Welcome, noble viewers, to A Journey through Aesthetic Realms. Together, let us go to the ancient Holy Land’s city of Jerusalem for a visit to a museum that is truly unique in the world:

The Bible Lands Museum Jerusalem. With artifacts from the land of the Hittites, Assyria, Persia, Canaan, Egypt, and Sumer, in the time of the Old Testament and beyond, this is where the legendary ancient lands of the Bible come to life.

People from all faiths, ages, and backgrounds can explore the wonders of the cultures of the Ancient Near East – and their fascinating interrelationships. From the dawn of the first civilizations all the way to the early Christian era, walking through these treasure-laden galleries is journeying through the pages of the Bible, as well as deep into our shared human spiritual heritage.

For this, the Bible Lands Museum Jerusalem, which first opened its doors to the public in 1992, has been acclaimed internationally as a center for learning and understanding toward peace. Ms. Amanda Weiss is the dedicated director of the Bible Lands Museum Jerusalem.

The Bible Lands Museum Jerusalem is a unique museum. It’s the only museum in the world that looks at the Bible as our history book, and it shows through our galleries here in the museum the chronological development of civilization through the Ancient Near East.

So we look at how humanity, how people developed, how cultures, language, trade and commerce, and religion began and developed from its earliest origins up into early Christianity.

This museum was founded by Dr. Elie and Batya Borowski. Dr. Elie Borowski was one of the world’s finest collectors of ancient Near Eastern artifacts. He was also a scholar, an historian in his own right. He had a very deeply religious upbringing and went on to study theology and history throughout Europe. And he brought to Israel this remarkable, priceless collection of antiquities to put on display in a museum. And he created the Bible Lands Museum in doing so.

The museum’s founder, renowned Polish expert Dr. Elie Borowski, had a dream of fostering understanding among all faiths and cultures, through an understanding of biblical history. His resources were his extensive knowledge of ancient art, history, and languages on one hand, and on the other, personal experiences witnessing the atrocities of war.

Elie Borowski really understood the history of the Bible, the purpose of understanding the spiritual element in the message of the Bible. And his belief was that if we could show the physical evidence of the cultures that are written about in the Bible itself, that we could encourage people to learn more about the humanitarian side and the development of Western civilization, what it has on the positive side of life, and how you can study and learn more from it to build a better future. His motto was that “the future of mankind has its roots in the past, and only through understanding our history can we build a better future.”

Creating the collection, in and of itself, and looking for a place where it would be most perfectly appreciated, really was a result of him meeting Mrs. Borowski, Batya Borowski, and they married in the early 1980s. And she felt very strongly that this museum needed to be in Jerusalem, because it is the center for monotheistic faith and the one city in the world where Christians, Muslims and Jews hold it very high in their esteem and very important in their religious belief and their faith. And no place compares to Jerusalem. So together, they put this museum on the map. They built it together.

The Bible Lands Museum, according to Dr. Elie Borowski’s vision, also encourages appreciation of the timeless morals and ethics of the Bible. Mr. Borowski contributed over 50 years’ worth of his own Ancient Near East art collection to the museum.

The logo itself is parentheses, to frame the Bible. And at the top is a star, which gives us the heavens. And if you look at the line in between, looks like water, and you have a straight line in between the two and that’s the firmament, the land. So you have the star in the sky, the water below and the land in the middle. And all of it is framed within the framework of what is the Bible. That’s the logo of the Bible Lands Museum Jerusalem.

It went through many different changes. We chose artifacts at the beginning to show different cultures and we realized that’s not good enough, because it’s too finite. If it’s something that’s Persian or Egyptian or Canaanite, it doesn’t give you all of the lands of the Bible. And this way, we have a logo that’s a very modern concept, but really frames all of our ancient history and the Bible itself.

Ms. Weiss gives us an overview of just some of the reasons why the Bible Lands Museum is so special.

This really is a unique museum. You enter this museum and you walk through history chronologically. You have an opportunity for people of all faiths, all backgrounds, all nationalities to visit here and learn something that I believe connects to who we are as human beings, and who we are each individually in our own spiritual quest, our personal spiritual quest. And so that makes us a universal museum. We are called the Bible Lands Museum, because that was the vision of our founder, of Elie Borowski, but it’s really the creation of civilization as we understand it today. And so therefore it’s a flow and a look at civilization through the millennia really, that you don’t see any place else exhibited in this way.

When you read the stories of the Bible and you’re looking at the development of civilization in this part of the world, in all of the Ancient Near East, whether it’s the flood story and you see it in the Bible as the story of Noah, or you see it in ancient Mesopotamian tablets as the Gilgamesh Epic, you’re seeing stories that reflect one another in their history.

You understand the development of writing – where did the alphabet come from? Why don’t we write a Chinese pictorial alphabet or an Egyptian hieroglyphic language form, a pictographic language? How did we get to the alphabet itself? Where did it come from? All of these things are very much interconnected with the bible.

Because when you start to look at different kings and how did they seal documents and what kind of languages did they use, it starts to make sense, and you go from having the spiritual concept on one end, which is very much interpretive, alright? If you read the Bible or I read the Bible, we’re coming at it from our own culture and our own understanding and our own belief system.

We have our own religious leaders that are showing us to pay attention to certain parts of the message and to read it and filter and understand it this way. We believe that this entire museum is here for anybody that wants to understand the Bible, and if you look around the galleries around you here, we have quotes from the Bible, from the Old Testament, from the Bible itself, that reflect the history of that time period in the gallery itself.

We asked Ms. Weiss if there is a particular artifact from the museum that she would like share about.

I do and I have many, but I can only show you I think probably one in order to you to be able to fit it into your program. So I have one that I’ve chosen. Can we go take a look at it? It’s right over here.

What we’re standing in front of right now is a Roman sarcophagus, a coffin basically from the time period of Constantine. But why is it so important? Because in early Christian art, the ancient art was what told us about religious belief and led us and helped guide people to understanding the religious principles.

So this particular piece talks about the miracles of Jesus Christ. Now I said at the beginning, it’s from the time period of Constantine, so that’s about the 4th century, around 332. And we know because in Latin across the top here, we know who was buried here. Her name was Julia Latrolilia. So Julia is no longer here, her bones are not in the building, we have no human bones in the museum.

But we do have this beautiful, carved, Roman, marble carved Roman sarcophagus that shows us Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, a fragment of Zacchaeus hiding in the tree. And here you have various scenes along the way that bring us, and in many ways connect us between the Old Testament and the New Testament, because here at the far end, you have Abraham, and Isaac shown as a little child.

And if you look closely here you have the hand of the angle of God holding back the hand of Abraham. So here you have the story of the sacrifice of Isaac, or in Hebrew as we call it the Akedat Yitzchak, the binding of Isaac. You have the sacrificial lamb and the burning bush. Again, we’re talking about the miracles of Christ, so you have the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves to feed the starving. And all of this pulls together.

You have Adam and Eve on the other side. The most important part of the entire sarcophagus, though, is the cross at the bottom which is the Chi Rho, which is the earliest known symbol of Christ and it therefore makes this, historically, a very important artifact. It predates anything actually with this symbol on it that they even have in the Vatican collections, which are known to be some of the most extensive collections existing. This is only one piece in the museum’s collection of thousands.

We have pieces that talk about the ancient calendar in the time of Abraham, that are ancient tablets that were reconstructed and put back together again in order to help us understand. We have cylinder seals and important material that really is the physical evidence of the people of the Bible. When you read the Bible, we’re not reading only about the Holy Land in Israel, we’re reading about all of the lands around us. And this museum tries to give you the entire picture of the history of those lands from the beginning of civilization even into early Christianity.

We thank Ms. Weiss and the Bible Lands Museum Jerusalem for opening your doors for us and all people of the world to explore this wonderful treasure trove of religion, culture, and human life.

To find out more about the Bible Lands Museum Jerusalem, please visit

Thank you, precious viewers, for joining us today on A Journey through Aesthetic Realms. Please join us

next Sunday, for the second and final part of our program, as we enter some of the fascinating galleries of the Bible Lands Museum Jerusalem.

Now, please stay with us for Our Noble Lineage, after Noteworthy News. May exciting spiritual discoveries beckon you each day.