Stealing Israel's History: Chasing Antiquities Looters, and Why Charisma Picked Up the Story

Most people who visit Jerusalem never see the battle I want to tell you about. It isn't fought with tanks or rockets. It's fought on quiet hillsides after dark, with shovels and metal detectors, by thieves who are trying to dig up the history of this land and sell it to the highest bidder.

When I set out to report this story for CBN News, I knew looting was a problem in Israel. I had no idea how constant it was, or how personal it would feel to watch an archaeologist describe what is being lost.

A Hillside at the Entrance to Jerusalem

Dr. Eitan Klein of the Israel Antiquities Authority met me on the slopes of Mount Scopus, overlooking the city. He pointed to a patch of ground that, to my eye, looked like nothing special.

“This is the entrance to Jerusalem, actually. We are on the slopes of Mount Scopus, and at that side here we caught the looters last month.”

Then he bent down and started picking up pottery from the surface. One shard, he told me, most likely dated to the Second Temple period. That is the kind of place this is. You can practically trip over two thousand years of history on an afternoon walk.

The looters knew exactly what they were after. “They were looking for the entrance of a cave,” Eitan explained. Ancient burial caves and hidden chambers can hold the kind of artifacts that fetch a high price on the black market.

“It’s a Total Loss”

I asked him the question that had been on my mind since we arrived: what does that do to the science?

“Actually, it’s a total loss.”

That answer stayed with me. An artifact's real value isn't just the object. It's where it was found, how deep, and what was lying beside it. That context is what lets archaeologists reconstruct how people lived. Pull a coin out of the ground without recording any of that, and you haven't just stolen a coin. You've torn a page out of the story and thrown it away.

And it happens constantly. “You need to know that almost every night someone is trying to steal antiquities all around the state of Israel,” Eitan told me. Almost every night. In a country smaller than New Jersey that holds some of the most important archaeological sites on earth, many of them tied directly to the people and events of Scripture. As Eitan put it simply: “This is the place where Jesus walked.”

Gold to Them, History to Us

Coins are a favorite target. Looters sweep sites with metal detectors looking for them, because they are small, portable, and valuable. But for archaeologists, a coin is a timestamp. “It’s very important because it dates the level. You can see who was the ruler,” Eitan said.

Later he showed me trays of artifacts that authorities had recovered from thieves, including ancient gold coins. I'll never forget how he looked at them.

“You see here a gold, but I see archaeological items. It’s many, many pieces of history that now I cannot complete. I cannot complete the story.”

Standing there, I felt the weight of that. These were real people's coins, real people's lives, from the very land where the Bible's stories unfolded. And some of what they could have told us is simply gone.

Eitan told me why he does this work. “The stories about the land of Israel, the people of Israel, the biblical stories and other, they spoke to me,” he said. “This is the land where most of the stories that our heritage is based on, it was here. And we have to protect it.” I couldn't agree more.

Grateful Charisma Shared the Story

I was honored when Charisma Magazine picked up this report and featured it in their piece, “Ancient Israel Under Attack? Looters Target Sites Connected to Biblical History.” They embedded our CBN News video and walked their readers through Eitan's warnings, the hillside on Mount Scopus, and the trays of stolen coins.

What moved me most was how they framed it. Charisma described the struggle as “a fight to preserve the physical testimony of a land where God’s redemptive story unfolded.” That's exactly why I wanted to tell this story. Every shard and every coin is a witness to the historical truth behind Scripture, and when looters steal them, we all lose a little of that testimony.

I'm thankful to the team at Charisma for helping this report reach so many more believers, and to Eitan Klein and the Israel Antiquities Authority for the work they do, night after night, to protect the stones that still speak.