Route 60: Bringing the Biblical Highway to wider audiences
Two of the Trump administration’s top diplomats took a road trip through the Holy Land. Their goal? To bring the Bible to life
Two agents of momentous political change in Israel traveled down the most hotly-charged road in the region, and hardly talked politics.
"The single most important content that I care about anywhere is biblical history. That is what really gets me up in the morning," David Friedman, former U.S. ambassador to Israel, told i24NEWS.
Friedman and Mike Pompeo, the former U.S. secretary of State, teamed up for a new documentary entitled “Route 60: The Biblical Highway,” which is set for a limited run in theaters on September 18 and 19.
The film follows the ex-diplomats around historically significant locations on and near Route 60, a 146-mile highway running through Nazareth, home of Jesus Christ, through Beersheba, where the biblical patriarch Abraham settled. Many of the stops along the highway made by Friedman, an Orthodox Jew, and Pompeo, an Evangelical Christian, included places in the West Bank, like Shiloh, Hebron and Bethlehem. Most of the Bible’s foundational stories took place along this path.
“It brings the Bible to life in a very powerful way. And it ties the biblical messages and the biblical values that I and many people care about, with the land itself,” said Friedman. “It makes it clear how the two go hand-in-hand.”
Friedman referred to the road as featuring “mile markers, human and divine.”
Serving under U.S. President Donald Trump, Friedman and Pompeo were largely responsible for the staunchly pro-Israel stance of that government, including carrying influence over the decision to relocate the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and push for the historic Abraham Accords.
In fact, Friedman refers in the film to Beersheba as the site of “the first of the Abraham Accords, the real Abraham Accords,” owing to a treaty made there between Abraham and Abimelech, king of the Philistines in Gerar.
Pompeo’s legacy in the West Bank is his Pompeo Doctrine, which holds that Jewish settlements there do not necessarily violate international law. He also reversed government policy by removing the requirement that American imports from the region be stamped with “Made in the West Bank” labeling, but rather with “Made in Israel.”
While Friedman and Pompeo sprinkle in anecdotes of their time in government, the majority of the discussion between the two centers on biblical history.
“My goal here is not to influence anybody politically. I think that's a different product and a different conversation and a different presentation,” said Friedman, who had a dominant hand in the project. “What I want from this film is that people who see it will have a much broader understanding of Judea and Samaria and they'll care about it as they choose, but they'll care about it. It'll mean something to people.”
The film, originally conceived as a TV-ready four-part series, was whittled down to a 90-minute film. Friedman said his experience in his first career helped tremendously in the lengthy, tedious editing process.
“I love the storytelling. I was a trial lawyer for 35 years. It's not that different,” claimed Friedman. “When you're trying a case, you collect all the evidence, you put it all together, you take depositions of all these people, you’ve got all these transcripts, then you have to make sense out of it. You have to put it all together in a way that you can bring it to a judge or a jury and tell a story and make sense out of it. And so it's a similar exercise.”
Much of the film was unscripted, including an appearance by Shmuel Rabinovitch, Rabbi of the Western Wall, during a visit there by Friedman and Pompeo. With a small but growing number of incidents of animus and provocations by a small element of Jewry toward Israel’s Christians circulating in the region’s headlines, Rabinovitch, upon spotting the pair and their crew, stopped by to assure Pompeo the location was open to all, by biblical command.
“There's a scene in the movie where he's saying that when King Solomon built the temple, it was very important to him that it would be open to non-Jews, as well as Jews,” said Friedman, and “that everyone in the world needed to have a relationship with God, not just the Jews. He hoped that this would be that place.”
Distribution of the film is being handled by Fathom Events, which specializes in niche content. A documentary such as “Route 60” will likely be seen as one of interest to a distinct subsection of the U.S population: pro-Israel, active Jewry, evangelicals, biblical scholars and history buffs. But Friedman contends that is an underestimation of the film’s appeal.
"‘Barbie’ is having a good run right now, but nobody's had a run like the Bible. We tend to lose sight of the fact that 2,300 copies of the Bible are sold every hour,” said Friedman. “It still matters to a lot of people. You can study the Bible, but seeing the Bible is a whole different level of experience. You walk this path, and the Bible transforms from a myth or a story into something very authentic.”