TomRoushOnline

In the years that I was married, I was a regular church goer, and the pastor of the church I attended, Ted Traylor, offered to his flock a free education in many areas of religious history. One of the ideas I retained from him was about the organization of the Bible. He said the Bible can be divided into three basic parts: history, philosophy, and prophesy. Since the Bible was authored by Jews, it offers a tremendous view into Jewish history, as well as philosophy and prophesy, which is 100% relevant, as all histories are, to today.

The philosophy can be found all across the documents and chapters and includes such pearls of wisdom as “When there are many words, sin is unavoidable, but the one who controls his lips is prudent” from Proverbs. The prophecy portions include the many predictions of exile for the Jews, all of which came true. The prophesy sections are so true as to the nature of the Jews in the region and their fate, that they are STILL coming true, in the headlines, every day.

 As a history, the Bible has proven to be remarkably accurate in so many ways, and it records the presence of Jews in the land known by many names. It was called Canaan when it was promised, according to their story, to the Jews, and later, it was the area of the first Jewish nations, Judea in the south, and Israel in the north. The Jews, it is worth noting here, were never united. The archeological record in the areas of Judea, Israel, Assyria, Egypt, and Babylonia, carried out by generators of scholars from multiple nations, confirm the essential outlines of the Jewish Biblical history. The Jews have been in the same land, worshiping the same God, and in many instances, speaking the same language, and reading the same holy book, for 3000 years. No one disputes this or claims that the biblical holy land is in, say, India, or Tunisia, or Poland, or non-existent. Israel isn’t Narnia.

The Jews, then as now, were always a small population surrounded by larger populations and so they were often under siege from the empires at their borders. The Egyptians carted the Jews off and made them slaves, but they managed to get back to their homeland with the help of Moses. They were later attacked by the Assyrians, the Greeks, and the Babylonians. It was the empire military of the Babylonians that led to the destruction of the massive Second Temple, built by King David’s son, Solomon. And yet, after a few decades, they trickled back into the area, and began to rise again. The Bible records two rises and falls even before we get to the Roman period.

Eventually, The Greeks began to influence the culture of the entire Mediterranean space, and that included the area populated by the Jews. The Jewish dilemma than, as now, was just now much to submit to the much larger and more powerful cultures and empires around them. One faction thought that political submission was good, since it left the grubby and corrupt work of government up to someone else, allowing the Jews to focus on their religious devotion, while another faction thought that submitting to any foreign government or culture corrupted the religion itself, and so the  Jews needed to fight for a restored homeland operated by Jews, and defended by a Jewish military.

For a time, they were fortune to be ruled by relatively benign empires who allowed them to operate local governments and follow their customs. The empires that controlled and defended them, both Persian and Greek, eventually fell, and they were absorbed into the rising Roman empire. This is where Jewish history begins to be relevant to today.

The Roman empire went passed the Jews and into Persia, and included the Assyrian lands, and so the Jews were to the Romans what they had been to the Greeks and Persians; a minor but virulent tribe fiercely dedicated to a particular deity and plot of land. The Romans treated the Jews the same as they did everyone else, and they appointed various governors and empowered various local potentates. Their champion and modernizer for many decades was Herod the Great, and he was friends with several Roman emperors, and while Herod was alive, the Jews thrived. They lived under his dictatorial rule, of course, but they were mostly left in peace.

The New Testament Bible records the presence of Pontius Pilate, the Roman Governor, and Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great as holding power in 33AD. In fact, the New Testament records the beginning of what would later bloom into disaster for the Jews. The fault lines in the ancient debate over Jewish self-rule were still not healed. On one side were the winners in Roman occupation, the Pharisees, who were fine with letting the Gentiles run the administration of the district, and the Zealots, who wanted the Jews to rule the Kingdom of God themselves. Self-rule, however, meant war, with Rome.

In 70AD, this dispute reached the first of two disastrous resolutions. The Jews went into rebellion against the Romans and the Romans destroyed Herold’s restored temple and dispersed the Jews to the four winds. A few remained in Jerusalem, but a second revolt culminating in 135AD led the Romans to forbid the Jews from living in Jerusalem at all. They pushed out what was left from the 70AD fighting, and they renamed the capital city Aelia Capitolina. Over time the area that had been Judea became known by a different older word derived from the Greek word ‘Philistia,’ which was where the Philistines were. The Philistines also appears frequently in the Bible. Goliath, of David and Goliath fame, was a Philistine. The Romans spelled this word ‘Palestine.’

Over the following few hundred years, the Romans weakened, in no small part because of the spread of another religion that was started by the exiled Jews and based on the teachings of a Jew that Bible says the Romans had killed: Jesus. Christianity became the organizing principle of the Western Roman Empire and in time, the Roman will and civilization dissolved and was replaced by the Christian nation state. It is from the dying husk of Rome that the nations of France, Spain, and England grew. They in turn gave birth to the United States, Mexico, Canada, Haiti, and a full host of other countries.

In 650AD, out of the deserts south of Palestine came another religion, based on an Arab reported to have descended from one of Abrahams children, Ishmael. That man was Mohammad, and his religion is was Islam. Islam spread from the deserts into Palestine and became the religion of most of the inhabitants there.

For hundreds of more years, the Jews were not players in the land that had once been their kingdom. Various Muslim potentates ruled Jerusalem and the former lands of Judea except in the period of the Crusades, where hundreds of thousands of Christians walked from France and Germany to Palestine and claimed the area for Christ. Their 200-year reign ended in military defeat, and the area remained under the control of various Muslim militaries throughout the rest of the Middle Ages and into the modern era.

Things began to change again in 1918. The Ottoman Turks sided with the losers in World War 1, and the British took control of the lands the Muslim Ottomans controlled south of Turkey after the war. In a nod to the Romans, they renamed the place British Palestine, and in a nod to the historic ties the Jews had to the area, they began allowing Jews to move to the area and openly suggested it was to be a Jewish national home. The danger the Jews faced in Europe were already well known. The Arabs in the region voiced their displeasure in allowing Jews to move there at the time.

The fears the British had for the Jews in Europe were not overstated in the least. In Germany, a political party that held as one of its basic tenants the destruction of the Jews was elected, and over the course of the war to follow, made killing Jews a priority even over its own military needs. In September of 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland which started the Secord World War.

Across Europe, Jews were exported to the industrial killing centers set up by the Nazis, and murdered. This came after mobile killing squads had followed along behind the German military and rounded up the Eastern European Jews and executed them. At the end of the war, some 6 million Jews were dead. The shock and horror of this event, known as the Holocaust, ended the dominance of the German military and may well have set the clock on virtually everything of consequence in Europe. The Europe of today grew from the wreckage of the war, and so everything to follow now is war related. Europe demographic decline is directly war related.

In the aftermath of World War 2 and the Holocaust, interest in a Jewish homeland accelerated. Under a United Nations mandate, British Palestine was to be partitioned into two states: Israel, for the Jews, and another nation for the Arabs still in the area. The Jews jumped at the chance to be reestablish in their ancient homeland, and they maintained that the issue of the need for a restored Jewish state was settled. The answer, debated after nearly 3000 years, was yes, the Jews needed a state or they would be eradicated forever. The Jews had to rely only on themselves for security as it was apparent that no one else would defend them.

The Arabs and their allied armies rejected the idea of a Jewish nation and began to wage war on the Jews immediately. Despite the opposition, Israel was born in 1948, and the new nation had to fight with its Arab neighbors from the first days. That first war, in 1948, the Jews refer to as their War for Independence, much like the Americans refer to their War of Independence from the British.

The last 80 years have been the story of the displaced Arabs trying to find a way to destroy the Israeli nation and rid the area of Jews, again. The issue isn’t complicated beyond that. The details are as numbing as any courtroom drama and the actions are as bloody as a horror movie, but the Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir, summed the issue up quite nicely: “If the Palestinians lay down their weapons, there will be peace. If the Israelis lay down their weapons, there will be a massacre.”

What is happening now in Israel is another turn of the wheel of Jewish history. The Arabs of Gaza, who had no Jewish presence in their lands in October of 2023, and who had a ‘ceasefire’ already with the Jews, burst through the security fence put up by the Jews and ruthlessly murdered all the Jews and even non-Jews they could find. They did this while yelling their religious slogans, and then they took the hostages back to their lair. And now, the Jews are coming after them. The Jews will ‘win’ in the sense that they are a superior military, but the history of the region will not substantially change. It is a dangerous place. It always has been.

What is different, however, is the position of the Jews in the world now. The Jews have allies in the most powerful empire, the United States, and are therefore militarily backed up by the Americans. The Jews have also prospered in the worldwide technology driven economies. They have prospered in Israel, and in the US and in a few other pockets. The Jews are prosperous and successful both at home and aboard, for the first time in their long tortured history.

But, the Jews have always traveled a dangerous, violent, and difficult path. They have been pioneers in the conception of the powerful deity that wasn’t carved of wood, or part of a pantheon of local deities, and their fierce allegiance to their religious tradition has made them hated by the other peoples of the world who tend to bend and blend their faiths as the tides come and go. The Jews stand alone, and as such, have always been outsiders in every land they live in, even their own. For hundreds of years, they were hated when they were a landless band of nomads rootlessly wandering the lands where they were sent by the Romans, and now, they are hated for going back to the land they previously lived in and restoring their nation. They also still have the same tendency towards a particularly poisonous politics internally, and they were at each other’s throats on Oct 7, when the terrorists burst through their walls.

And so, in a sense, nothing has changed. They only way to change the situation now is for the latest enemy of the Jews, which are the Arab Palestinians (the Jews were also in Palestine, and called Palestinians before there was an nation called Israel) to accept, once and for all, that they share a land with the Jews, and let the past go. That, obviously, has never happened. Perhaps one day, it will.