| News and Views | July 1943 |
Palestine for the Jew
ABOUT four thousand years ago God said to Abraham, the father of the Jewish nation, “Lift up now thine eyes, and look from the place where thou art northward, and southward, and eastward, and westward: for all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever. And I will make thy seed as the dust of the earth: so that if a man can number the dust of the earth, then shall thy seed also be numbered. Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it; for I will give it unto thee.”—Genesis 13:14-17
From the day that this promise was made, down to the present dine, the land of Palestine to which it applies, has been known as the “promised land.” The fulfillment of the promise was not realized in Abraham’s own day. St. Stephen, in Acts 7:5, explains that while God did indeed promise the land to Abraham, yet “He gave him none inheritance in it, no, not so much as to set his foot on: yet He promised that He would give it to him for a possession, and to his seed after him, when as yet he had no child.”
The descendants of Abraham enjoyed the blessings of the promised land only intermittently, being driven there from time to time. When, after the nation of Israel had been delivered from Egyptian bondage, and were about to enter the promised land, it looked as though it might be possible for them to remain there. But not so. Moses gave utterance to a prophecy indicating that they would be driven there from and scattered among all the nations, and then finally recovered in the “latter days,” at which time, the prophecies show, the land will be restored to them forever. Moses’ prophecy reads:
“I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that ye shall soon utterly perish from off the land whereunto ye go over Jordan to possess it; ye shall not prolong your days upon it, but shall utterly be destroyed. And the Lord shall scatter you among the nations, and ye shall be left few in number among the heathen, whither the Lord shall lead you. And there ye shall serve gods, the work of men’s hands, wood and stone, which neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor smell. But if from thence thou shalt seek the Lord thy God, thou shalt find Him, if thou seek Him with all thy heart and with all thy soul. When thou art in tribulation, and all these things are come upon thee, even in the latter days, if thou turn to the Lord thy God, and shalt be obedient unto His voice; (for the Lord thy God is a merciful God;) He will not forsake thee, neither destroy thee, nor forget the covenant of thy fathers which He sware unto them.”—Deuteronomy 4:26-31
The covenant God made with the fathers of Israel embraces His promise to Abraham concerning the land. While Moses clearly foretold the dispersion of the Israelites from the land which they were about to enter, yet he also assured them that God would remember His covenant, and that in the latter days His favor would return to them. There is every reason to believe, on the basis of prophecies now being fulfilled, that the world has already entered the latter days—already the ground-work is being laid for the establishment of Messiah’s Kingdom. The prophecy of Jeremiah 16:13-16 gives us further details concerning this foretold worldwide scattering of the Jews, and their ultimate restoration to the promised land. We quote:
“Therefore will I cast you out of this land into a land that ye know not, neither ye nor your fathers; and there shall ye serve other gods day and night; where I will not show you favor. Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that it shall no more be said, The Lord liveth, that brought up the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt; but, The Lord liveth, that brought up the children of Israel from the land of the north, and from all the lands whither He had driven them: and I will bring them again into their land that I gave unto their fathers. Behold, I will send for many fishers, saith the Lord, and they shall fish them; and after will I send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain, and from every hill, and out of the holes of the rocks.”
During all the long period of Jewish dispersion from Palestine, large numbers of them continued to maintain their faith in the promise of God that eventually they would be restored to the Holy Land. Their hopes, nevertheless, showed no signs of being realized until within the last half century. The number of Jews in Palestine less than n hundred years ago was twelve thousand. Concerning these, the Peel Commission states:
“But, small though their numbers were, the continued existence of these Jews in Palestine meant much to all Jewry. Multitudes of poor and ignorant Jews in the ghettos of Eastern Europe felt themselves represented, as it were, by this remnant of their race who were keeping a foothold in the land against the day of the coming of the Messiah. This belief in the divine promise of eventual return to Palestine largely accounts for the steadfastness with which the Jews of the Diaspora clung to their faith and endured persecution.”
What is now known as the World Zionist Movement, having as its objective the reclaiming of Palestine as a homeland for Jews, had its birth more than sixty years ago. Concerning some of the conditions which brought it into being, we quote from the 1942 Year Book of the United Palestine Appeal, as follows:
“Violent pogroms against the Jews of Russia and Eastern Europe beginning in 1881 had repercussions throughout the world. Amongst the Jews on the Continent it caused a ferment of ideas which culminated in the fast world Zionist Congress at Basle, Switzerland, where, in 1897, the delegates called for a ‘publicly recognized, legally secured home for the Jewish people.’”
However, according to Judge Louis E. Levinthal, President of the Zionist Organization of America, in an article also appearing in the 1912 Year Book of United Palestine Appeal, the early days of Zionism were considered more or less experimental, and it was not until following the fast World War that it gained any considerable degree of real impetus. Judge Levinthal further explains:
“With the issuance of the Balfour Declaration twenty-five years ago, it became a glorious historic enterprise in which the enlightened statesmen of the world solemnly joined, pledging the honor of their nation to right an ancient wrong by granting the Jewish people the opportunity to reconstitute Palestine as the Jewish commonwealth. Until 1933, however, the rate of development of the Jewish national homeland kept pace with the probing uncertain fluctuating tempo of the experimental. But progress, though slow, was undeniable.”
We believe that this slow progress of the Zionist Movement is in keeping with the prophecy of Jeremiah 16:14-17, quoted above, in which the Lord said that, in connection with the restoration of His people to the promised land, He would first send “fishers” among them. Fishing methods are mild, and are suggestive of the religious and economic advantages offered to the Jews by the Zionist Movement, to enlist their cooperation in a back-to-Palestine movement. But something more than the mild methods of fishers was necessary, in order to accomplish the foretold divine purpose of actually restoring God’s ancient people to the land which He promised their fathers.
The prophecy further explains that in addition to the fishers, the Lord would also send “hunters” who would hunt His people, and drive them back to Palestine, as it were. This seems to have had a remarkable fulfillment in the experiences that have come to the Jewish people within the last ten years. On this point Judge Levinthal continues:
“Then came the flood-tide of blood-letting by the Nazi regime, and the stream of joyous, hopeful homecomers—Jewish pilgrims—became a torrent of desperate men and women, persecution-shocked, tragic human beings, fleeing before the onrush of barbarism. It was then that we began to hear Palestine described as a haven, and less and less as a homeland. It is sad that the same numbness of emotion which has tended to harden us to the agonies of our people has also served to make us callous to the miraculous achievements of Jewish Palestine. How quickly many of us have forgotten the fact that in one year, in 1935, the Jewish national home admitted 62,000—a figure which represented an increase of fully twenty-five percent of the total Jewish population of the country at that time! And this was only one of the many miracles Palestine performed at a time of crisis for our people.”
While the above rate of return to Palestine does seem astounding, yet, as a matter of fact, Jews have continued to pour into the Holy Land since 1935 in equal, if not greater, numbers, so today the population of the country is easily 600,000. And this in spite of the hardships imposed by the var. On this point, Dr. Israel Goldstein, President of the Jewish National Fund of America, says:
“It is significant that during the war period, in spite of immigration restrictions, economic war-time strain and recurrent apprehension of invasion, the Jewish position in Palestine has become enlarged and strengthened during the past three years. This program of advance can be best measured by the growth of the soil, for progress which is not based on the soil is not sure. Since the outbreak of the war, the land possessions of the Jewish National Fund have increased by 125,000 dunams.”
It is significant that these outstanding Jews and officials in the Zionist Movement recognize the miraculous nature of that which is now taking place in Palestine, for miraculous it is. True, back in 1918 the British Government, in association with the League of Nations, undertook to guarantee the safety of the Jews in their homeland, and to assure them the opportunity of rebuilding that land as a home for their nation. Yet today, in spite of immigration limitation placed by Great Britain, the returning of the Jews to Palestine continues in larger proportions than ever before, and they are being richly blessed in the land, despite all the hardships and difficulties now imposed upon a world at war. This proves that God’s time has come for the Holy Land to revert to the Jew, and whether humanly constituted governments endeavor to help or hinder, God’s promises will be fulfilled.
But let no one suppose that the outstanding experiences of the Jews in Palestine at the present time, and the wonderful way in which they are being blessed there, is the end of the miracles that are to be performed on their behalf. The prophecies show clearly that these miracles will continue, not only until the land is fully restored to the nation, in fulfillment of God’s promises, but until all the Jews, even those who have died, are brought back there to enjoy divine blessings in fulfillment of the promises made to their fathers. As an official of one of the branches of the Zionist Movement has well said, Palestine will be restored to the Jew, not because of the Balfour Declaration, but because of God’s declaration.
The entire 37th chapter of Ezekiel’s prophecy presents a most hopeful view of what is yet in store for the ancient people of God, the Jews. The prophecy not only assures us that their national hopes are to be revived, but that they are also to be restored to their homeland, and that even their graves are to be opened, and the dead restored. in Psalm 45:16, the promise is given that all the fathers of Israel will then become the children of the Christ, and will be made princes in all the earth—Palestine, of course, included.
This prophecy of Ezekiel also shows that then God will enter into a covenant of peace with Israel. The details of this covenant are foretold in Jeremiah 31:31-33, as follows:
“Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah: Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which My covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them, saith the Lord: But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the Lord, I will put My law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be My people.”
In Ezekiel 16:60-63, these promised blessings to Israel are again related, and the promise made that the Gentile nations also shall then be blessed by entering into the same covenant with the Lord under which the Israelites receive their blessings. We quote:
“Nevertheless I will remember My covenant with thee in the days of thy youth, and I will establish unto thee an everlasting covenant. Then thou shalt remember thy ways, and be ashamed, when thou shalt receive thy sisters (Sodom, Samaria, Syria, and Philistia), thine elder and thy younger: and I will give them unto thee for daughters, but not by thy covenant. And I will establish My covenant with thee; and thou shalt know that I am the Lord: that thou mayest remember, and be confounded, and never open thy mouth any more because of thy shame, when I am pacified toward thee for all that thou hast done, saith the Lord God.”
The significance of the present miraculous developments in Palestine is that the time for God’s promised blessings of life to flow out both to Jew and Gentile is drawing near. While the persecutions upon the Jewish people in Europe today are severe, yet we can see that they are helping to fulfill the divine purpose of restoring the Jews to the promised land. The issue of what is to be done with the Jew is being forced, and whatever economic or territorial reallocations come out of the present global war, there seems little doubt but that, with or without the consent of either the United Nations or the Axis powers, we will then see hundreds of thousands of the prophetic people of God returning to the promised land.
The blessed part of it is that both Gentiles and Jews who are now losing their lives as a result of persecution and war are not to lose the blessings God has promised, because, in the divine economy, these are to be awakened from the sleep of death, that they, too, may share in the great homecoming. To Israel, it will be a homecoming to their own land, and into covenant relationship with their God. To the Gentiles, it will also be a returning to the fold of the Creator, and the enjoying of His promised blessings of life and happiness that are to be dispensed through the administration of the coming Kingdom of Christ.
We cannot leave this subject of Palestine for the Jew and its glorious implications for the entire race of mankind without appending the recent findings of Dr. Nelson Glueck, Director of the American School of Oriental Research of Jerusalem, as reported in the New York Times of June 1. Some objection has been raised to the restoration and rehabilitation of Palestine on the ground that the Jordan valley is uninhabitable and incapable of supporting any large number of returning Jews. The recent findings of Dr. Glueck definitely and irrefutably contradict such a thought. Following is an excerpt from the published report:
“Recent evacuations in the Jordan River valley by Dr. Nelson Glueck, … resulted in the discovery of the ruins of seventy villages that existed between 3500 B.C. and the twelfth century A.D.
“Between the thirteenth and sixth centuries B.C., there were about thirty-five villages along thirty-five miles of the eastern side of the Jordan valley. The inhabitants then totaled 35,000 to 40,000, compared with the 12,000 Arab encampments today.
“Explorations of Dr. Glueck contradicted earlier authorities since Sir George Adam Smith who described the valley as uninhabitable because of the climatic and health conditions. His discoveries also confirmed the Biblical narrative in Genesis 13:10, where Lot describes the Jordan valley as well watered everywhere, ‘even as the garden of the Lord.’ … The story of a culture starting from the beginning of the fifth century B.C. until the present can be clearly read along the banks of the river. It is now well known that the earliest settlements in Palestine were on the coastal plains and in the Jordan valley.
“Dr. Glueck established that the eastern side of the valley was densely settled from earliest historical times onward by a large thriving permanent agricultural population dwelling in numerous villages of considerable size. From the area, however, must be excluded much of the western side of the Jordan valley where the hills come so near the river that little space is left and because of the scarcity of water.
“Large, permanently settled, highly developed farming communities dwelt here in ancient times under climatic conditions that geological experts say were generally the same as today. The reasons for the richness of the eastern side of the Jordan valley, said Dr. Glueck, were ‘a soil of exuberant fertility plus the presence of plentiful water.’
“One place had the greatest masses of ancient pottery fragments Dr. Glueck had ever seen in any ancient site in Palestine or Trans-Jordan. Inhabited about 3500 B.C. this site contained more pottery than exists throughout the whole Jordan valley today.
“The ancient civilization of the Jordan valley is ascribed by the American archaeologist to irrigation. Undoubtedly tremendous reservoirs of subsurface water exist in this valley. Only recently have they been explored. The farmers of antiquity made excellent use of the rich supplies of surface waters.”