More than 1,000 U.S. Christian pastors and influencers traveled to Israel this month becoming “the largest group of American Christian leaders to visit Israel since its founding.”
At the height of the Christmas season — one of the two most important celebrations for Christians of the year, the birth of Christ, the other being Easter which marks his death — these pastors were on mission paid for by the Israeli government “to provide training and prepare participants to serve as unofficial ambassadors for Israel in their communities,” Fox News reported.
Trip organizer Mike Evans is an author, a top evangelical ally of Donald Trump, longtime confidant of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and founder of the Friends of Zion Heritage Center in Jerusalem. “For Christians, Israel is not just another country on the map. It is the cradle of our faith. The story of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, King David, and Jesus starts here. If you cut Israel out of the Bible, you do not just edit a text, you undermine the foundations of Christian faith itself," the long-time, prominent Christian Zionist said in a press release about the trip.
Real Q, was Israel in the bible?
Yes and no. The word Israel is named, but Israel in the Bible is entirely different than a secular ethnostate based on Jewish surpremacy.
It’s like if someone said “love thy neighbour” and then you start a settler colony called “thy neighbor”.
Also the Bible is heavily manipulated since the 1850s to include heavier and heavier alterations of its verses about Israel.
Here’s a great video about it that just came out https://youtu.be/bYFuK4OwLcA?t=7m5s
But are the borders of Israel now the same as in the Bible?
That’s kinda complex since there were multiple Hebrew/Jewish/Abrahamic kingdoms and polities in the region at the time and not all of them are recorded particularly well. There were two major kingdoms roughly set where Israel and Palestine are now, the kingdom of Israel/Jerusalem (it got turned into a city state a couple times) and the kingdom of Judea, then there was the kingdom of the Philistines, and then in the north you get a weird mix of city states and minor kingdoms.
This is all to say that no it is not, even a fully unified Hebrew state at the time would possibly be smaller than modern Israel. The modern boarders of Israel match up better with the medieval Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem. Also kinda irrelevant the Palestinians are the peoples of the region who stayed rather than being exiled after the Romans put down the Jewish rebellion, they homogenized and mixed together over about two thousand years before the modern period.
I’m not religious but I went to Catholic schools growing up so had to take classes like Theology and Dogma. The entire bible centers on that region and the Jewish faith as Christians are basically the next version of the Jewish people in the storyline. So, the books has like two volumes. The old and new testaments. The old is about the Jewish people basically making their way to Israel and their history of kings and rules. The second volume is basically “be good to others” written across hundreds of pages. That’s obviously distilled way down and I found it a dry read. Anyways, that’s my summary, I’m sure people will comment that it’s overly simplistic but yeah I ain’t writing anymore.
Is it referred to as Israel? Palestine? Levant? Appreciate you digging into the memory banks.
Old Testament uses a lot of terms like “the promised land”. It also refers to Canaan, which doesn’t exist anymore but I guess was in that general area.
And by “refers to Canaan,” I mean committed a Yahweh-sanctioned genocide on them. Which is why it doesn’t exist anymore.
IIRC there was a whole part about the Israelites heading towards the Land of Milk and Honey which was to be Israel. Pretty sure they called it Israel…I am confident they called their people Israelites. There were a significant number of parts in volume one that called their destination their “promised land” kinda like how Mormons and others have done. so I think it’s a common thematic format across different religions.
The correct term is Zionist-Occupied Palestine.
The Levant is a bigger area that includes it, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and a small adjacent part of Turkey.
Doesn’t really matter if the bible refers to Israel or any other country or people. The area that we now call Israel has been inhabited by a variety of people for thousands of years. No one group can claim total ownership of the area. And the bible is fiction not an historical record.