Land of Israel

“ It would, of course, be an absurd exaggeration to assert that the life of Israel through the Middle Ages was an unbroken horror of carnage and rapine. There were spells of respite, some of them fairly long, during which the Jew was permitted to live and grow fat. But these Sabbaths of rest can be likened not inaptly to the periods during which a prudent husbandman suffers his land to lie fallow, in the hope of a richer harvest. They are only intervals between the acts of a tedious and bloody tragedy, with a continent for its stage and seven centuries for its night. ”

“ There shall not fail a man of thy race upon the throne of Israel.
6 But if you and your children revolting shall turn away from following me, and will not keep my commandments, and my ceremonies, which I have set before you, but will go and worship strange gods, and adore them:
7 I will take away Israel from the face of the land which I have given them; and the temple which I have sanctified to my name, I will cast out of my sight; and Israel shall be a proverb, and a byword among all people. ”

“ And the sticks whereon thou writest shall be in thine hand before their eyes. And say unto them, Thus saith the Lord God; Behold, I will take the children of Israel from among the heathen, whither they be gone, and will gather them on every side, and will bring them into their own land: and I will make them one nation in the land upon the mountains of Israel; and one king shall be king to them all: and they shall be no more two nations, neither shall they be divided into two kingdoms any more at all" (verses 19-22) . ”

“ And Pharaoh said, "Who is the Lord, that I should hearken unto his voice to let Israel go? I know not the Lord, and moreover I will not let Israel go."
And they said, "The God of the Hebrews hath met with us: let us go, we pray thee, three days' journey into the wilderness, and sacrifice unto the Lord our God."
And the king of Egypt said unto them, "Wherefore do ye, Moses and Aaron, loose the people from their work? get you unto your burdens. Behold, the people of the land are now many, and ye make them rest from their burdens." ”

“ Israel as a people arose amidst peculiar surroundings in the land of Goshen, a territory situated in the extreme north of Egypt, near the borders of Palestine. The Israelites were not at once moulded into a nation, but consisted of twelve loosely connected shepherd tribes. ”

“ In the same way, Israel, scattered all over the world, was not reassembled in the Holy Land in the Christian cycle; but in the beginning of the cycle of Bahá’u’lláh this divine promise, as is clearly stated in all the Books of the Prophets, has begun to be manifest. You can see that from all the parts of the world tribes of Jews are coming to the Holy Land; they live in villages and lands which they make their own, and day by day they are increasing to such an extent that all Palestine will become their home. ”

“ Now, there has been no second Restoration as yet; neither could the return from Babylon be said to be a gathering from the "four corners of the earth"; that captivity having been local in its character, and of short duration. Never before the dispersion inaugurated by Titus, could the scattering of the people be said to have been universal; hence they could never before have been gathered from the four corners of the earth.
IV. Israel has never yet in all its fulness possessed the land which God has promised them; and Palestine may still be said to be "the land of promise." ”

“ While this kingdom in the universal sense is called the kingdom of God, there is a special sense in which the kingdom of Israel is called God’s kingdom. In the history of Israel we have the establishment of the kingdom of God upon the earth, but it was not universal. It was confined to Israel and to Israel’s land. Some of its blessings, no doubt, spread out, and the world at large, to some extent, has been benefited by them, but there never has been a time when that kingdom of God has spread out in all the earth, resulting in blessing all nations, as the covenants of promise require. ”

“ Now, however, she must permit emigration or perish by famine. Take the countries of Europe, and is it not strange that Israel’s fulness of land, people, and language is made the fuller by these nations contributing towards the same? The fulness of the Gentiles is made to flow into the fulness of Israel. These countries, outside of Israel-England, p. 74have no colonies to send their overflow to; hence, they are filling up the domain of Israel and so hastening on her fulness. The French, Germans, Italians, and Spaniards forsake their land and language, thus adding to Israel’s fulness ”

“ Already Jerusalem before the war was almost a Jewish city, while the thirty and more Jewish colonies which dotted the land were described by a prominent English Jew as " so many milestones marking the advance which Israel is making towards national rehabilitation." And in no other country in the world do the Jews, to the same extent, represent the nation. In Jerusalem and in the other Jewish settlements in Palestine I have personally, in the course of my seven different visits to the land since 1890, met Jews from all parts from the east and the west ”

“ And the Lord hath appointed himself a king over Israel, who shall cut off the house of Jeroboam in this day, and in this time:
14:15. And the Lord God shall strike Israel as a reed is shaken in the water: and he shall root up Israel out of this good land, which he gave to their fathers, and shall scatter them beyond the river: because they have made to themselves groves, to provoke the Lord. ”

“ Let me only remind you of the commencement of my narrative, in which I showed, that Israel was destined to communicate the faith of Abraham to all nations, by means of the law; and that the Messiah is to be the Patriarch of the human race. To bring 176this to pass, Israel became a nation in Egypt, received the law from Sinai, conquered the Holy Land under the judges, obtained a temple under its kings, and was taught obedience by the vicissitudes of calamity and prosperity in successive centuries. All now exists together—Israel is a nation, has the law and obeys it willingly. ”

“ As abundant proof that many were led by God from the land of promise before the days of the captivity we have the words of Nephi:
"For it appears that the house of Israel, sooner or later, will be scattered upon all the face of the earth, and also among all nations, and behold there are many who are already lost from the knowledge of those who are at Jerusalem. Yea, the more part of all the tribes have been led away; and they are scattered to and fro upon the isles of the sea; and whither they are, none of us knoweth, save that we know that they have been led away. ”

“ Now there arose a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph. And he said unto his people, "Behold, the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we: come, let us deal wisely with them; lest they multiply, and it come to pass, that, when there falleth out any war, they also join themselves unto our enemies, and fight against us, and get them up out of the land." ”

“ But to what part of the world shall we look for a power whose interests will make it willing, as it is able, to plant the ensign of civilization upon the mountains of Israel? The reader will, doubtless, anticipate my reply from what has gone before. I know not whether the men, who at present contrive the foreign policy of Britain, entertain the idea of assuming the sovereignty of the Holy Land, and of promoting its colonization by the Jews ”

“ They will return to Egypt. 008:014 For Israel has forgotten his Maker and built palaces; and Judah has multiplied fortified cities; but I will send a fire on his cities, and it will devour its fortresses." 009:001 Don't rejoice, Israel, to jubilation like the nations; for you were unfaithful to your God. You love the wages of a prostitute at every grain threshing floor. 009:002 The threshing floor and the winepress won't feed them, and the new wine will fail her. 009:003 They won't dwell in Yahweh's land; but Ephraim will return to Egypt, and they will eat unclean food in Assyria. ”

“ Surely a land which includes within its boundaries an area at least one-third more than the whole of France may with right be called " a large land " ; but it is possible that even the larger land, with its desert parts transformed into fruitful fields, will not suffice to hold the whole of blessed Israel in the millennial period, so great and rapid will be the increase of the saved remnant.
In the iith verse God s wonderful works on behalf of His people in the past are again alluded to as the basis and illustration of what He will do for them in the yet greater deliverance of the future. ”

“ Many writers, in their researches into the early history of that continent, have been forcibly struck with the similarity that existed between the laws, manners, customs, etc., of the ancient inhabitants of its northern and northwestern portions and those of ancient Israel. These writers have endeavored to account for this peculiarity in two ways. First by the supposition that Israelitish colonies for various causes, left the land of their inheritance and gradually worked themselves north and northwestward over Europe ”

“ How can we account for the repeated dispersions, and the continued, unceasing wanderings and strange restlessness of the Jew, apart from these ancient inspired utterances? That Palestine should be vanquished, and that Israel should be cast out of their own land, or even be dispersed among the nations, was within the range of human possibility, and mayhap within the power of a shrewd observer to forecast; but, that for centuries and centuries, a people, vanquished and scattered out of their own country, instead of becoming absorbed among the nations—as has been the case with other peoples ”

“ I. The Restoration promised here is a complete one:
"I will bring again the captivity of My people Israel and Judah;"
and the number who will return shall be "a great company," [7] so that even the whole of the promised land will not be large enough for them. [8] The same appears in that remarkable prophecy of Isaiah xi., which, on whatever system of interpretation we adopt, is admittedly future in its application, where "the outcasts of Israel" and "the dispersed of Judah" are to be gathered together. ”

“ The word to be accomplished was to plant the Israelites in Egypt, that they might be strangers in a land not theirs, and serve them, and be afflicted, until the time should arrive for their oppressors to be judged, and their deliverance effected to the glory of Jehovah's name. ”

“ After a brief description of the fall of Jerusalem the “seventy years” of the exile are passed over, and we are plunged into a history of the return (2 Chron. xxxvi.; Ezra i.) . Although Palestine had not been depopulated, and many of the exiled Jews remained in Persia, the standpoint is that of those who returned from Babylon. Settled in and around Jerusalem, they look upon themselves as the sole community, the true Israel, even as it was believed that once before Israel entered and developed independently in the land of its ancestors. ”

“ CHAPTER IV. Israel's Journey Northward—Esdras and Modern Revelation Compared—The Testimony of Jesus to the Nephites—Ephraim to be Gathered from all Countries—The Coasts of the Earth—The Ancestors of the Latter-day Saints.
Having considered the causes that led the outcasts of Israel to determine to seek a home in a new and uninhabited land, we may be excused if we endeavor to follow them in fancy in their journey northward. ”

“ When Israel, of the Lord beloved, Out of the land of bondage came, Her father's God before her moved, An awful guide, in smoke and flame. ”

“ The horns of the Gentiles will then be cast out of the land, and they will be ruled by "Israelites indeed" who will have become Jews by adoption; for no Jews or Gentiles after the flesh can have any part in the government of Israel and the Israelitish empire, which will embrace all nations, unless their Jewish citizenship is based upon a higher principle than natural birth. The flesh constitutes a Jew a subject of the kingdom, but confers on him no right to sit and rule upon the thrones of the house of David. ”

“ Consequently much interest attaches to the evidence which illustrates the environment of the Jews during this period. Those who had been scattered from Palestine lived in small colonies, sometimes mingling and intermarrying with the natives, sometimes strictly preserving their own individuality. Some took root in the strange lands, and, as later popular stories indicate, evidently reached high positions; others, retaining a more vivid tradition of the land of their fathers, cherished the ideal of a restored Jerusalem. ”

“ Israel, its providential existence, and its wonderful development and progress in these latter times, notwithstanding its persecution in times past in all the world and at present in some parts. This is a sign, because Israel is to be ready for deliverance at the return of their Messiah as they were about thirty-five hundred years ago at the hands of Moses.
2. The Holy Land, its desolation of the past and the present attraction which is turning the eyes of the world thither; colonization and railroad enterprises which the nineteenth century has been remarkable for ”

“ True, many of them longed to emigrate to America, the land which had been a place of refuge to their brothers for so many years. Others dreamed of a return to Palestine, willing to live there as exiles in their homeland until the coming of the Messiah brought Israel's freedom. ”

“ Jewish colonies, too, were being founded in Egypt. The agriculturists and herdsmen who had been left in Palestine formed, as always, the staple population, and it is impossible to imagine either Judah or Israel as denuded of its inhabitants. The down-trodden peasants were left in peace to divide the land among them, and new conditions arose as they took over the ownerless estates. ”