To Whom does the land of Canaan Rightfully Belong?
The entire basis of the government of Israel’s claim on the land that Palestinian Arabs had occupied for 1400 years, is that this land rightfully belongs to them because they are the blood descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This is based on the Biblical narrative in the book of Genesis, in which “the land of Canaan” was given by God to Abraham, who then bequeathed it to his son Isaac, who passed it on to his son Jacob, who passed it on to his 12 sons, aka “the twelve tribes of Israel,” later to be declared as God’s chosen people (Ref. Genesis 13:15; 15:18; 17:1-10; 19-21; Duet. 7:6)
After Jacob’s 12 tribes had occupied the land for 1400 years,* around 600 BC in two military invasions, the Babylonian Empire destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, seized the land, and took most of the nation into a 70-year captivity. This is referred to as the first “diaspora” of the Israelites. (Ref. 2 Kings: chapters 24 & 25; the book of Daniel) The last major diaspora happened under the rule of the Roman Empire, with the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple by Titus and the Roman Army in AD 70. (1)
*Israel has never occupied the entire Abrahamic land grant, or what is presently referred to as “Greater Israel.”
At the end of that first captivity, a remnant of those who survived were allowed by Cyrus, the king of Persia, to return to the land and rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. (Ref. Ezra: chapters 1 & 2; Neh: chapters 1 & 2) However, the Israelites on the land continued to be scattered abroad, with the final scattering occurring in the seventh century AD with the capture of Palestine by the Mohammedans (Saladin). Save for a brief period of Christian rule in the 12th and 13th centuries, Muslims ruled the Levant and Jerusalem up to the early 20th century when the British Empire took control of it.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, ethnic Jews began to migrate back into Palestine, and during this period a European Jew named Theodore Hertzl initiated the Zionist movement to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine and encourage European Jews to migrate there. This culminated in what is known as Israel’s war of independence in 1948, which resulted in the death of 15000 Palestinian Arabs and the forced displacement of 700,000 of them from their homes into permanent exile. (2)
Again, this entire Zionist agenda to repatriate Palestine with ethnic Jews was/is predicated on the theory that Jews are the rightful owners of “the land of Canaan” because they claim to be the blood descendants of Jacob’s twelve tribes who, according to the above Biblical narrative, were the recipients of the Abrahamic land covenant.
Those of us who believe in and acknowledge the “revelation of the mystery” (Romans 16:25), viz., “the dispensation of the grace of God”(Eph. 3: 1-3), which encompasses both the message of God to the world today and the period that has now spanned almost 2000 years, beginning with Paul’s declaration of it, would readily say to this claim by Zionists that it doesn’t matter whether or not one can claim blood descendency from ancient Israel because God, through Paul, kicked national Israel to the curb almost 2000 years ago, where it has remained to this day. With Paul’s declaration/application of Isaiah 6:9 in Acts 28:26,27 to the Jewish leadership in Rome, in which he declares them blind and deaf to the gospel, they, in effect, became the fulfillment of Hosea 1:9, i.e., “not my people.”
In other words, modern Israel’s claim to be God’s chosen nation is Scripturally bogus.
Of course, a large contingent of Christendom rejects this narrative, claiming that ethnic Jews, being the blood descendants of Jacob, are entitled to take over their ancient homeland by whatever means necessary–furthermore claiming the blessing and cursing mandate of Genesis 12:1-3 to be currently in effect, meaning that any nation-state that fails to support them in their quest to occupy the Holy land fully will come under a curse.
Question: Can anyone, including ethnic Jews, possibly trace their blood lineage back 2000 years? In the book he published in 1953, “What Price Israel,” in chapter 12, pages 163-4, Jewish law professor Alfred Lilienthal had this to say about the impossibility of this claim:
“Today, to trace anyone’s descent to ancient Palestine would be a genealogical impossibility; and to presume, axiomatically, such a descent for Jews, alone among all human groups, is an assumption of purely fictional significance. Most everybody in the Western world could stake out some claim of Palestinian descent if genealogical records could be established for two thousand years. And there are, indeed, people who, though not by the widest stretch of the imagination Jewish, proudly make that very claim: some of the oldest of the South’s aristocratic families play a game of comparing whose lineage goes farther back in Israel. No one knows what happened to the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, but to speculate, on who might be who, is a favored Anglo-Saxon pastime; and Queen Victoria belonged to an Israelite Society that traced the ancestry of its membership back to those lost tribes.” (3)
Fast-forward to the 21st century and the advancement of DNA technology that enables geneticists to identify from where and from whom people descend, to the following study in 2012, conducted by a geneticist at John Hopkins School of Public Health, of the true lineage of the majority of Jews occupying Israel, which confirms the fact that most of the Jews occupying Palestine are NOT of Middle Eastern extraction:
Eran Elhaik, a geneticist at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, thinks so. In a recently published study in Genome Biology Evolution (Elhaik 2012), he is calling for a rewrite of commonly held assumptions about Jewish ancestry. Instead of being primarily the descendants of the 12 tribes of Israel, present-day Jewish populations are, finds Elhaik, primarily the children of a Turkish people who lived in what is now Russia, north of Georgia, east of Ukraine. This civilization, the Khazars, converted from tribal religions to Judaism between the 7th and 9th centuries.”
This study of the Jewish Genome puts the kibosh on the “Rhineland Hypothesis,” which had been, for a century or more, the gold standard of European Jew’s claim to be blood descendants of Jacob’s twelve tribes:
“In the favored ‘Rhineland Hypothesis,’ Jews descended from Israelite–Canaanite tribes who left the Holy Land for Europe in the seventh century, following the Muslim conquest of Palestine. Then, in the beginning of the 15th century, a group of approximately 50,000 left Germany, the Rhineland, for the east. There they reproduced rapidly, in a kind of “hyper–baby boom.” Their breeding outpaced their non-Jewish neighbors by an order of magnitude—despite disease, persecutions, wars, and economic hardship—ballooning to approximately 8 million strong by the 20th century. Under this history, European Jews would be very similar to each other and would have Middle Eastern ancestry.” (4)
Conclusion
In light of all this, there still are many folks in the grace community of faith who say that for political reasons Americans must support the government of Israel in its “struggle” to displace the indigenous Arab Palestinian population occupying the Levant and replace it with Jews. Paramount among these reasons is that Israel is the only Democratic state in the Middle East and as our long-standing ally, is an indispensable cog in the so-called “war on terror,” and the bulwark there against the spread of Muslim Extremism.
Valid arguments can be made against the claim that Israel is a true democracy and that it is anything but a ballast against the spread of Muslim extremism. On the contrary, it is more likely the cause of it. This notwithstanding, when there arises a clear dichotomy between what Scripture says about something and what politics says about it, the believer must side with the word of God–this is not a fence one can straddle (ref Matt. 6:24). To do this for the benefit of staying in good standing with the political faction one is affiliated with is, in my humble opinion, a very unwise choice because whatever you gain temporally by this will cost you, eternally, at the judgment seat of Christ. So if you are presently riding this fence, I implore you to get off it NOW because that day of judgment will happen for us all at the end of our earthly sojourn, which might be today.
All Scripture references are taken from the King James Bible.
Post Script
Are you saved? Jesus Christ—“who knew no sin”—and his sacrificial death on the Cross, has made the way for “everyone that believeth…to be reconciled to God. History has shown that whatever peace man has achieved in the world can only be temporary. The Bible says that individual men and women can know, beyond a doubt, that they are saved and bound for heaven, and therefore have absolute and permanent peace, regardless of what is going on in the world, by trusting Jesus Christ and his death on the cross for their eternal salvation. “…Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.” Have you done this? If not, why not now?
The interesting thing about the Zionist agenda to drive the Arab Palestinians off this land grant they claim rightly belongs to Jews, is the fact that they made their capital Tel Aviv, rather than Zion (Jerusalem).
3. I have heard that under the Throne at Buckingham Palace is the ancestral line that traces the Royal Family’s lineage back to King David. As for what happened to the lost ten tribes, a theology called British Israelism purports that they migrated into the British Isles and became the British people.
