A Quick Historical Overview for Those Who May Not Be Familiar with Jewish History

About 3900 years ago, around 1900BC, a man named Israel had 12 sons, one of whom was named Judah. Judah's descendants became known as Judahites, or for short, Jews. 

 

They lived in what was then known as Canaan, which is now known as Israel and Gaza and the West Bank and Jordan, etc.

 

Near the end of his life, he and his family of twelve sons and their families, moved to Egypt to escape famine. While there, the Egyptians eventually enslaved them, until one of their own, Moses, was called by God to free them and return them to Canaan.

 

This collective, called Israel, settled in the area around modern-day Israel, and their land was known as Israel.

 

They considered themselves separate from the rest of the nations of the world, referring to these other nations as Goyim, or in a more familiar term to us, Gentiles. Gentiles are non-Israelites.

 

About 900 years later, in the period around 1000BC, King Saul united these twelve clans into a unified kingdom of Israel, which expanded and strengthened under the next King, David (the shepherd boy / musician / dancer / giant-killer), whose son Solomon then reigned over the kingdom in a time of peace and prosperity.

In the reign of Solomon's son, about 930BC, these twelve clans split into two sub-kingdoms, Israel, composed of ten clans, and Judah, composed of the Judahites and the smaller clan of their baby brother Benjamin, the Benjaminites. These sister nations were sometimes friendly with each other, sometimes not so friendly, with the Northern tribes typically being "less godly" than the Southern tribes, which the Bible prophets warned would lead them to their destruction.

 

A couple of hundred years later, around 722BC, that destruction came, and the Northern, larger of those two kingdoms, Israel, was conquered by their enemy Assyria, and the people were dispersed by their enemies into the ends of the earth, into the "Nations" of the "Goyim" ("Gentiles"), and only the smaller, Southern kingdom of Judah (and Benjamin) remained.

 

Similar ungodliness in the Southern kingdom led to their downfall about a century and a half after the downfall of the Northern kingdom.

 

In 586BC, this smaller, Southern kingdom Judah was conquered by the Babylonians and the population was taken to Babylon. But after 50-70 years (depending on how you count the beginning and ending of captivity), in 536BC, they were allowed to return, and from then on for about five centuries, Judah was an on-again-off-again semi-autonomous nation, with the peak of their regained independence being from about 140BC to 63BC.

 

In 63BC, Rome took over. During the next century, little Jewish rebellions against Rome rose up time and again.

 

About 60 years later, Jesus was born in Judea (in Bethlehem, a suburb of Judah's capital city of Jerusalem). In his teaching, Jesus warned that if Judah did not turn to God's kingdom, instead of fighting against Rome for their own kingdom, they would again be conquered, and Jerusalem would be trampled underfoot by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles had been fulfilled.

 

After a little over a hundred years of Roman occupation, in 70AD, in response to yet another Jewish rebellion against the Roman occupation, the Romans destroyed the capital city of Judah, Jerusalem, and their nation's prized Temple, and the Jews were scattered to the ends of the earth among the Gentiles, as had happened to their kinsmen Israel several centuries earlier. The Romans, as an insult to the Jews, renamed the land after the ancient enemies of Judah, the Philistines, calling the land "Palestine".

 

For the next almost-1900 years, the Jews lived scattered among the nations, holding onto their heritage as best they could, oftentimes suffering persecution for their separatist ways, with one of their greatest persecutions occurring during the World War 2 years. After that war, the Jews were granted a renewed homeland in the ancient Judean lands, which became the root of modern-day Israel.

 

The Jews are not Gentiles; Gentiles are not Jews. But either, and both, can be Christians, grafted together into one family rooted in Christ, the two, Jew and Gentile, having became one new Man in Christ.