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The UK Bible Students Website Christian Biblical Studies |
RECOVERING
ZION
‘When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dreamed.’
- Psalm 126: 1 -
All Scripture references are to the NIV-UK unless stated otherwise
CAPTIVES IN BABYLON for 70 years, the psalmist here likens the Jews’ startling deliverance to the sudden waking from a dream, though ‘nightmare’ would perhaps be a more apt description.
Not everyone wanted to go back to Jerusalem. Those who had been assimilated into the heathen culture were comfy and stayed behind. For the thousands who did return, the first order of business was to rebuild the Temple, which was in a pathetic state, its timbers rotting. So too, the city walls, the stones of which had suffered from lack of maintenance, many bits and pieces of which had probably been raided by foreigners and carried off for building materials. In short, the land of Israel was desolate, the holy city, Jerusalem and the temple, a mess – as was the spirit and mood of the people who had surveyed the site.
No question about it: they would have to start over.
Royal Interventions
King Cyrus had previously smoothed the way by returning the paraphernalia of the Temple which Nebuchadnezzar had swiped. Cyrus supplied funds from his own treasury to finance the Jews’ enterprise. Later on, even his successor, Artaxerxes (Longimanus), commanded that his provinces round about Jerusalem ensure that the returnees got all the help they needed without fee (Ezra 7: 21-24 [‘without limit’, without ‘taxes, tribute or duty’]). There was in Artaxerxes’ decree an element of compunction: his generosity was enlightened by the concern that his own kingdom and his posterity might be destabilised were he to act otherwise – ‘Whatever the God of heaven has prescribed, let it be done with diligence for the temple of the God of heaven. Why should his wrath fall on the realm of the king and of his sons [the princes]?’ (v. 23).
Through the Ages
We may draw a rough equivalent of these events to modern Israel’s return from their ages-long captivity in metaphorical Babylon, the period when they were largely under the authority of a spectrum of secular, Muslim and Christian nations, persecuted as ‘Christ-killers’ or jealously reviled for their industry.
In the nineteenth century, especially from about 1878 on, the fate of the Jewish people attracted the patronage of Great Britain, then the seat of the world’s foremost empire, whose Reformation history and love of the King James Bible inclined its sympathies towards the Hebrews.[1]
At the time, the economic and political interests of the British aligned with the overall welfare of the Jewish people. Cyrus-like, the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, issued his eponymous Declaration of 1917, which provided for a national home in Palestine for the Jewish people. The British Mandate of 1923 provided the framework for the foundations (walls) of Jewish independence to be laid down. Agricultural co-operatives dating back to the early 1900s —the kevutzah and kibbutz — managed and run by Jewish settlers, eventually made the desert bloom as the rose. The formal establishment of the nation of Israel in 1948 was thus the culmination of about 70 years of effort involving big-power politics, religious and secular Zionism, two world wars, and Hitler’s satanic brutality towards the Jews in the Holocaust.
Aftermath of the Second World War
Following the 1939-45 war a blend of pity, guilt and horror at what had been done to the Jewish people caused nations who otherwise would not have been kindly disposed towards them to endorse the nascent Jewish state. As the principal architect of their sufferings, Germany was obliged to pay reparations (Shilumim, tribute). [2] For now, most of the countries that make up the United Nations give lip-service support to the ‘notion’ of Israel and many of them have enacted laws against blatant acts of anti-Semitism. However, we should not be surprised if this etiquette lurches eventually towards open hostility to Jews in general and Israel, the nation, in particular.
Hatred of ‘the Jew’ is and has been for many nations and individuals the default position. The beneficial, supportive treatment of them by both the Persian and British empires were, therefore, extraordinary developments supervised by Israel’s God, who always overrules in the untidy and sometimes malign affairs of man, and He will elevate His people Israel to the highest rank in due course. Then, and only then, will ‘Jacob’ fully awaken from his nightmare.
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ENDNOTES
1. As predicted by Dr. John Thomas, founder of the Christadelphian movement (pp. 441-443, Elpis Israel: An Exposition of the Kingdom of God, by John Thomas, M.D., Thirteenth Edition, 1942; orig. publication, 1850).
2. Both the First World War (1914-18) and the Second World War (1939-45) occurred after the formal dissolution of the ‘Gentile Times’ in 1914 – when the mantle of authority began to be removed from the historic world powers – and the prising open of the door to Israel’s flowering, beginning in 1948. We are now witnessing the diminishment of one social order and the gradual instatement of Millennial blessings, a process which will take some years.
At the time, the economic and political interests of the British aligned with the overall welfare of the Jewish people. Cyrus-like, the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, issued his eponymous Declaration of 1917, which provided for a national home in Palestine for the Jewish people. The British Mandate of 1923 provided the framework for the foundations (walls) of Jewish independence to be laid down. Agricultural co-operatives dating back to the early 1900s —the kevutzah and kibbutz — managed and run by Jewish settlers, eventually made the desert bloom as the rose. The formal establishment of the nation of Israel in 1948 was thus the culmination of about 70 years of effort involving big-power politics, religious and secular Zionism, two world wars, and Hitler’s satanic brutality towards the Jews in the Holocaust.
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