Meditation 198
On Israel
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I regularly get emails asking what I think of Israel, and its re-establishment in accordance with biblical prophecy. And Amos 9: 14-15 does indeed look like such a prophecy. But does it really refer to events which took place in 1948?
At least some Christian scholars question the authenticity of the last half of Amos 9 (verses 8-15.) They consider it to be a later addition, added a couple of centuries later after the Babylonian captivity and the construction of the Second Temple to make it appear that Amos had prophesied these events.
Whether the passage was actually written by Amos, or added later, given the context of the rest of the Book of Amos, which consists of prophecies for his own times and directed specifically at the Northern Kingdom, it is highly unlikely that the last two verses carried a prediction which jumped forward 2700 years.
It is a stretch to claim Amos prophesied the current state of Israel. In context, the passage can only refer to events of long ago.
Israel does not exist because of some Old Testament prophecy.
Rather Israel exists because all branches of Christianity have systematically persecuted Jews for nearly 2000 years. The Catholic Church, the various Orthodox churches the various Protestant denominations have all, for most of their existence, encouraged and sponsored anti-Semitism to the extent it became embedded in European and North American culture. The Holocaust was the culmination of centuries of anti-Jewish propaganda.
Israel exists because the "Christian" nations of the world were incapable of allowing Jews to live peaceably in their midst, and nearly all rejected the unfortunates fleeing from Nazi persecution in the years immediately preceding WWII. Thus a Jewish homeland became essential.
Christians traditionally have imposed collective guilt on the Jews for the death of one man some two thousand years ago. By those standards, the collective guilt of Christians is at least 10 million[1] times as great.
Footnote:
- Not just the 6 to 7 million in the Holocaust, there were millions more murdered in the centuries preceding.
Photographs taken in Israel in 1976 by John Tyrrell