The Talmud (a collection of Jewish rabbinical commentaries) tells a story of the great Rabbi Akiva. Shortly after the Temple’s destruction in AD 70, he led a group of rabbis to Jerusalem’s ruins. When they reached Mount Scopus and gazed at the Temple Mount, they saw a fox dart out from where the holy of holies stood. Immediately the other rabbis cried. But Rabbi Akiva laughed. Astounded, the rabbis said, “Akiva, you never cease to amaze us. We are crying, and you laugh!” Rabbi Akiva asked them, “And you, why are you crying?” They responded by quoting Lamentations 5:18: “Because of Mount Zion which is desolate, with foxes walking about on it.” Akiva replied,
This is exactly why I laugh. For just as we have seen the prophecies of Jerusalem’s destruction come to pass, so, too, know that the prophecies of her future consolation shall also be fulfilled. I laughed because I remembered the verses, “Old men and old women will once again sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each with his staff in his hand because of advanced age; and the streets of the city will be filled with boys and girls playing in its streets” [Zechariah 8:4–5]. The Holy One, blessed be He, has declared that, just as the first prophecies have been fulfilled, so shall the latter. I am joyous that the first has already come to pass, for the latter shall be fulfilled in the future.
Rabbi Akiva believed biblical prophecy and thus believed all his people would be joyfully back in the land one day. Twenty centuries later, another great rabbi, Abraham Heschel, also believed the Bible’s promise of a land for the Jewish people. He said,
The love of this land was due to an imperative, not an instinct, not to a sentiment. There is a covenant, an engagement of the people to the land. We live by covenants. We could not betray our pledge or discard the promise. When Israel was driven into exile, the pledge became a prayer, the prayer a dream, the dream a passion, a duty a dedication.
. . . It is a commitment we must not betray. . . . To abandon the land would make a mockery of all our longings, prayers, and commitments. To abandon the land would repudiate the Bible.
The Dry Bones Come Together
The Jewish people illustrate their collective return to Israel when they celebrate the Passover feast each year. The Torah commands Jewish people around the world to gather their families on the 14th day of the first month (Leviticus 23:5, 7). When the Seder concludes, they cry out, “Next year in Jerusalem!” This statement is a biblically based hope that one day all the Jewish people—no matter where they have been scattered—will celebrate the feast in their homeland, Israel.
The most familiar biblical passage regarding the hope of a reconstituted Israel is Ezekiel 37. God gave the prophet Ezekiel a vision of dry, scattered bones and asked him, “Can these bones live?” (v. 3). The answer normally would be no, but in this case, Ezekiel knew the Person asking the question, and he responded accordingly, “O Lord Gᴏᴅ, You know” (v. 3). God asked Ezekiel this question at a time when the Jewish people were exiled in Babylon. Like the dry, scattered bones, these captives had no reason to hope of ever regaining nationhood. Yet in verse 7, the bones (the whole house of Israel, v. 11) started to rattle and make noise as they came together.
That process has taken shape throughout modern Jewish history. The rattling began in 1897 when Theodore Herzl, a journalist from Vienna, led the first Zionist Congress to discuss the necessity of a Jewish homeland. It seemed like a dream. But it was no dream. Although the dry bones coming together seemed impossible, hundreds of thousands of Jewish people made aliyah (returned) to their land over the next 51 years. That land, largely deprived of its people for nearly 2,000 years, was finally seeing them come home.
God’s Breath of Life for Israel
Since then, Israel has survived four major wars: the 1948 War of Independence; the 1967 Six-Day War; the 1973 Yom Kippur War; and the current war with Hamas, the Houthis, Hezbollah, and Iran. It lived through two intifadas: 1987–1993 and 2000–2005. Yet here it stands in fulfillment of biblical prophecy, reconstituted, but with no breath in it (Ezekiel 37:8). American author Mark Twain said it best: “All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”
Secret? There is no secret. We only need to believe the promise God provides in His Word. The apostle Paul did not want the church to “be ignorant of this mystery, lest you should be wise in your own opinion, that blindness in part has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in” (Romans 11:25). Paul knew, and we know today, that Israel’s people are in the land in unbelief. But one day God will breathe into His people the breath of spiritual life (Ezekiel 37:14), and He “will pour on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem the Spirit of grace and supplication; then they will look on Me whom they pierced. Yes, they will mourn for Him as one mourns for his only son, and grieve for Him as one grieves for a firstborn” (Zechariah 12:10).
Currently, the majority of Israelis are secular, without God. And yet God continues to bring His people back to their homeland. As a nation, Israel will remain in unbelief, except for a remnant of believers, until God breathes life into it and saves it. As Paul said with assurance, “All Israel will be saved” (Romans 11:26). Despite the Jewish people’s unbelief, Bible-believing Christians will continue to unconditionally love, support, and bless them and the land of Israel, as God instructed us to do (Genesis 12:3).
Steve Herzig is the Vice President of North American Ministries and a Bible teacher for The Friends of Israel.
