Zionism/Zionism in the Bible
§1. Zionism in the Bible
A Zionist is something more than an 'advocate of colonizing of Palestine by modern Jews' as he is defined in the Oxford dictionary. Whether he looks forward to a 'political' or to a merely 'cultural' Jewish occupation of Palestine, whether he is himself religious or non-religious, or even anti-religious, he has been imbued by the history of his race with a passionate love of the Zion of Scripture; and from this common sentiment Zionism draws its best energy.
Though it is less than twenty-five years since Theodor Herzl in his Jewish State suggested Zionism as a solution of the Jewish question, it is also the oldest nationalist movement in history. The earliest books of the Bible make Palestine the rallying-point of Israel and the Nations. Moses, Isaiah, Malachi, all preached the love of the Holy Land. The Zionism of the Bible is far anterior to the exile of Israel even the first exile. It dates back to the prehistoric days of Israel in Egypt; and Moses was the first Zionist. The Promised Land of the Patriarchs is the country where 'I will make of thee a great nation ... and I will bless them that bless thee ... and in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed'.[1] Jacob is to be brought back to this land, this fruitful land of 'the dew of heaven, and the fatness of the earth, and plenty of corn and wine'.[2] During the Exodus, Moses warns his people that, when their children 'walk contrary', God will 'bring the land into desolation, and ... scatter them among the nations ... And yet for all that ... will remember the covenant of their ancestors' and restore them.[3]
The dispersion of Israel among the nations was long anterior even to the destruction of the first Temple; its literature is not limited to the Bible and the Hebrew Prayer Book, nor its history to Palestine. Much of the yearning for Palestine in the Psalms and elsewhere is not the lament of the exile or captive, but the expression of the emotion of the self-banished trader and colonist. In 720 B. C. the Assyrians under Sargon conquered the Ten Tribes and transplanted them eastwards to the Far East, to Armenia, Persia, Afghanistan, perhaps to India, China, and Japan. Joel, Micah, and Hosea prophesied in those times and predicted that 'many nations shall come and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, and to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for the law shall go forth out of Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.[4] ... Thou wilt perform the truth to Jacob, and the mercy to Abraham, which thou hast sworn unto our fathers from the days of old.'[5] 'Be glad then, ye children of Zion ... the floors shall be full of wheat, and the vats shall overflow with wine and oil.'[6]
'I will bring again the captivity of my people Israel, and they shall build the waste cities, and inhabit them ; and they shall plant vineyards, and drink the wine thereof; they shall also make gardens and eat the fruit of them. And I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be plucked up out of their land which I have given them, saith the Lord.'[7]
Isaiah (750–695 B. C.), in whom, of all the prophets, the union of the real with the ideal is most clearly marked, is essentially Messianic. The earlier chapters reflect the world war of the time, Assyria at its zenith, Babylon becoming its menace, Egypt, Tyre, and Syria doomed. But 'the Lord shall set his hand again the second time to recover the remnant of his people, ... from Assyria, and from Egypt, ... and from the islands of the sea. And he shall set up an ensign for the nations, and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth.'[8] The later chapters of the book attributed to Isaiah deal with the conditions towards the close of the Babylonian Captivity a couple of centuries later, but they proclaim even more triumphantly the Restoration of Israel. 'Say ye to the daughter of Zion, Behold, thy salvation cometh ... And they shall call them, The holy people, The redeemed of the Lord: and thou shalt be called, Sought out, A City not forsaken.[9] ... And ye shall be comforted in Jerusalem.[10] ... And they shall bring all your brethren for an offering unto the Lord out of all nations, upon horses, and in chariots, and in litters, and upon mules, and upon swift beasts, to my holy mountain Jerusalem.'[11] 'For the Lord shall comfort Zion: he will comfort all her waste places; and he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness shall he found therein.'[12] The conquest of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar led to a further deportation; and many of the remaining two tribes were exiled to Babylon in three batches in 606, 599, and 588. The number of actual exiles does not seem to have been very large, but it included 'all the princes, and all the mighty men of valour, even ten thousand captives, and all the craftsmen and smiths: none remained, save the poorest sort of the people of the land."[13] Most went eastward to Mesopotamia with Jeremiah and Baruch and Ezekiel, but some fled southward to Egypt.
After seventy years, a partial return took place. The resettlement of Palestine, started by Cyrus and continued by Darius, is of peculiar interest at the present time.