In the Old Testament God promises the Israelis a land of their own flowing with milk and honey. In Numbers 34 the boundaries for this land are laid out in pretty specific terms:
This brings up two questions:
(1) Have the Israelis *ever *occupied the entirety of this land at one time?
(2) My knowledge of this part of the world is that it doesn’t exactly flow with milk and honey. Was this the best God could do for his chosen people?
The land did not always look the way it does today. Much of the reason why the area is so arid today is due to entensive deforestation. (Think of the ancient “cedars of Lebanon.”) There is a reason why the region was once referred to as the “Fertile Crescent.”
This is discussed is Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. I haven’t read it yet, but I’m willing to bet he also brings it up in his latest book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.
Palestine wasn’t always the dry, somewhat barren place that it is today. Way back when the Israelites would have been entering it for the first time, it was a fairly nice place to live, with grasslands and forests (think cedars of Lebanon) and plenty of wildlife – lions, bears, deer, antelope, cheetahs, ostriches, wild asses, and so on. A few thousand years of intense farming and grazing have pretty much turned the place into a desert, but with proper irrigation the land is still quite fertile.
If anything, it would be during David’s reign, but from sermons and such I have heard that Israel never occupied the entirety of the land because they never finished the job that God required of them (to wipe out X, Y, and Z and take their land). Israel started, got satisfied with what they had, and quit while they were ahead.
I don’t think that’s right. This land was *promised *to the Israelis, and it is a promise that was repeated many times, e.g.:
The Promised Land was a big, big deal in the OT, and it seems to me that if it was never delivered, something went terribly wrong with either God or his chosen ones.
By the way, the best map of the Promised Land that I’ve found so far is here .
What was it called way back when? When did it start to be called Palestine? And who, genetically, are palestinians? Also, what would happen is Israel tried to take all of tbeir land? This would include Jordan, I think.
Wikipedia has a pretty good article on the history of Palestine, including the various names - Israel and Judea, when the Romans had the territory they changed the name from Judea to Palestine, as a slight to the Jewish people after there was a large revolt in 135 AD. Genetically, the Palestinians are a semetic people, not really different from surrounding Arabs in Jordan or Syria. If Israel tried to take all the land, it would mean a large scale war in the area, Iran would speed up its nuclear program, and there would be a lot of suicide bombings.
It should be pointed out that the milk in question is not cow’s milk but goat’s milk and that the honey in question is not bee’s honey but date honey.
And there are plenty of goats and dates in Israel.
Zev Steinhardt
What’s that interpretation based on? The Israelites certainly kept and milked cows, hence the injunction not to boil a calf in the milk of its mother. And they certainly knew about bee honey, evidenced by Samson robbing a hive as well as in the name Deborah.
So why the asumption that it was date honey and goat’s milk rather than cow’s milk and bee honey? Actually I doubt anyone made a distinction between cow’s goat’s and ewe’s milk.
Well, I think I’ve read enough now to answer my first question. The Israelis have **never **occupied the entirety of the Promised Land at one time. Certainly not to the extent that they could be considered to be somehow in control of or administering the entirety of the region.
(Now, at this point I’m probably drifting off into GD land, but so it goes.)
I find this amazing. The Promised Land was God’s big reward to his chosen people. It is mentioned over and over in the OT. For the Israelis, it is the motivation behind putting up with so much misery. Yet in the end God doesn’t deliver on his promise, and that doesn’t seem to matter to anybody!!! How can anyone take this particular God seriously when he can’t even deliver a relatively insignicant parcel of land after thousands of years? This is God we’re talking about; the Big G; Mr. Omnipotent; Creator of the Universe. C’mon, buddy, put up or shut up.
Since this is still GQ, I’m asking for someone to explain this to me. How does God maintain his credibility with his followers when he has failed his side of the bargain so badley?
From what I’ve heard, God couldn’t fulfill His promise completely until the Israelies accept Jesus as their messiah. I think. Eventually, they will and THEN they get all the land. I think.
El Zagna:
Do you mean the Israelis (as in the modern-day state) or the Israelites (as in the ancient tribal folks from the Bible)? If the latter, then the answer is pretty obvious: the Bible says that they DID take complete control of the land within those borders. They populated the entire region during the conquests of Joshua (while not yet eradicating the other nations that lived there) and complete control finally came at the hands of King David.
In addition, if you want something more “solid” than Biblical history, I can point out that the Hasmonean kings had control over the entire “Promised Land” region as well.
Israel isn’t as arid and forbidding as you all assume to be, either. While the southern half is indeed desert, the north is largely Mediterranian forest and scrub, much like Greece or southern Italy. Parts of it, such as the Kinneret area, are positively lush. Too lush, in some places - you hear a lot about Israel “making the desert bloom,” but most early Zionist land reclamation took the form of drying out swamps and marshes on the coastal plains, the Jezreel valley and the Hula basin.
And there are still quite a lot of cedars up in Lebanon. Else, why would they have one on their flag?
Ah, yes. A quick review of Joshua and 2 Samuel shows that to be true. Thanks for the help.
There still seems to be a disconnect here between the build up of the importance of the Promised Land and the rather inconsequential coverage of the actual achievement. It’s like opening up the Chicago Tribune today and seeing the story of the White Sox World Series victory buried on page 2.
Now I have a follow up question. From what I can tell, it took about 450 years from God’s original promise to the delivery of that promise, and even then the control of the Promised Land lasted only about one generation before it started to slip away. Is that about right?
Ah, so it’s the Jews’ fault, is it? Reminds me of faith healers - if you can’t get healed, it’s because YOU didn’t have enough faith.
El Zagna:
Yes to the first and no to the second.
The conquest-to-the-point-of-settlement was complete by the time Joshua died. Strangely, it never specifies in the Bible exactly how long Joshua led the Israelites for, but I believe it was calculated (based on the periods of the various Judges) as no greater than 31 years.
However, once the Israelites settled the land, they preferred to actually settle - each man to his grapevine and fig tree. They preferred that the occasional uprisings of non-Israelite inhabitants or invasions by external nations be met by a temporary leader to restore the immediate tranquility. G-d promised to aid them in their battles, but if they weren’t interested in fighting, there was no promise that he’d go ahead and kill them without their involvement.
It wasn’t until the time of Samuel that the Israelites were interested in a more activist leader. Once they demanded a king, it was not long before David established complete control over the Promised Land.
As for its “slipping away,” the entire land remained in Israelite hands for much more than a single generation - it was for approximately 300 years. Rulership over a large portion of it slipped out of the hands of the Davidic dynasty, but until the Assyrian conquests, it was still Israelites from one kingdom or another in control of it.
It was called various names, mostly “Israel” or “Shomron” for the Northern Kingdom and “Yehuda” for the Southern, as well as other names for other peoples populatin the region (such as “Edom”, “Moab” etc… including, until they sort of faded away, “Pleshet” for the area around Gaza where the “Philistines” (remember Goliath?) lived. By the time the Romans came on the scene, the kingdom of Israel had been gone for quite some time. As mentioned, they re-named “Judea” to “Palestine” (and “Jerusalem” to “Aelia Capitolina”) as part of the payback for the “Great Revolt”.
Now the Roman-day “Palestine” had nothing to do with Arabs! This name was given after the Philistines. The name “Palestinians” was given to the Arab residents of this part of the world because… well, they’re living in “Palestine”, so that’s what we’ll call them. BTW, during the British Mandate, all residents of “Palestine”, Jews and Arabs, were called “Palestinians”. Israel took its name upon independence, the various Arab National Movements clamoring to regain all of the area continued to self-style themselves as “Palestinians” (or rather, even closer to the original name, “Phalestinians”, since Arabic pretty much lacks the “P” sound)
Rashi to Exodus 13:5.
Zev Steinhardt
