I don’t think anyone really enjoys reading this account. No matter who you want Yeshua/Jesus to be and what you want Him to conform to—you can’t read this without wincing and realizing that He is what He is and we can’t always predict Him. We’re going to explore history and the pseudepigraphic book of Jubilees in order to explore what I think was really going on here. If only our Savior would stay in a more comfortable box…
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Transcript:
24 And from there he arose and went away to the region of Tyre and Sidon. And he entered a house and did not want anyone to know, yet he could not be hidden. 25 But immediately a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit heard of him and came and fell down at his feet. 26 Now the woman was a Gentile, a Syrophoenician by birth. And she begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. 27 And he said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” 28 But she answered him, “Yes, Lord; yet even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” 29 And he said to her, “For this statement you may go your way; the demon has left your daughter.” 30 And she went home and found the child lying in bed and the demon gone.
Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist, and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. If you prefer written material, I have five years’ worth of blog at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids—and I have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for both adults and kids. You can find the link for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com and transcripts can be had for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com
All Scripture this week comes courtesy of the ESV, the English Standard Version but you can follow along with whatever Bible you want. A list of my resources can be found attached to the transcript for Part two of this series at theancientbridge.com.
On a positive note, 2020 is over. So, let’s celebrate by talking about the second cringiest thing Yeshua/Jesus ever said. We can all agree, I would think, that the “eating my flesh and drinking my blood” remark in John 6:53 has to be the most disturbing out of context and it certainly drove people away when He said it. But this—oh my gosh, comparing this desperate woman’s little girl to a dog. Yikes and a half. Yeshua sure doesn’t like to stay in anyone’s boxes. In fact, and I am going to recommend a non-Gospel of Mark related book here, I just finished reading Too Good to Be False by Tom Gilson. Just came out about four months ago and dang. He makes this point. No one would have made up anyone like this as a fictional character. I mean, besides being perfect and showing no character growth over the course of the Gospels, learning nothing, not changing, never making a mistake—you know, the things that make people boring to read about—He said these things that no one would make up because they just drive people away. Like, you know, writing to a mixed but mostly Gentile audience in Rome and calling an upper-class pagan girl a dog. Not really endearing or helping his cause here, okay? And He says these awkward things that would get me either unfriended or surrounded by the worst sorts of blowhards but when He says it—well, it works. It’s crazy. Anyway, get the book. Very awesome.
And, I am not going to make nice about this or make excuses. We’re going to talk about this in all its ugly glory and talk about what might have been going on. We have to let Yeshua be Yeshua. Sometimes He had to say some really hard things and sometimes, like this, we can’t be entirely sure why but we can explore the history to try and come up with an educated guess. What we do know is that this wasn’t made up because no one would make this up. What I am not going to do is tell you that this was playful banter because to speak that way to a woman, any woman, would have been extraordinarily inappropriate. I mean, beyond conversing with the Samaritan woman-level inappropriate. They weren’t buddies. This wasn’t a lighthearted encounter. This was serious business and we can’t haul this conversation into modern times with modern rules of male-female interaction. We have to treat this like a conversation between a first-century Jewish man and a heathen woman from one of the classic enemies of Israel, and still an oppressor of Israel at the time this happened. There is a whole lot more here than meets the eye so let’s look at it without flinching, okay?
Let’s call this “the woman with the issue of blood and Jairus’s daughter” part two because it’s the same sort of thing only outside of eretz Israel. We’ve had a woman in crisis, a rich man’s daughter in crisis (dead even) and now we have a Gentile woman’s daughter in crisis. Stories about dealing with women in the ancient world like this were not the norm and Yeshua is very egalitarian in His dealings with women. They can follow Him, learn from Him instead of existing to serve men, His named financial supporters are all women, it was women (and one man) who were there with Him at His crucifixion, and it was women who were the first witnesses to the resurrection. In the early church, like 20% of those named by Paul as leaders within the congregations were women: Junia the apostle, Priscilla the teacher, Phoebe the deacon and benefactor, etc. But it all started here in the ministry of Yeshua in how approachable He was and in how differently He treated women—even going so far as to eviscerate the liberal divorce laws of the first century that oppressed women terribly. So, if we were going off of the example of the rest of His dealings with women, we would be expecting warmth and kindness. We would be dead wrong. Alright, starting in chapter seven:
24 And from there he arose and went away to the region of Tyre and Sidon. And he entered a house and did not want anyone to know, yet he could not be hidden.
From where? We don’t know. He and His disciples were somewhere in the Galilee and all of a sudden He is here, alone, north of Israel up in the region of Tyre and Sidon which is most famous for being the birthplace of the infamous Jezebel, whose spirit, I hear, is responsible every time a woman gets uppity and allows a man to hear her teach. So, just be warned, guys, I am trouble. Just kidding, kinda, but I have to laugh that when men act like Jezebel they get a total pass whereas whenever a woman does stuff that men don’t approve of it’s because of Jezebel. Oh, just wait until we get to the book of Revelation, I might burst some bubbles. But, as I said, He’s alone or at least His disciples get zero mention until chapter eight. But in chapter eight He is still in Gentile territory and it says He calls His disciples to Him so either they are gone here and meet up with Him later or they are here now and go unmentioned.
We do know that He is well-known in Tyre, a coastal city, and Sidon because in Mark 3:8 people have come from that region to hear Him preach and they followed Him around. So, the buzz would have proceeded Him. Again, He is likely escaping the region because it still hasn’t been long since Herod Antipas killed John the Baptist and we see Him only staying any place long enough to preach, heal and leave before there is trouble. He has a lot of ground to cover in a short time and He cannot afford to be killed anywhere else except Jerusalem and even then, it must be on the Passover. He knew what He was doing and what would happen, but it had to happen in fulfillment of prophecy or He would be nothing except a brash, young fool. And I use young lightly because thirty was the life expectancy during the first-century Roman occupation. Half of the people didn’t make it past that so Yeshua was becoming an elder at this point.
But, Sidon and prophets are a famous pair, Biblically. Let’s look at I Kings 17:
8 Then the word of the Lord came to him, 9 “Arise, go to Zarephath, which belongs to Sidon, and dwell there. Behold, I have commanded a widow there to feed you.” 10 So he arose and went to Zarephath. And when he came to the gate of the city, behold, a widow was there gathering sticks. And he called to her and said, “Bring me a little water in a vessel, that I may drink.” 11 And as she was going to bring it, he called to her and said, “Bring me a morsel of bread in your hand.” 12 And she said, “As the Lord your God lives, I have nothing baked, only a handful of flour in a jar and a little oil in a jug. And now I am gathering a couple of sticks that I may go in and prepare it for myself and my son, that we may eat it and die.” 13 And Elijah said to her, “Do not fear; go and do as you have said. But first make me a little cake of it and bring it to me, and afterward make something for yourself and your son. 14 For thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘The jar of flour shall not be spent, and the jug of oil shall not be empty, until the day that the Lord sends rain upon the earth.’ ” 15 And she went and did as Elijah said. And she and he and her household ate for many days. 16 The jar of flour was not spent, neither did the jug of oil become empty, according to the word of the Lord that he spoke by Elijah.
Later, Elijah raises the son of this same woman. And she is a Tsidonian, just like Jezebel. But this poor woman is barely hanging on in the midst of a famine. As we will see, she is entirely different from the woman Yeshua meets up with. But, this story of the woman from Zarephath was about bread. So were the last two stories—the handwashing debate was all about eating bread with unwashed hands while the very next teaching was about how bread eaten with unwashed hands cannot defile you. This story is also about bread. The pattern is very important. Elijah ate with a non-Israelite woman. Yeshua set the precedent that made it possible to be in contact with Gentiles and preach the Gospel to them.
So, He goes into a house, presumably the house of a Jew living in the area (we don’t know) and hoping to hide and rest—as He often did when pressed by the crowds—but it is no use, word gets around and He gets a desperate visitor. It’s always the same story no matter where He goes, right?
25 But immediately a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit heard of him and came and fell down at his feet.
The word for little daughter is thygatrion, just the same as with the little daughter of Jairus who was twelve years old. She falls at his feet—same wording as with Jairus, the correct posture that one would assume when asking for benefaction from someone more powerful. By benefaction, I am talking about the reality in a society where you can’t just go to the store and get whatever you want or to the bank for a loan if you are a nobody. That’s not how it worked. If you needed something, you had to go to the person who could provide it to you. You became their client and they were your benefactor. They gave to you, freely, but it was a give and take relationship. People in the ancient world didn’t usually take without giving something back unless they were beggars. It was shameful to be an endless glutton using up someone else’s resources without doing whatever it is you could do for them. So anyway, all that is to explain why she was at His feet. She was recognizing Him as someone whose resources were greater than her own—not wealth wise, but in terms of what He could uniquely provide that she could get nowhere else, namely deliverance for her young daughter. So, she isn’t recognizing Him as divine here—likely she wouldn’t quite know what to make of Him as miracle workers were not entirely unknown nor would she see Him as the Messiah because she was not a Jew.
26 Now the woman was a Gentile, a Syrophoenician by birth. And she begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter.
And before I forget, we are meant to contrast her reaction to Him with that of the Pharisees and their scribes who would witness His miracles and be utterly unmoved, in fact, they would ignore and challenge and try to undermine Him in response. She was a Syrophonecian, and that word is a Latin loan-word—another indication that the author was a Roman, even if he was also a Jew because we keep getting these words that are just glaringly foreign. Now, Josephus had some words about these people—calling them “our bitterest enemies” in Against Apion 1.70. Compared to the Galilean Jews to the south, they were very well off financially. They were considered to be oppressors because they were well fed on the food that came from Galilean farms while the Galileans themselves were barely subsiding between taxes and tithes. Malnutrition was a terrible problem, as was the loss of family farms due to the heavy tax burdens imposed by King Herod and the Temple establishment, the family of Annas (father in law of Caiaphas) who was very rich indeed. In a very real sense, the Syrophonecians were seen as thieves, stealing bread from the mouths of Jewish children. And here we have an oppressor, a wealthy Gentile woman, begging a Galilean miracle-worker to save her daughter.
What have we seen so far? We’ve watched Yeshua scandalize the Pharisees and the Scribes from Jerusalem by eating with sinners, touching lepers, not rebuking the woman with the issue of blood, and refusing to wash his hands before eating bread. All eyes, if His disciples were there, would be on Him to see how He would respond to this woman who was begging his patronage.
27 And he said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”
It must have come across as a hard slap. Her daughter, who was eating well at the expense of starving Galilean children, should have no expectation of receiving what rightfully belongs to the Jews first. She’s pretty much being told to get in line, be put on hold—indefinitely. And it’s hard because we see a child and Yeshua is talking about oppressors, the powerful, and yet calling them lowly dogs. Yeshua is demanding that the oppressor acknowledge that what she is asking for does not belong to her any more than the food they are taking from Galilean tables. And more than that, He says it isn’t worth interrupting His mission to throw her a bone, so to speak. The Syrophoenicians looked down on the Jews and had for many centuries. In effect, they undoubtedly saw them as little better than dogs, impoverished and slaving away to try and scrape out a living. But Yeshua is saying, “I need you to understand that the God whom I represent, He sees them as His primary people on this planet. He is their God first and foremost. If you want something from Him, you have to acknowledge His primary attention as being on feeding them His bread. You don’t have any special rights on His attention no matter how things look in the physical world.” I believe with my whole heart that this is what she understood Him to be saying. Let me read it again so you see all the parts to this:
27 And he said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”
So, how will she respond? I mean, that’s the $24,000 question. Pretty sure I would get totally uppity about it and guilt trip Him about my innocent daughter. Well off women, potentially wealthy Roman citizens, don’t take kindly to being mouthed off to by the rabble, miracle worker or not. He had just assaulted her honor rating in her own community. He had shamed her. This was nothing to be laughed off. And yet, this woman would have understood the concept of regional deities who were concerned with caring for a specific population group on their own land. But, she would also assume that the God of the Jews was under the feet of the Roman gods because the Jews were a conquered people. What would she do? Would she acknowledge Yahweh as being greater than? Would she acknowledge Yahweh as being concerned with the people that her own people were oppressing and eating at the expense of?
28 But she answered him, “Yes, Lord; yet even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”
Wow. This woman reminds me of Abigail, David’s wife. Such wisdom and humility. He degraded her publicly, and she acknowledges that He is right in everything. Yes, she answers. She calls Him kyrios, a title of profound respect. She is accepting the demotion in honor and reputation and humbly accepting a position beneath Him where what He says goes. She doesn’t deny that her people have prospered at the expense of the Galilean Jews, she doesn’t deny that it makes them oppressors and sinners—dogs. But she does more than that—she honors Him by her next statement. “Even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” What exactly does this mean?
“I am not asking you for the children’s bread, just a few crumbs that they will never miss.” How about putting it this way, “I have heard what you can do and this is nothing for you. It won’t take a moment. I am not asking for a seat at the table. I am not claiming that I deserve to be there, but what I ask will take no effort from you and it will cost you nothing. I am not asking for a lot of your power and authority, just the smallest bit will save my daughter. I don’t deserve this, I am just asking for your pity.” Now that’s faith. And it’s humility and a mother’s truest kind of love in that society when she could have stood on principle and stomped off and unleashed her family on him for assaulting their group reputation. This was a woman with two things—absolute belief that what she had heard about Him was true and a willingness to endure anything, even public shaming, to save her daughter. May we all be found even a fraction as faithful and wise.
It’s funny, how the disciples are fighting over who is the greatest while this woman is willing to be debased in order to save her child. And the Pharisees and the Scribes from Jerusalem are trying so hard to shame Him and undermine Him. And we have the woman with the issue of blood on the outskirts of society, the synagogue leader falling at his feet, and this Gentile woman all doing whatever it takes to get what they know only He can deliver. So, what will Yeshua do?
29 And he said to her, “For this statement you may go your way; the demon has left your daughter.”
So, things we can notice here—unlike the woman with the issue of blood, He does not call her daughter. Why? Covenant reasons. The woman with the issue of blood was a Jew and therefore a member of the Covenant community who had been excluded from community life for twelve years. This is an entirely different situation as she is not a member of the Covenant community, despite calling Him kyrios, meaning Lord or Master, take your pick. She approached a miracle worker but she wasn’t converting. I have mentioned this before but there is this excellent analogy that someone made between being a customer of Christ and a disciple and I have searched in vain. I believe it is Richard Wurmbrand but it might be Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
It goes this way—there are different relationships we can have with Yeshua. The first is the most common, the relationship of being a customer—as though He is a tailor making us a suit of clothes to cover our nakedness. Customers are in the relationship for what they can get out of it. Yeshua isn’t their master and King, He’s just their supplier. They want eternal life and forgiveness. They have never or rarely ask themselves what they owe in return. Then you have disciples, who are in it for what they can do for the Kingdom. They are first and foremost servants with the hope of eternal life but it does not drive them to serve. Love drives them to serve. Allegiance drives them to serve. This woman had great faith in a miracle worker but she wasn’t a follower, we never hear from her again. Unfortunately, most of those whom Yeshua met on His travels were no different and they proved it by being conspicuously absent at the Cross despite His good works on their behalf. That being said, not like she could have followed him anyway and she would not have understood His role as Messiah—not like His disciples understood it either. This event—we can chalk it up as a sign and a wonder and a foretaste of the things to come when the Gospel would go out from Jerusalem—even though it would take another ten years and quite the radical vision.
But this episode—it is applicable in ways we might not want to think of in the US. People ask all the time, “Why don’t we see the miracles here that they saw in the first-century church?” To which I respond, “We do, but only in third world countries where the Gospel is spreading and people are very poor.” And then I get asked, “Why?” And I would respond, “Because they are worthy of the bread while we deserve only crumbs.” We’re getting our goodies already, and we’ve chosen comfort and prosperity over the spirit.
And Americans don’t like to hear that because, after all, we send aid everywhere and sponsor a child here and there and give to relief efforts when we feel guilty or need the tax break. But what else do we do? We have closets full of cheap clothing produced by what amounts to slave labor in Asian countries. We are gluttons while others are starving. We complain about being poor while wasting time on our smartphones. We are the Syrophonecian women of the world, living large while others pay the price. Yeah, we’re generous, in a way in that we give a bit out of our surplus but Yeshua never gave anyone credit for that—He honored the widow’s mite. The truth is that giving is even worse in the “Torah Observant” community than in the mainstream church because people have benefitted themselves of a technicality—we’re supposedly only supposed to give out of our agricultural harvest. Well, that giving out of agriculture fed the poor and the Levites and the priests. Do we honestly think that we are off the hook for feeding people now because of that legalistic loophole? We are supposed to keep the commandments in spirit and in truth. It is not the spirit of the tithe to allow people to go hungry simply because we aren’t farmers. And so, in Africa and Asia, where they lack medical care and basic sustenance in some areas, they get the bread. They are sitting as children at God’s table and the African and Asian Churches are growing by leaps because of it. And every now and then, God blesses us with some crumbs. And we have to own this and repent of it. It’s incredibly serious business. We are an oppressor nation in our consumerism—which was exactly what the problem with Babylon was. Which reminds me of something I wrote almost four years ago, and it is scary how far things have progressed. But we have some extra time, so I am going to insert this here about how dangerous comfort really is.
You know, we see from Scriptures that Babylon is not entirely bad. Before entering exile, the Jews were not monotheistic–they were henotheistic–worshiping many gods but acknowledging Adonai as the head of the pantheon, the top god. King David even had a teraphim in his bedroom that Michal placed in their bed to distract the soldiers (I Sam 19). It began after the death of Joshua and wasn’t because they wanted to insult God–it’s just an indication that we all read the Scriptures through our unique cultural context and assumptions. The entire world was non-exclusively polytheistic (meaning the multiple gods they served were not jealous)–henotheism was a step up from that, not having any gods BEFORE Adonai, just beneath Him. They saw Him as jealous, but not that jealous. We see that this was unacceptable to Adonai and the prophets repeatedly warned the people, and yet we see Adonai’s patience. They really were trying to do what was right, but they weren’t quite understanding. Every other pantheon had greater and lesser gods who controlled different cosmic functions–polytheism was just an indication that no one thought one god could do it all alone. Sometimes they had more gods and sometimes very few, who were worshiped alongside Adonai–until the exile.
Exile changed Judaism forever; it was a major correction. The Jews were engulfed into a truly polytheistic society and, because of this, they were allowed great religious freedom to worship Adonai. Horrified by what life was truly like in a society bereft of the One True God, they chose to worship Him exclusively, becoming enormously concerned with what the Scriptures said about acceptable worship, and that worship has remained exclusive to this day.
The original idea behind a vaccine is this: being infected with a controllable measure of a virus at a certain stage in its life cycle and being able to suffer through it and overcome it naturally, builds the immune system to give immunity. The body learns what the disease looks like and learns how to deal with it. The early vaccines did that incredibly well. (Not an invitation to talk about vaccines, only the Bible). That was Babylon–God’s vaccine against idolatry. The Jews got a snootful of the real thing and the true lack of freedom that people have within it to be led by and obey God’s laws. As a result, the Judaism that emerged from Babylon was hyper anti-idolatrous. This hypersensitivity was a direct lead up to the Maccabean revolt–the Jews were wanting to die before going the path of betraying God ever again. A great many did die–they allowed themselves to be slaughtered instead of fighting on the Sabbath, they endured torture rather than eat idol meat (although this part is likely a late legend), the mothers illegally circumcised their male babies only to die with them hung around their own necks.
Why was the command given, “Come out of her my people?”(Jer 51:41). Well, they had been sent to Babylon against their will – Nebuchadnezzar, a brutal and idolatrous man, was used as God’s own tool–His servant (Jer 27:6). But Nebuchadnezzar had gone too far; he had been too brutal, he enjoyed his job. God often uses the unrighteous to discipline His people, but woe to the man who enjoys doing it, who inflicts too much punishment and shows not enough mercy and refuses to give God His due respect afterward. When the discipline is done, what happens to the people who went too far? Who relished slaughtering the apple of God’s eye? They have to be judged themselves! And they were–by Cyrus the Great, who destroyed Nebuchadnezzar’s line. The Jews were warned to flee out of the way of the coming destruction–not from idolatry. Babylon was an incredibly comfortable place, the commercial center of the world–and they had religious freedom. There were some bumps along the way where kings were manipulated into actions that put the Jews in jeopardy, but all in all, the Jews were safe and cozy there, they were prosperous and influential–it was hard to contemplate leaving and in fact, at that point, they had nowhere to go, really, but this was a call to get ready to go. They were subjects of the Babylonian empire with no homeland of their own to legally return to yet–but that would change.
Cyrus II, the “Great” would change that, and they would be able to leave in the last half of the sixth century BCE, able to go back to a very hazardous Israel to rebuild the Temple and the walls of Jerusalem. Those who did, faced hardship and death, a total loss of comfort and the status they had in the Empire. It was somewhat like the prospect of those who leave America and make Aliyah today. Israel is good, it is the Land of my King and always will be, but those who go are leaving a very safe and very easy way of life here in order to go to a place where living is expensive, jobs are hard to get unless you speak Hebrew as well as a native-born, and the threat of being murdered by terrorists is very real.
Still, the call to “Come out of her” is spiritually always before us, not just the Jews. Are we willing to leave our ease and comfort to go where God is leading us, away from what we have always known? Following God is always difficult–it rarely takes us over well-tread paths, it is not comfortable, it comes at great cost to ourselves, and sometimes it is not safe. And yet, where is God? Is God calling us to live well-fed in our city, suburban, or country homes, pleased with ourselves and our safe religious lives, or does he call us to turn our eyes away from all that ease when the time comes?
The Jews who did not “Come out of her,” who refused to go rebuild Jerusalem in 530 BCE, ended up being faced with slaughter at the hands of Haman around fifty years later during the rule of Cyrus’ grandson Xerxes I. It was only after this genocidal attempt that many more Jews made Aliyah under Artaxerxes – the king mentioned in the chronicles of Ezra and Nehemiah.
Sadly, it became popular within Christianity, during the Protestant/Catholic wars, to mischaracterize this call to “Come out of her” as a clarion call against “Babylonian” idolatry, but this isn’t the context–in fact, Babylon’s idolatry barely gets a mention in the entire chapter; when it does, it is in relation to their being shamed as part of God’s overall vengeance. Furthermore, when the danger of idolatry is mentioned in the Bible, it is in connection with Egypt, Canaan, and Jeroboam. Babylon, on the other hand, is overwhelmingly referenced in respect to commerce, military might, and the luxury provided by the two. God didn’t send Israel into exile to introduce them to idolatry, but to cure them of it and make them sick of it before they could rebuild the Temple as commanded in Haggai 1.
God gave Nebuchadnezzar the authority to subdue the people as well as the nations of the Earth, but he misused his power and was unspeakably cruel, as were his descendants. He amassed tremendous wealth–Babylon was probably the greatest commercial giant of the ancient world. Hence the head of the statue in his dream was made of solid gold. The wealth of the world was centered in Babylon, it was the merchant’s equivalent of Mecca–and the whole world was drunk off of the luxury and profits–not the religion. After all, Babylon was simply one of a great many heathen nations–not unique in the ancient world. They were all entirely idolatrous, every single nation, and so Babylon was not unique in that way. Babylon’s uniqueness lay in her military prowess and especially in her commercial dominance.
Babylon was sent to punish God’s people and went overboard. Babylon destroyed the filth that had overtaken God’s Temple and His city Jerusalem and went overboard. Once the seventy years of wrath were completed, God had achieved His vengeance, as Jeremiah 51 clearly shows. Babylon dishonored God in every way, instead of honoring Him as they should–and when Nabonidus took the sacred Temple vessels and placed them into the hands of heathens to drink to the honor of the gods of silver and gold, that was the final straw. Jer 51:24 gives the final sentence against Babylon:
“I will repay Babylon and all the inhabitants of Chaldea before your very eyes for all the evil that they have done in Zion, declares the Lord.”
God’s honor was tied up in Zion–it still is. That’s why all the nations still fight over Jerusalem, why every nation seeks out a place for their god there. Islam, for example, sets up mosques over the holy ground of any other religious site they destroy–to shame defeated gods and, by extension, the people who worship them. Since the end of World War II and even long before, Zionists have been crying out “Come out of her my people” because they see now what too many Jews of Babylon did not understand: If the Jews had all returned to Israel in the time of the initial decree of Cyrus, then no one would have been able to harm them or subjugate them. There were enough Jews in the world at that point that their sheer numbers would have overwhelmed the Samaritans, they could have rebuilt the walls and Temple quickly, and they could have avoided much of the bloodshed under the later Seleucids.
“Come out of her my people.” It is a statement of reality–you can generally only be persecuted when you live in small pockets around the world–like the 1% of the pre-WWII German population whose passports were taken easily and whose voting rights and jobs were taken just as effortlessly. Of course, superior weaponry can change that–as we saw in Apartheid South-Africa where the minority terrorized the majority. In general, however, it holds true. As Gandhi taught the Indian people, there is strength in numbers, enough strength to drive out the oppressors.
“Come out of her my people.” Before WWII, in 1933, there were approximately 15.3 million Jews in the world, after WWII there were roughly 9 million Jews in the world, with just over half living in the Americas. In 2014, there were 13.9 million Jews worldwide–6.1 million of those living in Israel and 5.7 million living in America.
That’s right–there are fewer Jews now than there were in 1933, and anti-Semitism is rising again. I don’t blame them for not wanting to leave America, but I am increasingly wondering if they are supposed to go. We are the new commercial giant giving them religious freedom, we have made it comfortable to stay when they belong to the Land and the Land belongs to them. They need each other, the Land and the Jews. The Land of my King is good, so good, but too much of it lies undefended because God’s people have been spread out too thin in other nations. Too many Jews live undefended as well because they are spread out too thin among the nations. I am torn, I want them here because I love them and they bring blessings, but a growing part of me wants them to go home, because increasingly I feel a tug at my heart that they should be home in Israel–even though this is also their home. I fear for the days when this will not be their home anymore, may it never happen–when we will have to hide them and feed them and care for them at the cost of our own lives and the lives of our children. Already I see them being increasingly slandered among some cultish fringe leaders–but how long before the cultish fringe becomes the mainstream? Hitler was fringe once, and so was Stalin–fringe but charismatic. Hates burns brighter and brighter until the fuel runs out and it fizzles–our modern Google society has too much fictitious kindling out there right now to ignite the hatred of people who are quick to believe whatever fuels their contempt–as though people with webpages are automatically credible as long as what they say either outrages or appeals to us. People who don’t want to believe they can be deceived are easily distracted and fooled when told that someone else has already lied to them. In their offense they become easy pickings for con men and women.
