Behold He that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.

(Psalm 121:4)

S. L. HALE

THE STATE OF ISRAEL was born on the 14th May, 1948. Birth-pangs which had accompanied the delivery of the infant were very severe. For some thirty years the Jews had been encouraged by the Balfour Declaration to establish a National Home in Palestine. But that period had witnessed not only the recurring waves of violent opposition by the Arabs but also the holocaust of Nazi-dominated Europe. Attempts were made to strangle the infant at birth but it proved to be a sturdy, virile, and lusty child, and it survived. The birth was confirmed by both America and Russia, and at the age of one year the State was accepted as a member of the United Nations Organisation.

The period of human gestation is reckoned as 280 days. Following the principle of a day for a year seen in Numbers 14 and Ezekiel 4, was the period of gestation for national Israel 280 years? Put another way, were there any movements around 1668 which can be said to have started the long process which ended with the birth of the State in 1948?

The Jewish events of A.D. 70 and A.D. 135 are well-known. The nation was overturned, the city of Jerusalem and its temple were destroyed and replaced by a Roman city and a pagan temple, and the Jews were either killed or driven out of their country. Of those first-century events Milman in the nineteenth century wrote, “The political existence of the Jewish nation was annihilated; it was never again reckoned as one of the states or kingdoms of the world”. Driven out of their land the Jews spread throughout the Roman Empire. Persecutions brought them calamity after calamity. They became the victims of many a superstitious people. They were falsely accused of all sorts of heinous crimes. They became the target of Christendom’s wrath. No one seemed to want them. Country after country expelled them when they tried to find refuge within their borders. They were expelled from England in 1290, from France in 1395, from Spain in 1492, from Portugal in 1498. There were numerous expulsions from other countries and cities. Continued harassment by the Church, determined to convert them, drove many of them from Western Europe to Poland and to Russia only to find the same recurring opposition and persecutions. In many towns they were segregated into specified quarters. One such area in Venice in 1516 had been an iron-foundry, a “getto”. This led to these Jewish quarters becoming known as ghettos, which under the Papal Bull of 1555 became enforced places for Jewish communities. The idea spread. In Germany, in Poland, and in Russia the Jews were forced into remaining a separate people.

In the hearts of many of those scattered yet separate people was the hope that the nation would eventually be restored to Palestine. But for how long could such a people hold on to a hope like this in face of all the antagonism they had to contend with? What were the chances of a return? Would the miracle ever happen? To bring about such a development there was need for a unifying process, but how could that be achieved when in different countries they were penned into their quarters like animals? It is a remarkable thing that while they were being persecuted, tortured, and expelled from Christian Spain and Portugal in the 1490’s they received a warm welcome from countries of the Mohammedan faith. As one historian says, “In no country were the exiles from Spain and Portugal received with greater willingness than in the Ottoman empire, then on its course of greatest expansion. . . . In these vast domains the Jew could drop the mask of enforced adherence to a religion that was not his, and be himself again. The Turks demanded of their subjects the surrender neither of their nationality nor of their religion. The poll-tax, levied on all non-Mohammedans (non-believers) was not oppressive; the road was open to all to rise to the highest position in the state”. As a result of this liberal treatment Jewish communities grew in various parts of the Ottoman empire. In Constantinople there were 30,000 Jews; in Saloniki they outnumbered the non-Jews and the city became known as a “mother-city in Israel”. At that time Palestine was within the Ottoman empire. Some Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal had gone there to join the Jews already in the land and small communities were to be found in Jerusalem, Safed, and Tiberias. With the encouragement of the Turks there were plans to make Tiberias a manufacturing centre, and an invitation was sent to all Jews to move into the colony. But the venture failed for various reasons.

With the return of the Jews to the land (under the blessing of the occupying power) seeming to become a reality there was a revival of interest in the concept of the Messiah. This interest was stimulated from time to time by Jewish individuals claiming to be Messiah or Elijah, the Messiah’s forerunner. But these false Messiahs rose and they fell. Let down by their own people, the victims once again of harsh, repressive, violent, opposition in the countries of Europe the Jews were faced with a great disappointment and a dashing of their hopes that the age-old dream of a return to Palestine was about to be realised. Two developments in the middle of the 17th century, however, showed that the idea of a Messianic kingdom was being revived. In England there was a group of non-Jews known as the Fifth-Monarchy people. Basing their convictions upon the prophecies of Daniel they believed that four great world empires would be followed by the coming of Messiah’s millennium which would come into being with the return of the Jews to Palestine in 1666. Furthermore, in some Jewish circles and stemming from cabbalistic thinking there was a firm belief that the Messiah would come in 1648. The ground was being prepared for important developments.

Born into a family of Jews who had been exiled from Spain and had settled in Smyrna within the Ottoman empire was a child who was to have a big effect upon the Messianic concept. Of him it is written, “The man who made a well-nigh irresistible appeal with his Messianic pretensions was Sabbatai Zevi... The advent of the year of grace 1648, Sabbatai marked by breaking with the age-long tradition and pronouncing the ‘Ineffable Name’. This signified that the power of the Godhead, impaired as it were by reason of human sin and the low estate of the Jewish people, had been restored and that the perfect moral order of the Messianic era had set in”. Sabbatai was ably assisted in his pretensions by one Nathan who claimed to be the prophet Elijah with the task of preparing the way for the Messiah; part of his message was that within just over a year Messiah would appear in glory, conquer Turkey peacefully, and set up his kingdom. There was great joy and rejoicing in many Jewish hearts. Those Jews who were in Palestine were in ecstasy. Agents of commercial firms trading with the Middle East took the reports back to Europe. “Jewish communities the world over were flooded with messages concerning the appearance of Messiah and his wonderful doings”. In Hamburg, elders of the Jews “led in the jubilant dances in the synagogues, the young men dressed in their best garments and wearing wide green sashes. Many sold all their possessions so as to be ready when the call came to leave the Dispersion for the Holy Land”. Yet it all collapsed. After being arrested by the Turkish government, Sabbatai announced that “he had turned Moslem in obedience to the command of God”. There was considerable shock and consternation throughout Jewry. Sabbatai died in 1676.

But the seed had been sown, for there was something about Jewish acceptance of this false Messiah which differed from earlier anticipations. It had come at a time when some Jews and non-Jews believed that in the Divine arrangement the time was ripe for the coming of Messiah and the Millennium. Sabbatai made a more universal appeal than had previous false claimants. Some Jews were living in Palestine, others were free to return, and many thousands lived within the Ottoman empire, and if they were not actually in Palestine they were not far away. The impact of Sabbatai was probably stronger than any such movement since A.D. 135 and Bar Kokhba for the episode “stirred the Jewish soul to its depths and roused the mass to penitence and religious fervour”. It was an event pregnant with possibilities.

In the womb of a woman with child quickening occurs about the eighteenth week. This is 126 days, or 126 years on the day-for-a-year principle. Is it just a coincidence that from 1666 it was 126 years to the French Revolution which saw the real beginning of Jewish emancipation? During this period of 126 years the Messianic hope was kept alive. One historian says, “The death of the would-be redeemer (Sabbatai) was as little of an obstacle to his followers as his apostasy had been in his life time”. One of these followers sustained hopes by saying that Sabbatai was not dead, but that he had been spirited away and would return after forty-five years to accomplish the redemption. Another man claiming to be Messiah rose up and said that he was the one whose coming Sabbatai had proclaimed. The sect which grew up around him met in secret but the Sabbatian ideas were again carried into Europe. Years later yet another false Messiah appeared claiming that he was the reincarnation of Sabbatai and his successors. When, because of his misdeeds, he was imprisoned his followers took this to be part proof that he was what he claimed to be. The hopes of a return to Palestine and the appearance of the promised Messiah who would establish the Millennium were therefore in the minds of world Jewry at the time of Sabbatai and his successors, and these hopes had survived in some form or other up to the time of the French Revolution. That the hopes were fed by false messiahs and that those who accepted them were in unbelief of the true Messiah who had been crucified does not alter the fact that the movement for the return to the Land had started. And let it be noted that the great return to the Land since 1945 has been a return in unbelief of true Messiah. But the return is the work of God.

The French Revolution of 1789/1815 was a notable landmark in Jewish as well as world history. In September 1791 the French Assembly voted for the emancipation of the Jews. This was the real beginning of the emancipation of European Jewry—a similar movement in America was already under way under the Constitution drawn up in 1790 and the First Amendment of 1791. In 1806/7 Napoleon asked for a “Jewish States-General” to be called and the “Great Sanhedrin” to be convoked. With his conquests, many other Jews outside France were brought under his control. The emancipation within France was followed by other countries within and outside the Napoleonic empire, and history records that it took place in the Netherlands in 1793, in Belgium in 1830, in Sweden in 1848, in Denmark and Greece in 1849, in Switzerland in 1874. In Italy, emancipation came in stages, Tuscany and Lombardy in 1859, Southern Italy in 1861, Venice in 1866, and Rome in 1870. In England the process of emancipation was spread over many years. In the House of Lords there was considerable opposition to this during the first half of the nineteenth century but gradually this diminished. The taking of the Christian oath was a stumbling block but in time this was overcome. A Jew became a British Peer in 1885. Earlier than this, in 1868 and again in 1874, Benjamin Disraeli a Jew who had been baptised as a Christian at the age of 13 and who had entered Parliament in 1837 became Prime Minister. The quickening of Jewish aspirations showed very clearly that a great development was on the way. The years that followed the French Revolution and the freedom which it eventually brought to very many Jews was followed by the strengthening of the desire to return to Palestine. Jewish hopes were crystallised by the Zionist Conference of 1897, were tremendously uplifted by the liberation of Jerusalem in 1917, were made a matter of great urgency by the Nazi holocaust, and were realised in the birth of the State in 1948.

According to the law of Moses (Lev. 12) a woman who had given birth to a male child was unclean for forty days. This period was divided into two parts, seven days before the circumcision of the child on the eighth day followed by a further thirty-three. During this time the mother was not to enter the sanctuary, and when the forty days had ended she was required to make the appropriate offering. Is there a parallel here with the birth of the nation? Is it now unclean? Will it be purified in 1988? And was the year 1956, the eighth of the newborn State a year of “circumcision”? Should not the conquest of Sinai in that year have reminded the Jews that God has not cast away His people? Sinai, with all its memories of redemption, of Moses, of the Law, and of the long wilderness journey —what emotions did this arouse in the hearts of the people of the State, and indeed of Jews throughout the world? The fact that later they had to cede the conquered territory is an indication that the State is not yet fully grown. It has not yet been purified. The prophet Ezekiel describes this process which the nation has yet to undergo. In chapter 20 we are told that God will gather the Jewish people out of the countries of their dispersion (v. 34), will bring them into the wilderness of the peoples (v. 35), will then purge and purify them (v. 38), after which the nation will make acceptable offerings to Him and be filled with remorse for all their iniquities. Only then will they be able to enter into the sanctuary.

In chapter four of the same prophecy are two time periods which have long puzzled students. The prophet was commanded to lie upon his left side to bear symbolically the sins of Israel, and on his right side for those of Judah. The time period for Judah is 40 days. There is a difference of opinion about the period for Israel. The AV, following the Hebrew reading, gives 390 days, but some modern versions following the Greek of the LXX give 190. The day-for-a-year principle applies in both cases. In applying these periods to the end of the Babylonian captivity, 190 is much easier than 390. The same terminating point for the 40 and the 190 seems to be demanded, and it is probable that the 70 years captivity of Jeremiah 25:11 also ends at the same time. Do these time periods also have a latter-day application? If the terminating point is the same as for the cleansing and purification mentioned in the preceding paragraph, the 190 began during the French Revolution, the 70 in 1918 immediately after the publication of the Balfour Declaration, and the 40 in 1948.

The seed sown, the hopes quickened, the child born and circumcised, the woman cleansed and allowed to enter the sanctuary. Is it all too fanciful? Or is it striking confirmation that we are on the verge of tremendous developments involving the nation of whom God once said, “Israel is My son, even my firstborn”?