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Monday, December 7, 2020

Claiming Rights to Land: This Is My Land

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                

Moses bartered with the Egyptian Pharaoh to free his slaves at the age of 80 in the year 1311 BCE, and they got to Canaan 40 years later in about the year 1270 BCE. He was told to do this by G-d. The people he was freeing, some being his kinfolk, this stiff-necked people, were to live on the land he was to take them to.  

  King Saul of the tribe of Benjamin, son of Kish,  claimed the land as the Israelite nation sometime between  1270 and 1010 BCE;  after which David of Judah, son of Jesse,  became King and so did his son, Solomon.  

The land was attacked by the Romans in 70 CE when they burned down the capital, Jerusalem and it's 2nd Temple of King Solomon. Judah, the northern part of Israel, was 1,340 years old by 70 CE.   The people knew of their heritage and that it was G-d who wanted them to live in this land.  

Jews had gone through much grief before 70 CE in trying to hold onto their kingdom.  They had the experience of being attacked by the Assyrians in  722-721 BCE and lost about  10,000 of their best people to exile then, and their Assyrian enemy was replaced later by the Babylonian enemy by 586 BCE and   a great part of the population then was also exiled to Babylonia.  Then some returned by 538 BCE to join those who were able to remain.  

Jews have been able remain all this time in the land since 70 CE, not as a nation but living in their ancient cities such as Safed and Jerusalem.                                    


 By May 14, 1948 CE, they were able to announce their 2nd rebirth as a nation once more; a haven for Jews, rebirthed for Jews who have been without a country since 70 CE, 1,950 years of existence but rarely as a citizen of any country.  They've become the perfect blend of the East and the West.   Their  history is remembered in the plant, "Wandering Jew."  Jews are returning from all 4 corners of the world, something not only prophesized but expected and needed to happen.  

In 1620, a small sailing ship, the Mayflower, sailed for the east coast of North America with about 100 passengers, some being Pilgrims.  They landed in Plymouth Rock, to be later called Massachusetts.  By 1630, a fleet of ships also sailed there.  They  claimed the East coast as a country by 1776 and it  filled the whole part of the continent and continues to this day as the United States of America.  It  will be a young  245 years old next year.  

                                                   

 Judah's Jerusalem  was over 1,000 years older when it was burned by the Romans!  Can we imagine what it's like to live in a country that is 1300 years old?  England is a little older than the USA.  

The kingdom of England – with roughly the same borders as exist today – originated in the 10th century. It was created when the West Saxon kings extended their power over southern Britain.  That would be in the 900s. The Norman Conquest was in 1066.  The Conquest was 954 years ago. (The Norman conquest of England was the 11th-century invasion and occupation of England by an army made up of Normans, Bretons, Flemish, and men from other French provinces, all led by the Duke of Normandy, later styled, William the Conqueror.) People have changed since then but so has our technical advances.  Could the English leave England permanently?  As they have done so, we see their religion is not tied to England like it is for the Jewish people.  This shows the difference in attitudes towards a country.  

This was a rare group of people who sailed on the little Mayflower.  They were living in Holland but were immigrants from England who were angry because they were not allowed to practice their Christian religion in  a way slightly different from the established Episcopalian religion in that they studied the Old Testament and admired the Jews, a people that Christianity had said to have replaced in about Rome's 3rd meeting of establishing this new religion-started pretty much by an Emperor's mother, Helena. Then again, Episcopalians were a branch developed from Catholicism, Rome's first rendition of the religion, by one of the English kings.  These English Pilgrims thought they were also on a journey similar to the Jewish Exodus, coming to a new home. 

Woodie Guthrie felt so strongly about the USA that he wrote: 

This land is your land, and this land is my land
From the California, to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest, to the Gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and me  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxiMrvDbq3s

                                                

Jews could sing the same song only theirs would cover,. “On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram and said, ‘To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates.’” (Genesis 15:18). The ‘river of Egypt’ most likely refers to one of the tributaries of the Nile. The word in Hebrew ‘nahar’ denotes a large river and this is how early Aramaic translations along with Jewish commentaries identify the location (See 1 Chronicles 13:5). The Euphrates begins in Turkey and flows through Syria and Iraq before entering the Persian Gulf. The April 1920 League of Nations plan followed those directions pretty much.  

Both Christianity and Islam have copied much of their religion from Judaism, the mother of the two religions.  Yet both seem to have a hard time abiding this older religion, both feeling they have replaced her and she is no longer necessary.  This gives impetus to holding on to her all the more by her adherents, a religion established by the fact of the mother being Jewish and then so are her children.  

Hopefully the USA and other countries can see that after having a nation for so long, one does not forget it or want to forget it.  It's a part of the culture; of the prayers, and part of our ancient history.  Unlike many people, Jews do have a validated history which is what the "Old Testament" is; history of a people, of its wars, loves, errors, and happy existence.  Even digs by archeologists are proving that this history is correct.                                                     

 

Add 1,000 years onto the USA's life and then take away many of its population and see how they would feel about regaining their land, their New York City or Los Angeles.  They wouldn't give it up without a great fight.  For one's country usually stands for certain things, certain rights and ethics that others may not have accepted. 

                                                     


 
This is our claim to the land, Israel;  land of the Jews which is over 3,000 years old.  Can we fathom such an age, a length of time? This land is My Land.                                                

Today we see Armenia and Azerbaijan fighting over land, a little piece between them, and they've been fighting for  years.   Fighting broke out between the two regular armies of Armenia and Azerbaijan over a disputed territory on 27 September. The conflict spread rapidly. Urban areas have been heavily bombed and shelled, including Stepanakert, the largest city in Nagorno-Karabakh with a population of 55,000, and Ganja, the second-largest city in Azerbaijan, 100 km further east, which has a population of 350,000. Cluster munitions, on which HI obtained a ban under the Oslo Convention in 2008, have been used in Stepanakert. If the conflict continues to escalate, it could have disastrous humanitarian consequences for civilians.

Armenia has had Jews living there since Solomon's Temple was first destroyed by the Assyrians.  Ties between these Jews and those of the 2nd Temple destruction continued.  One of Herod's grandsons was Aristobulus, king of Little Armenia by Nero, while 2 other grandsons ruled Greater Armenia. Armenian Christians have lived in Jerusalem since the 5th century, and there is an Armenian quarter in the Old City.

 

Azerbaijan, their neighbor, is now divided between the Azerbaijan Republic and Iran.  Artaxerxes III settled Jewish prisoners in Hyrcania within the area of Azerbaijan in 342 BCE.  Jews lived in the town of Berdea in the 7th -10th centuries and in the 11th-12th centuries occupied important position.  Many were adherents of the pseudo-messiah ALROY.  They continued to flourish when the Mongols entered in the 13th century but after the latter embraced Islam, most of them apostatized.  

In 1926, there were in Azerbaijan some 19,000 Jews speaking a Persian dialect.  In 1979 there were 35,497 Jews living here. 

They are both old countries and fight for land they think is theirs.  Palestinians have not been on the land a long time.  Natives who had worked the land sold out to Jews who paid outlandishly high prices for it, as it was sacred to them.  We don't want this same situation of fighting over the land like what has been already going on for the past 72 years in an Israel-Palestine venture.   


Resource:

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia

https://hi-canada.org/en/news/armenia-azerbaijan-conflict-hi-assesses-needs-of-displaced-people?gclid=CjwKCAiAwrf-BRA9EiwAUWwKXq7mQ0MSmsrnnylp36CzIHPEdFOz4l35_d9p4j_Subt8ujc5PgRpxRoCTgwQAvD_BwE 

Tanakh, Stone Edition. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_conquest_of_England

Why The Jews?, by Dennis Prager & Joseph Telushkin, just in general-reading 


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