Understanding Judah and Samaria (West Bank of Today)

Nadene Goldfoot                                                 

The Jewish Homeland promise was on both sides of the Jordan River.

After 2 years, the Brits gave all the land east of the Jordan to Abdullah, 2nd son to the sherif of Mecca.  He didn't stand a chance to be king there.  

Israel lost land east and then west of the Jordan River but being as horrible as the Six Day War was, in enabled them after winning to gain back land.  Did the world let them get land back?  The Oslo Accords changed all that.  Let's look at the history of why Judea and Samaria are so important to Jews.  

      King Saul was chosen by the prophet Samuel of 1100 century BCE, 1st King of Israel, son of Kish of the tribe of Benjamin, fighting against the Philistines, and the marauding Moabites, Ammonites and Arameans, and in his off hours eliminating witchcraft. He died on Mt. Gilboa with his 3 sons.    He laid the groundwork for national unity that proved effective in establishing a strong and independent Israelite monarchy.  Saul had fought people of what had later become Transjordan, or later, Jordan.  

                            

                                            The Tribe of Judah

                                                    

   King David, selected by the prophet Samuel,  was the youngest son of Jesse of the tribe of Judah, born in Bethlehem.  At 25, he became Saul's armor-bearer.  He became king( 1000-960 BCE) and also fought the Philistines, first making Hebron his capitol.  After being king for 8 years, he captured Jerusalem and made it the capital. They are 18.3 miles apart, with Jerusalem in Israel's Judea and Hebron lying in the West Bank (Hebron is a Palestinian city in the southern West Bank, 30 km south of Jerusalem. Nestled in the Judaean Mountains, it lies 930 meters above sea level ) Before Abraham, it belonged to the Hittites who are no more.  Abraham bought a plot of land, the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron for a place to bury Sarah and later himself and his descendants.  It was one of the 4 sacred towns to the Jews (Jerusalem, Tiberias, Safed and Hebron). 

                                                   

   King Solomon (961-920 BCE) was David's son by  Bathsheba. He was not a king of war but a king of peace as he first built the Temple.  After being king for 11 years, the Temple was finally finished.  It was in Jerusalem, the capital of Judah, or Judea as the Romans called it after occupying the city.  Israel's division into Israel and Judah came after Solomon's death.  It had been a bad period of Solomon raising high taxes on his people for building the Temple.  When he died, his son continued the taxes, so they took the opportunity then to split, and the northern tribes ceded from Judah.     

Solomon's Temple ensured  the central position of Jerusalem in the kingdom.  He had sumptuous buildings built to house his royal family and harem consisting of 1,000 wives and concubines.  Politically, Solomon rested on his father David's achievements.  The realm extended from Egypt to the Euphrates River where Abraham had lived in the city of Ur.  It was a creative period.  Solomon was known for his wisdom.  However, the forced labor connected with the extensive building program impoverished the country.  The Edomites and Arameans began to revolt and there was malcontent inside Israel over the high taxes.                                                        
General "Pompey the Great") stayed behind to make the area secure for Rome, including his siege of Jerusalem in 63 BCE.  He called Judah as Judaea in Latin or translated as Judea 

The kingdom of Israel had been invaded by the Assyrians previously in 721 BCE when they took away the 10 Tribes, later referred to as the 10 Lost tribes of Israel.   

                                  A hill in Judea 

The Kingdom of Judah was the southern part of 2 Kingdoms (Israel and Judah) , the division of which took place after King Solomon in 920 BCE had died.  Israel had divided into Israel and Judah for political reasons over taxes and labor.  They even were at war with each other for several years.  However, the city of Jerusalem was in Judah, which made it very important.  Jerusalem was the city of the Temple of Solomon of which all Israelites were expected to visit 3 times a year.  When the division occurred, the king of Israel at the time was not a member of the Davidic dynasty.  That king, Rehoboam (933-917 BCE)  went with Judah and Jerusalem.  He remained king from 930 to 910 BCE.  He was Solomon's son.  Israel's new king, Jeroboam (933-912), had built a wall which kept his citizens from reaching the Temple, and that wasn't all he did.  He built pagan temples at Bethel and Dan with a similar cult but centering round the symbols of golden calves.   The wall made it hard  for them  to visit the 1st Temple , so they easily slipped away from their religion founded by Moses. The Bible and Talmudic sources are violently hostile to Jeroboam who "sinned and caused Israel to sin."                     

                          Neve Ilan television studios in the Jerusalem corridor

Since 1967's 6 Day War, the Judean hills area called the Jerusalem Corridor and some of the foothills were incorporated in today's Israel.  During the 1947-48 war, the Jerusalem corridor was the only route for bringing supplies to besieged Jerusalem. In the Battle of Latrun, Jewish forces attempted to capture the former British police fort at Latrun, where Jordanian forces were stationed. The so-called Burma Road was built as an alternative. In October 1948, Israeli troops brought the area under their control during Operation Ha-Har. The Arab inhabitants fled their villages during the war. 

The rest of the Judean Hills went to the kingdom of Jordan.   The Judean Hills are the mountainous region of central Eretz Yisrael (Palestine).  They were fertile and populous in biblical days, but later after 70 CE neglected and suffered severely from soil erosion.   As of 1949, the mountainous, rocky region of the corridor was bare of trees. In the first decade of the State of Israel, a total of 35 agricultural settlements were established in the Jerusalem corridor by new immigrants from Yemen, Kurdistan, North Africa, Romania and Hungary. The JNF employed many of the newcomers in afforestation and land reclamation. Since then it has become one of the largest afforested regions in the country.                         

     Residents of Motza before 1899 in the Judean Hill country-side of Israel. 

Modern resettlement of the area began in 1894 by Jews with the founding of Motza, a rural settlement near Jerusalem.  Motza was a biblical town originally and belonged to the tribe of Benjamin, existing in 2nd Temple times.  After the destruction of the 2nd Temple, the Roman, Vespasian ordered 800 Roman legionnaires to settle at Motza, which was then known as Colonia Amasa.  The modern settlement was erected nearby and had a population in 1990 of 708. Motza, also Mozah or Motsa, is a neighbourhood on the western edge of West Jerusalem. It is located in the Judean Hills, 600 metres above sea level, connected to Jerusalem by the Jerusalem–Tel Aviv highway and the winding mountain road to Har Nof.

 From 1948 to 1967, only a small area of the Judean Hills of the Jerusalem Corridor and some of the foothills  were populated by Israelis, so went to Israel. Today, in addition to the Jerusalem – Tel Aviv highway (Highway 1), a number of additional routes lead to Jerusalem; route 443 covers the northern part of the corridor. Route 395 leads from Ein Kerem to the coast, via Ramat Raziel and Bet Shemesh, and continues south. Route 386 leads to the Ella Valley, via Bar Giora and Tzur Hadassa. A railway line is active in the corridor, next to the Sorek Stream, which is part of the historical Jaffa–Jerusalem railway.

                                             

                          Nebuchadnezzar King of Babylon
                           

      315 years after Solomon's death-Israel's Ancient History Part II 

Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon (605-562)  had a victory battle over the Assyrian-Egyptian alliance in 605 BCE and conquered all the lands from the Euphrates to the Egyptian frontier, including Judah.

Judah fought back with a revolt in 597 BCE.  Nebuchadnezzar dispatched contingents which captured Jerusalem, and replace

 the young king Jehoiachin with his own choice, which was Mattaniah.  After being crowned he changed his name to Zedekiah.  

Then he exiled 8,000 of the local aristocracy to Babylon.  8 years later, Zedekiah had had enough and he rebelled.  

This caused Nebuchadnezzar's  top aide, Nebuzaradan,  to invade Judah again and recapture Jerusalem in 586 BCE and this time they destroyed the Temple, laying waste the cities and exiling masses of the population.  Zedekiah was taken to Riblah, where Nebuchadnezzar had  Zedekiah's sons killed in front of Zedekiah.  After that, the killers put out his eyes and kept him in prison. In the end he was slain.  (II Kings 25; Jer.52).  

                 King Omri of Israel Who Founded His Dynasty

         Israel's Samaria:  the northern section of Original Israel                                                       

Samaria was a city founded in 880 BCE, 33 years after Solomon  died in 920 BCE. It happened after Jeroboam (933-912),  Solomon's superintendent of forced labor, became king and was followed by  5 more kings:   Kings Nadab (912-911BCE), Baasha (911-888 BCE), Elah (888-887 BCE), Zimri (887), and then Omri (887-876 BCE), the 5th king who made it happen.   

                                                         

King Omri: In the thirty-first year of Asa, king of Judah, Omri became king of Israel for twelve years after being king Elah's general. ; the first six of them he reigned in Tirzah. (1Kings 16:23) But Omri did what was evil in the Lord’s sight, more than any of his predecessors. In every way he imitated the sinful conduct of Jeroboam, son of Nebat, and the sin he had caused Israel to commit, thus provoking the Lord, the God of Israel, to anger by their idols. -1 Kings 16:25-26(NABRE)

Omri made it his capital of Israel.  Samaria was on a hill bought from Shemer.  The site is 7 miles NW of Shechem (Nablus) and was on an isolated elevation dominating a wide countryside. It occupied 25 acres..  Samaria withstood the siege of the Syrians but fell in 721 BCE to Sargon II of Assyria who resettled it with Cutheans.  They intermingled with the remnants of the former population, who were the ancestors of the Samaritans.  It remained as an administrative center in the Persian Period and became a Macedonian colony in 331 BCE.  John Hyrcanus took Samaria in 107 BCE and razed it.  It was restored by General Pompey of the Roman forces.   King Herod of Judah renamed it Sebaste which was a Greek name for Augusta, in honor of Augustus Caesar, and the name has been preserved in the modern Sabastiya.    Samaria decayed in Byzantine times and became a village in the Arab period.  The name is also applied to the entire northern region of the central highlands of Palestine, especially today where this and Judah were renamed by the state of Jordan as The West Bank.    

British politician Lord Arthur Balfour (1848 – 1930) points out a feature of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to Governor Sir Ronald Storrs during a visit to Jerusalem, April 9, 1925.  Topical Press Agency/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Along came The Balfour Declaration after World War I by Britain to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine.  On April 24, 1920, it was formally decided by the Supreme Council of the Principal Allied Powers at the conference in San Remo that Britain should administer Palestine with a 30 year mandate.  By July 24, 1922, this was finalized with the Prime Minister approval by the Council of the League of Nations meeting in London.  The draft read as "recognition to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine (name given to Israel by the Romans)  and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country." 

Article 25 of the mandate delimits the borders of the country, excluding Transjordan from Palestine.  The mandate ended on May 15, 1948, with the withdrawal of the British administration.

                                                   

                Abdullah got all the land east of the Jordan River.  In reality, it is actually "Palestine," inhabited by many Palestinians. 

                                                         

                            Transjordan Frontier Force

That's because Transjordan was created in 1921.Britain detached it from the area covered by the British Mandate for Palestine and made a separate emirate under Abdullah (1882-1951) 2nd son of Hussein, sherif of Mecca or king of Hejaz,  who renamed it the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in 1946.  Abdullah gave support to Britain during WWI. So did the Jews living in Palestine at the time, and so did Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952) 1st president of Israel who had been a chemist who created acetone-butyl which helped the Brits win the war.                                                

 Abdullah, the second son of Hussein ibn Ali, the ruler of the Hejaz, was educated in Istanbul in what was then the Ottoman Empire. Abdullah was born in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.  In 1915–16 he played a leading role in clandestine negotiations between the British in Egypt and his father that led to the proclamation (June 10, 1916) of the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans.

Abdullah negotiated with Weizmann in 1922, but invaded Israel in 1948 with the announcement of the state of Israel being born.  Abdullah was assassinated in Jerusalem at age 69 by the instance of the Mufti, haj Amin el-Husseini.                          

 Transjordan was the land east of the Jordan River.  This included the following biblical sites of which the Israelites had defeated the more ancient northern pagan kingdoms and the cattle-keeping tribes of Reuben, Gad, and half of Manasseh of the 12 tribes of Jacob had established themselves in these places.  

1.  GOLAN-Bashan and Hauran, plateau bordered by Mt. Hauran to Yarmuk River

2. GILEAD-from Yarmuk and the Jabbok, mountainous area, wooded

3. AMMON-between the Jabbok and Arnon

4. MOAB-between Arnon and Zered, a high plateau

5. EDOM'S MOUNTAINS (MT.SEIR) south of Zered to Gulf of Elath.  

                                                     

  Abdullah's grandson is King Abdullah II.  He is married to a Palestinian, Queen Rania.  Rania Al-Abdullah is the queen consort of Jordan. The daughter of a Palestinian couple, her father being from Tulkarm in the West Bank, she was born in Kuwait. She received her bachelor's degree in business at The American University in Cairo. 

Resource:

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judea#:~:text=The%20name%20Judea%20is%20a,the%20ancient%20Kingdom%20of%20Judah.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Abdullah-I