Lebanon's Phoenician Heritage and Connection of Jezebel to King Solomon With Today's Israel Connection

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                

The cedar of Lebanon, also known as Lebanon cedar, is a species of tall coniferous trees of 100-130' tall, characterized by large, irregularly shaped heads with spreading branches. It belongs to the Cedrus genus of the Pinaceae family. This cedar species typically grows in the mountainous regions of the Eastern Mediterranean. In Middle Eastern culture, it has great historical and religious significance and has been cited several times in ancient literature.      

                                                     

                                                           

The Lebanese were once part of the Phoenicians who were an ancient people of Syria, and lived along the Syrian-Palestinian coast in Beirut, Sidon, Tyre.                                         

Tyre was the closest port to Israel. It was a city founded in the 3rd millennium BCE on an island 1.5 miles off the shore of Phoenicia.  It profited from a double harbor and was the rival of Sidon.  Hiram of  Tyre had good relations with King Solomon.  The 2 kings jointly exploited the commerce between Elath and Ophir via the Red Sea.  As a result of a marriage of the Tyrian princess Jezebel to  Israel's King Ahab, the religious and cultural influence of Tyre penetrated to Israel and even to Judah.  In Assyrian and Babylonian times, Tyre denounced by Ezekiel (ch 27), suffered a series of sieges and in 332 BCE, was captured by Alexander the Great.  Under the Romans, Tyre, which had been endowed with a temple by Herod, was a center of commerce and purple dyeing, and its Jewish population included rabbis.  The Palestinian Gaonate was transferred to Tyre. after 1071.  Benjamin of Tudela in about 1170 found there about 500 scholarly Jews, some owning ships, others engaged in glass-manufacture.  Tyire was held by the crusaders in 1124 to 1291, but subsequently declined and was in 1973 a small lLebanese port with a population of 10,000.                     

Sidon was an ancient Syrian city, now in Lebanon and was the capital of the Phoenicians who were the Sidonians in the Bible.  Jezebel was from Sidon. Sidon was occupied by the Assyrians, subject to Persians and  captured by Alexander the Great. Then it fell to the Romans and lost its independence. No Jews lived here.                     

                          Israel, Lebanon start maritime border

Naqoura today is a small city in southern Lebanon. Since March 23, 1978, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon has been headquartered in Naqoura.  Sidon, known locally as Sayda or Saida, is the third-largest city in Lebanon.  In 1881, the PEF's Survey of Western Palestine (SWP) described it: "A village, built of stone, containing about 250 Moslems, situated on low hills by sea-coast. Gardens of olives, palms, pomegranates, figs, and arable land ; brushwood to the east. Two springs with plentiful supply of water.

                                                                        

Beirut (Beyrouth) is still the capital of the republic of Lebanon.  The Jewish settlement is thought to be ancient, for the town received benefactions from Herod, King of Judea (73-4 BCE). There was a synagogue in the 6th century but no evidence of a large community.  By the 12th century, only 50 Jewish families lived there.  The community was renewed on a small scale with the arrival of exiles from Spain after 1492.  The number of Jews living there grew only at the end of the 19th century.  There were 6,000 Jews in 1940 of mainly the middle class, and well-organized.  After 1948, many who fled from Syria settled in Beirut.  Many left subsequent to the 1967 six-Day War with a population by 1975 of about 1,000 Jews, most of whom left during the Civil War:  by 1990 only about 100 remained. 

                                                                       

Tripoli  is the largest city in northern Lebanon and the second-largest city in the country. Situated 85 kilometers north of the capital Beirut, it is the capital of the North Governorate and the Tripoli District. The history of Tripoli dates back at least to the 14th century BCE. it had the largest Crusader fortress in Lebanon, the Citadel of Raymond de Saint-Gilles, and it has the second highest concentration of Mamluk architecture after Cairo. Evidently Jews did not settle that far north and did not live there.  With the formation of Lebanon and the 1948 breakup of the Syrian–Lebanese customs union, Tripoli, once on par in economic and commercial importance to Beirut, was cut off from its traditional trade relations with the Syrian hinterland and therefore declined in relative prosperity

 At certain past periods, Lebanon expanded north toward the later Antioch and south to the Carmel and even to Jaffa.  Their language was similar to Hebrew.  Their script used in writing was the same used by the Israelites.                                     

We first heard of Lebanon in the Bible;  King Solomon of Israel (961-920 BCE) dealt with the Hiram, king of Tyre, and bought their cedar trees for use in building the Temple in Jerusalem. Hiram   had extended his kingdom to Cyprus and Libya and maintained friendly relations with Solomon's father, King David, to whom he sent wood and craftsmen for his palace.  Then he contributed wood, gold, and craftsmen to Solomon's Temple and residences as well as sailors to his Red Sea fleet, receiving in exchange wheat, oil and and 20 Galilean cities.                                               

                                    Ethbaal, King of Tyre (a city-state)

Ithobaal I was a king of Tyre who founded a new dynasty. During his reign, Tyre expanded its power on the mainland, making all of Phoenicia its territory as far north as Beirut, including Sidon, and even a part of the island of Cyprus. At the same time, Tyre also built new overseas colonies: Botrys (now Batrun) near Byblos, and Auza in Libya.                                  

Jezebel, daughter of the king of Sidon, Ethbaal and her husband, Ahab, King of Israel;   Meeting Elijah in Naboth's Vineyard Giclee. Print by Sir Frank Dicksee.  .Jezebel was very vindictive, and had control over King Ahab(876-853) -son of King Omri. kings of Israel.   She introduced the idol-god Baal into Israel, and that was something taboo in Israel.   According to the Biblical narrative, Jezebel, along with her husband, instituted the worship of Baal and Asherah on a national scale. In addition, she violently purged the prophets of Yahweh from Israel, damaging the reputation of the Omride dynasty. For these offences, the Omride dynasty was annihilated, with Jezebel herself suffering the gruesome death of defenestration. Omri was the 7th king after Solomon, but was not related to Solomon.   

The wedding ceremony of Ahab and Jezebel is recorded, according to Near Eastern scholar Charles R. Krahmalkov, in Psalm 45. This marriage was the culmination of the friendly relations existing between Israel and Phoenicia during Omri's reign, and possibly cemented important political designs of Ahab. Jezebel, like the foreign wives of Solomon, required facilities for carrying on her form of worship, so Ahab made a Baalist altar in the house of Baal, which he had built in Samaria. Geoffrey Bromiley points out that it was Phoenician practice to install a royal woman as a priestess of Astarte, so thus she would have a more active role in temple and palace relations than was customary in the Hebrew monarchy 

The Phoenician, Ethbaal of Sidon's close cooperation with King Omri of Israel (887-876 BCE)  The Jewish population there was ancient.  Back then there were no borders and people were migratory, moving from Lebanon to Syria to Israel's lands.   The Torah  recorded the mountains of Lebanon, famed for their cedar trees which was the western part of these mountains being known as Lebanon, the eastern as Anti-Lebanon of which Mt. Hermon marks the southern extremity.  

What Jewish population there was by 1992 congregated mainly in Beirut, but had had communities in Tripoli, Tyre, and Sidon.  Most of them engaged in commerce.  

During the Israel War of Independence from 1947-1949, when Lebanese forces invaded Israel, some discriminatory regulations were imposed on the Jews but removed after the fighting ceased.  Lebanon had the reputation of being the Paris of the Middle East.  Arabs went there on holiday.  By 1944 there were 6,261 Jews living in Lebanon.  their numbers were augmented after 1948 by Jews from Syria, and the community in 1964 was estimated at 5,,00 to 7,000 population.   

Many Palestinians fled to Lebanon because of the war of 1948.   As of 2017 between 174,000 and 450,000 Palestinian refugees live in Lebanon with about half in refugee camps (although these are often decades old and resemble neighborhoods). Palestinians often cannot obtain Lebanese citizenship or even Lebanese identity cards and are legally barred from owning property or performing certain occupations (including law, medicine, and engineering). According to Human Rights Watch, Palestinian refugees in Lebanon live in "appalling social and economic conditions."

After 1967's Six Day War when Israel won over an attack of many Arab countries, the Jewish community in Lebanon diminished.  Israel was attacked again on October 6, 1973, on the most holy day of the year for Jews, Yom Kippur, a day of fasting and praying in the synagogues.   Most of the 1,000 who remained by 1975  left during the Civil War and by 1990, less than 100 remained. 

Lebanon is  a parliamentary democracy that includes confessionalism, in which high-ranking offices are reserved for members of specific religious groups. The President, for example, has to be a Maronite Christian, the Prime Minister a Sunni Muslim, the Speaker of the Parliament a Shi’a Muslim, the Deputy Prime Minister and the Deputy Speaker of Parliament Eastern Orthodox. This system is intended to deter sectarian conflict and to represent fairly the demographic distribution of the 18 recognized religious groups in government. It's a mess now.  Since the assassination of the Christian president, things have deteriorated.  

The Lebanese Civil War (13 April 1975 – 13 October 1990, Arabic: الحرب الأهلية اللبنانية‎, romanized: Al-Ḥarb al-Ahliyyah al-Libnāniyyah) was a multifaceted civil war in Lebanon resulting in an estimated 120,000 fatalities. There was also an exodus of almost one million people from Lebanon as a result of the war.

                                                              

         Elected president on 23 August 1982, assassinated 14 September, 1982

Bachir Pierre Gemayel  10 November 1947 – 14 September 1982) was a Lebanese militia commander who led the Lebanese Forces, the military wing of the Kataeb Party in the Lebanese Civil War and was elected President of Lebanon in 1982.

In 1982, the PLO attacks from Lebanon on Israel led to an Israeli invasion, aiming to support Lebanese forces in driving out the PLO. A multinational force of American, French and Italian contingents (joined in 1983 by a British contingent) were deployed in Beirut after the Israeli siege of the city, to supervise the evacuation of the PLO. The civil war re-emerged in September 1982 after the assassination of Lebanese President Bashir Gemayel, an Israeli ally, and subsequent fighting continued. During this time a number of sectarian massacres occurred, such as in Sabra and Shatila, and in several refugee camps. The multinational force was withdrawn in the spring of 1984, following a devastating bombing attack during the previous year.  Gemayel had planned to use the IDF to push the Syrian Army out of Lebanon and then use his relations with the Americans to pressure the Israelis into withdrawing from Lebanese territory. On 14 September 1982, Gemayel was addressing fellow Phalangists at their headquarters in Achrafieh for the last time as their leader and for the last time as commander of the Lebanese Forces. At 4:10 PM, a bomb was detonated, killing Gemayel and 26 other Phalange politicians. The PLO had killed them.                             

I was living in Tzfat (Safed) at this time, northern Israel.  The Maronite Major, Saad Hadad and his men, would patrol the borders between Lebanon and Israel and when he needed it, came to Israel for his R&R, and especially to the Army hospital in Haifa.  He had an arrangement with Israel for aid of his family members if needed.  

On August 5, 2021, Israel had its first air strike of Lebanon after 15 years.  It happened after Lebanon hit Israel with a rocket attack.  Lebanon has lost all control of its government which is infiltrated with Russians and Iranians these days.  "Israeli jets struck “terrorist targets’ in the Marjayoun region of South Lebanon early Thursday, Aug. 5, in retaliation for a three-rocket salvo against the Israeli Galilee town of Kiryat Shemona a day earlier. "I had been in Kiryat Shemona several times from 1980-1985.  That had a wonderful department store that Safed did not have.  

                                               

Michel Naim Aoun is a Lebanese politician who serves as the President of Lebanon since 31 October 2016. Born in Haret Hreik to a Maronite Christian family, Aoun joined the Military Academy in 1955 and graduated as an artillery officer in the Lebanese Army.

The population of Lebanon in 2011 was 4,196,453 and was 60% Muslim.  59 percent of Lebanese are Muslims, evenly divided between Sunni and Shiite. 33 percent are Christians, including 1 percent evangelicals. Members of the country’s small Druze minority, a secretive monotheistic faith, sometimes persecute Christians.

Various Islamic extremist groups, including Hezbollah in the south and other Shiite-majority regions, actively persecute Christians. Sunni extremist cells affiliated with the self-proclaimed Islamic State (ISIS), al-Qaida and other groups are active near the Syrian border. Christians are also persecuted by their tribes and families.

They were the 35th state in size of Muslim -majority countries. By 2019 the population was 6.856 million.   Up-to-date on Corona Virus:  Lebanon has had 7,926 deaths so far.  

Resource:

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

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripoli,_Lebanon

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

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

https://www.ancient-origins.net/history-famous-people/jezebel-revealing-slander-virgin-baal-princess-tyre-and-queen-israel-008762

https://www.coniferousforest.com/cedar-tree-lebanon.htm

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

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