I have always thought of Israel’s exile as being a 70-year thing. I struggled to figure out how to count those 70 years (is it 605 to 536 or 586 to 516?), but the exile ended when the Israelites came back from Babylon and rebuilt their temple.<\/p>\n
I’ve changed my mind in the last few years as I understood Isaiah better. The exile certainly included a physical deportation from the land, but it was much more than that. The exile continued even until Jesus’s day. Though Jesus was born in the land of Israel, the people were still in a state of exile by virtue of (1) their lack of national sovereignty; (2) their estrangement from God; (3) the non-fulfillment of prophecies that describe the end of the exile.<\/p>\n
To give but one example, Jesus fulfilled Isaiah 7:14-25 by being the child born in a land in impoverished conditions. Instead of growing up in a Judean palace eating royal fare, he was raised in a rural agricultural village in Galilee.<\/p>\n
But the exile did not end with Jesus’s arrival, because the people did not return to the Lord. This is reflected, among other places, in Jesus’s lament over Jerusalem: <\/p>\n
\nO Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing. Look, your house is left to you desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord” (Matt 23:37-39).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
The exile is not over today. Though millions of Jews have returned to their homeland over the last one hundred years, they continue to be in exile. This is reflected not only in their continued rejection of their God (and even the religious would acknowledge this, though we would disagree on who all is guilty in that rejection), but also in Israel’s lack of peace. It’s true that Israel has “sovereignty” over its land, but it’s a limited sovereignty, limited by the nations around them still at war with them, and limited by the Arabs within that still are at war with them. They don’t have true sovereignty because their decisions aren’t truly free. As much as they don’t like it, in many ways they are subject to the U.S., the U.N., and the E.U.<\/p>\n
Anyway, my recent thoughts about these matters was stirred by a very interesting interview<\/a> with Israel’s Minister of Strategic Affairs. He said this last week:<\/p>\n
\nThis is an existential struggle \u2013 the War of Independence has not ended<\/strong>. From a historical perspective, all the wars we fought, from 1948 and even before the establishment of the state, up until now, are part of a War of Independence for the existence of a national home for the Jewish people after 2,000 years of exile.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
The people of Israel are still waiting for their independence, for their peace, for rest. Israelis may populate large portions of the Promised Land, but Israel is still in exile. <\/p>\n
If you ‘re interested in an insider’s perspective on the current state of the Arab-Israeli conflict, I recommend reading that interview<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have always thought of Israel’s exile as being a 70-year thing. I struggled to figure out how to count those 70 years (is it 605 to 536 or 586 to 516?), but the exile ended when the Israelites came back from Babylon and rebuilt their temple. I’ve changed my mind in the last few\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,25,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-isaiah","category-matthew","category-modern-middle-east"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1041"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1041\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}