The Israeli People: The Genealogy Of Exodus

The history of Jews in host cities often depict a story of success or of failure when it comes to relations between the Jews and the Christians in Europe. Historian Jonathan Elukin, author of Living Together, Living Apart, presents the integration as a success process with rare, and special cases, of failure. On the other side of the spectrum is historian Raymond P. Scheindlin. Scheindlin’s novel, A Short History of the Jewish People, presents many cases of integration between the Christians and Jews that led to massacres and brutal endings for the Jewish community. There are many monumental events that take place during the long span of time that oversees European Jewish history, and both historians study and evaluate the events, however, they do so through different lenses.

For ages the Jewish population did not have a place to call home. They had been wandering around deserts, were once slaves in Egypt, but didn’t have any land to their name. Following the Holocaust, after many Jews had been persecuted by Hitler and the Nazis, a good portion of the overall amount of Jews in the world let alone Europe had been exterminated. As a result, Harry Truman and the UN suggested Israel, a homeland for the Jews. Tensions had been growing throughout the beginning of the 20th Century regarding the Palestinian area in the Middle East. This area was off to the side of Asia, near Africa. When the Jews and Arabs were offered part of this land, war broke out and still continues today. Even though a war happened as a result

About 500 years after the death of Abraham, his descendants through Isaac were living in Egypt as slaves. Genesis 37 to 50 tells the story of how this came about. The 10 oldest sons of Abraham's grandson Jacob disliked their younger brother Joseph so much that they found a way to sell him to traders who in turn sold him to an Egyptian officer as a slave. In his new land, Joseph went through a series of ups and downs and eventually became the prime minister of Egypt, the highest official under the king. God enabled Joseph to foresee an approaching time of famine, and used him to store up food and then distribute it during the famine. His political position made it possible for him to settle his father's family in Egypt's most fertile territory. Here they prospered for many years. However, the time came when the leaders of Egypt began to view the rapidly growing Israelite community as a threat. As a result, they made slaves of the Israelites, treating them with ever-increasing harshness. Finally, desperate because the descendants of Jacob continued to multiply, they issued an order that all their male babies be destroyed at birth. The first 12 chapters of Exodus tell the story of how the Lord responded to the cries of His people. He miraculously provided Moses to be their leader, sent 10 plagues on the Egyptians, helped the Israelites celebrate their first Passover, and led them out of the land of bondage. It appears that as they left for Canaan, they had no

The Israelite civilization dates back to between 1300 and 1200 BCE when they settled in Canaan from Mesopotamia. This was considered their homeland. The Israelites developed from the Cannanites, since their civilizations began together along with the Jebusites. They faced a lot of struggles, but after migrating to Egypt, and being separated into two kingdoms, they kept the faith that they would someday return to their homeland. The greatest achievements of the Israelites was their architecture, monotheistic religion, Ten Commandments, and their military. However, they were not enough to save the civilization. They fell due to the decline in leadership within the civilization, and attacks and conquest from the Assyrians and Babylonians.

The Jewish religion makes Israel’s culture in 722 B.C. - 540 B.C. distinctive. Israel’s religion is important in the fact that it started the Catholic culture. Though most Christians do not do the same things the Jews did back then, the bases for their beliefs and ideas came from the Jews. The Israelites’ way of life was influenced by their religion. They maintained their faith even when they were being exiled. Their work, customs, laws, and other things were all influenced by their Jewish religion. The geography of Southern Israel was also important in the way that the location affected their way of life and work. These folkways and work are important since their religion influenced them. Religion was their structure of life.

Throughout his life, Jacob lived for himself, lying and cheating through most of it, until he had a fate changing wrestling match with a mysterious Man one night when he was preparing to face his brother Esau. The Man fought with Jacob all night until day-break, and when He saw that this was going nowhere, he threw Jacob’s hip out of joint with a single touch. He commands that Jacob let Him go, but Jacob holds onto Him and refused to release Him until He blesses him, because by that point, he knew that this Man was of God. The Man does, and in the process, renames the trickster as Israel, or contended with God. He promises Israel that he will make his descendants vast in number, and then departs from the now crippled

The Israelites are the primary focus of the stories in the Old Testament, but just who were the Israelites and where did they come from? In the Hebrew Bible, the term "Israelites" refers to the direct descendants of any of the sons of the patriarch Jacob, or of the people called Israel,

Esau is the elder twin brother of Jacob and were the sons of Isaac and Rebekah. They were also the grandsons of Abraham and Sarah. The book of Genesis, “identifies Isaac as God’s chosen son of the promise as well as Isaac’s youngest son Jacob.” (Towns, 1996) The theme of dishonesty happens repeatedly through the course of Jacob’s life. Jacob deceives his father Isaac and took the blessing from under his Brother Esau’s nose. Jacob departed from his home to a town named Haran, which was his mother’s ancestral home. Jacob then married Leah and Rachael, which produce twelve children. God came to Jacob in a dream and revealed the angelic stairs, which was perceive as gate of heaven, in the eyes of Jacob. From that point on Jacob vowed

Ancient Israelites from the Patriarchs to after the Romans had a different religious practice of worshipping to what happens in modern-day Jewish communities. During the age of the patriarchs, a household leader, particularly the father, would build a place to worship God and would also be the one to offer sacrificial purposes. (Frigge 203) During the time of David and Solomon, worshipping in high places became more popular instead. (Frigge 203) When King Josiah of Judah came into power, the high places were destroyed so the Israelites prayed at the Jerusalem Temple. (Frigge 203) During the Babylonian exile, the temple was also destroyed, so, after the Israelites rebuilt the temple recalling it the Second Temple. When Jesus was born, the sacrificial

This historical path in which the Israelites had to endure taught them to fully trust in God and to always have faith in God. During this historical path, one can also learn a theological message behind the lives of the Israelites as one reads the book of Joshua. Just to take a step back a book in the Bible Deuteronomy one can read that the Israelites would complain about anything that they could think of, they would rebel against the Lord, and they would worship idol gods. Since God is so grateful and forgiving, God did not turn his back on his chosen generation. Leading the reader to Joshua, God had to do some drastic things to his people such as allow the Israelites to wander in the wilderness for forty years, but God was still with them

Israelites - the sons of Israel - the tribes that descended from the biblical Jacob. The term Israelites is usually used to describe the people when they were a loose confederation of tribes and before organizing into the kingdoms of Israel and

During World War II, millions of Jews fled from Germany to escape the brutality of Adolf Hitler. A Zionist movement established that all Jewish refugees were to flee to Palestine, a concept founded by The Jewish State, by Dr. Theodore Herzl, in order to unite all Jews in one holy state. The British were convinced in 1917 by Chaim Weizmann that all Jews needed their own territory in Palestine, and in the early 1920s, the British were given a mandate over Palestine by the League of Nations. Palestinians felt threatened by the rise in Jewish presence in their state, causing widespread fighting in order to expel Jews from the Arabians’ sacred Palestinian land. Ben-Gurion (also known as a member to the World Zionist Congress) was leader of the Jewish peoples in 1947, whereas there was no single leader of the Arabs, there were several influential figures to the cause: Haj Amin el-Husseini – grand mufti of Jerusalem, Azzam Pasha – secretary-general of the Arab League, King Abdullah of Transjordan – only leader open to a Arab-Jewish compromise, and Glubb Pasha – commander of the British-trained Arab Legion.

when we compare literature of the ancient Near East with the Bible, we will try to recover aspects of the ancient cognitive environment that may help us understand the Israelite perspective a little better (Walton, p.22). He further says that by catching a glimpse of how they thought about themselves and their world, we sometimes discover ways that the Israelites would have thought that differ totally from how we think. He provides a few examples. One that gives me new insight is about building tower of Babel which I presume is about human getting into the heavens. I am surprised to learn that background study allows interpreters to know that the ziggurats of

As will be evident when I proceed with the examination of Gordon’s essays, one of the main themes is the establishment of Jewish group identity; the negative diasporic identity Gordon creates is essential to compliment the positive future identity of the Jewish people. Following the definition of Fredrik Barth, group identity is created through shared fundamental cultural values and entails a membership that identifies themselves as members and which is identified by others as members. Group identity emerges when a group of people shares a common culture and this culture distinctly differs from the culture of other groups. Cultural features can be material such as dress, language, shape of house, or be based on basic values like standard of morality or excellence of achievement (Barth: 10-11). It is significant for identity creation, that while certain features are considered unifying, others are ignored. The features considered important for the self-identification of a certain group are the identity markers that make the group distinct from other groups (Barth: 14). National identity is one of the social identities that has had the most impact on historical events, with both positive and negative consequences, as for example the great romantic-national movement of the nineteenth century (Salazar 1998: 114). This movement affected the identity of the Jewish people in emphasizing their lack of nationhood. Jose Miguel Salazar defines national sentiment by four elements:

Each public theological attempt at an edifying discourse of care builds upon an excavated ruin of a thwarted future of the past by revisiting their religious textual artefact. The book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible contains religious narratives illuminating how established denizens’ desire to economise migrant strangers can turn the pharmakon of the city pathological.