Are Jews Really Indigenous to Israel? The History Most People Never Learned
Here is a question that can get you shouted down on many college campuses today: who was in the land of Israel first?
Today is Indigenous Peoples' Day in much of the United States, and across social media you will see Israel described as a settler colony and Jews described as Europeans who arrived in the Middle East less than a hundred years ago. Many young Christians have absorbed this idea without ever hearing the history behind it.
So let me walk you through that history, and you can decide for yourself.
The English word Jew comes from Judah, one of the twelve tribes of Israel and later the name of the southern kingdom whose capital was Jerusalem. The Romans called the same region Judaea. The name of the people and the name of the land share the same root, and when you call someone a Jew, you are using a word that originally meant a person from Judea.
For Christians, the New Testament itself bears witness to a Jewish nation living in its own land. Matthew 2:1 tells us Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea. He grew up in Nazareth in the Galilee, taught in synagogues, kept Passover in Jerusalem and prayed at the Temple. Nobody in the Gospels treats the Jews of Judea as foreigners in that land. The foreign ruler in the story is the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate.
Today you can stand in places where these events happened. The Pool of Siloam, where Jesus healed a man born blind in John chapter 9, was uncovered in Jerusalem in 2004, and archaeologists are still excavating the ancient street that pilgrims used to walk from that pool up to the Temple.
What Rome did to Judea
In the year 70, the Roman army destroyed Jerusalem and the Second Temple. You can still see the Arch of Titus in Rome, which shows Roman soldiers carrying the Temple menorah away as plunder.
About sixty years later, the Jews of Judea rebelled again under a leader named Simon bar Kokhba. The revolt lasted from 132 to 135 and briefly restored Jewish independence. Archaeologists have found coins from those years struck in Hebrew, with slogans calling for the freedom of Jerusalem.
When Rome crushed the revolt, Emperor Hadrian set out to cut the Jewish people off from their land. He renamed Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina and banned Jews from entering the city. He also renamed the province Syria Palaestina, and this is how the name Palestine came into official Roman use for the land, as a punishment imposed on the Jewish people.
Even after that destruction, Jewish life in the land continued. Jewish communities remained for centuries in the Galilee, where the Jerusalem Talmud was compiled, and in towns like Tiberias, Safed and Hebron. Jews returned to Jerusalem whenever its rulers allowed them to, and by the second half of the 1800s, Jews were the largest religious community in the city.
For almost two thousand years, Jews scattered across the world turned toward Jerusalem when they prayed. At the end of every Passover meal, families said the words next year in Jerusalem. A people who kept their homeland at the center of their prayers for that long never stopped belonging to it.
There is no single legal definition of the word indigenous, but most definitions focus on a people's historical continuity with a land from before conquest or colonization, along with a language, culture and identity rooted in that land.
The Jewish people fit that description closely. Hebrew is the language of the land of Israel, and today millions of Israelis speak it again in daily life. The Jewish calendar follows the seasons of the land of Israel, with its holidays tied to the spring barley harvest and the autumn harvest. The Jewish people were conquered by Babylon and later by Rome, and they came back.
None of this erases the Arabs who also live in the land today and who have their own history there. Recognizing that Jews are indigenous to Israel simply tells the truth about where the Jewish people come from.
When a young Christian is told that Jews are foreign colonizers in the land of the Bible, they are being asked to forget most of the Bible. Abraham walked this land and David ruled from Jerusalem, and the Gospels place Jesus in the synagogues of the Galilee and the courts of the Temple, surrounded by the Jewish people of Judea.
At Torch of Truth, we teach this history to young people and churches through our Light the Church project, so they can answer these claims with knowledge and kindness. If this article helped you, please share it with a student or a youth pastor who needs it this week.
On Indigenous Peoples' Day, it is worth remembering that the Jewish people have one of the oldest continuous connections between a people and a land anywhere on earth, and their story fills the pages of your own Bible.
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