Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. Susan Abu Hawa is a Palestinian activist and writer whose bio on X states, quote, Indigenous daughter of Jerusalem with receipts unlike the colonizers. On October 27th, she posted the following on the platform, and I quote, Hollywood's brainwashing is in full force. The new TV series on Prime called House of David is meant to imply that the 70-year-old Jewish Zionist settler colony in Palestine actually has ancient roots.
These people are parasites, end quote.
Well, this claim that modern day Jews have no ties or claims to the land of Israel and that Zionists are only colonizers of Palestinian land is becoming more common, even though the archaeological and historical evidence for the existence of ancient Israel is beyond dispute. For example, the Arch of Titus in Rome celebrates the Roman defeat of the Jews in AD seventy, events that were documented at the time by Jewish historian Flavius Josephus as well as others. Nearly every book of the Old Testament, of course, tells of the 12 tribes of Israel and of their descendants in that region of the world. The New Testament also describes Jesus of Nazareth as a Jew who lived in Galilee, Judea, and Jerusalem. There are ancient inscriptions from Assyria, Babylon, and Egypt that attest to the existence of ancient Israel.
The earliest being the Merneptah Steel, which dates to 1208 BC and was written in Egyptian hieroglyphics. It described a Pharaoh's victory over the Israelites and is now housed in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. There's also, of course, the Teldan inscription that was from the 9th century BC, found recently in northern Israel and commemorates the king of the house of David. And countless other inscriptions in Hebrew also further confirm that modern-day Israel is founded on the territory of ancient Israel. And there's also ample evidence of the Jews living in the region throughout the Christian era, with one exception.
In AD 135, the Roman Emperor Hadrian banned Jews from Jerusalem due to their repeated rebellions against the Romans. After the Muslim conquest of the city in 638, the Jews were invited back by Caliph Umar, who also invited them to pray on the Temple Mount. By the ninth century between two hundred and five hundred Jewish families were concentrated in the Jewish quarter of the city. During the capture of Jerusalem during the First Crusade of 1099, the Jews in the city were massacred and banned from re-entering, though they were later allowed to live in the surrounding villages. When Saladin recaptured Jerusalem in 1187, he invited the Jews to return.
The Jewish presence remained throughout the rest of the Middle Ages, though with increasing restrictions on their freedoms. With the rise of the Ottomans and the recapture of Jerusalem in 1517, Jews were granted more freedom. Multiple waves of immigration into the region followed, and the Jewish population especially grew in the 19th century. In fact, according to Ottoman census records, there were about 2,000 Jews in Jerusalem in 1800. or about 25% of the population of the city.
By 1900, that number had increased to 35,000 Jews, or 65% of the population of that city. There are also 150,000 Jewish tombstones on the Mount of Olives from the Ottoman period. When Ottoman rule ended in 1914, there were about 45,000 Jews in Jerusalem. Aside from the brief period between AD 135 and 638, the evidence is strong of extensive Jewish presence in the Holy Land. In fact, much of that evidence comes from Muslim sources.
The evidence is overwhelming, both for the existence of ancient Israel and for the continuing presence of Jews in the Holy Land, especially in the centuries prior to the founding of Israel in 1948.
Now another common argument against the legitimacy of Israel is the claim that modern-day Jews are not related to ancient Israelites.
Some argue that Ashkenazi Jews, historically centered around Eastern Europe, are descendants of the Khazars, a Turkic people who converted to Judaism to maintain their independence.
However, genetic studies have disproven that theory. When the Ashkenazi genome is compared to genomes extracted from skeletons from Bronze and Iron Age Israel, there's a 50 to 60% continuity between them. The remaining, 30 to 40 percent, dates back only 600 to 800 years and reveals the intermarriage that occurred during the medieval period, well after the Khazars. And the Sephardic and the Mizrahijus have an even higher genetic continuity with ancient Israelites. Of course, facts always tend to interrupt ideologies, but especially when it comes to anti-Semitism.
The evidence is simply abundant of the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah, of the nearly continuous Jewish presence in the Holy Land, and of the links between modern Jews and ancient Israelites. On the other hand, there's no archaeological support whatsoever for Arabs in the region prior to the Islamic conquest in the seventh century. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr. Glenn Sunshine.
If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast. And for more resources to live like a Christian today, go to breakpoint.org. My name is Billy Hutchinson, head of the Colson Educators Program. I'm excited to announce a special educators edition of Truth Rising the Study. If you work with students, you know this is a challenging time and culture.
From AI and social media to identity and the basic questions of meaning and purpose, the classroom can be a confusing place right now. But what if you had clarity to understand this cultural moment in light of God's story, know how to live in light of truth, and equip your students to do the same? That's where Truth Rising the Study Educators Edition can help. In this free digital course available for CEUs in partnerships with ACSI, John Stone Street summarizes God's game plan for this civilizational moment using four essential concepts. hope, truth, identity, and calling.
Then, I follow up each lesson with practical tips for classroom application. Through the study, you'll be grounded in the authentic hope of Christ's resurrection and understand God's grand story of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. You'll learn how our identity is anchored in the relationships we have as image bearers. and you'll learn what questions to ask to discern your calling where God has placed you, including your classroom, and then go and help your students do the same. You can access Truth Rising the Study Educators Edition and the full course library at colsoneducators.org.
That's colsoneducators.org.
