The History of Israel: From the Patriarchs to the Modern State

In June 2026, with missiles falling and the war widening, the U.S. president warned Israel she “could be left alone against Iran very soon.” Michael Knighton answers from Scripture: the threat of abandonment is the oldest weapon there is, and God’s reply has never changed — He will not leave nor forsake His people, the Keeper of Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps, and whatever the powers of earth may grant or withdraw, Israel is never truly alone.

On May 14, 1948, a people who had not governed themselves in their own land for nearly nineteen centuries became a nation again in the space of an afternoon. A look at the rebirth of Israel as the fulfillment of Isaiah’s promise that a nation can be born in a single day.

From the Tel Dan Stele and the Merneptah Stele to the seals of Judah’s kings and the Dead Sea Scrolls, a century and a half of digging in the land of Israel has steadily vindicated the biblical record as serious history.

Surrounded from its first day and outnumbered in every war, the State of Israel has survived against every reasonable expectation. A reflection on 1948, 1967, and 1973 against the biblical theme that the Keeper of Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps.

Of all the peoples who have ever ruled Jerusalem, only one has ever made it a capital. The historical and biblical case for Jerusalem as the eternal, undivided capital of the Jewish people — from the city of David to the reunification of 1967.

From Yemen, Iraq, the Soviet Union, and Ethiopia, the scattered children of Israel have been gathered home from more than a hundred nations — the literal fulfillment of the prophets’ promise to regather Israel from the four corners of the earth.

The rebirth of Israel did more than create a state — it ended the long Jewish wandering, gave a tiny nation an outsized place in world affairs, and forced the Church to read the literal promises of biblical prophecy with new eyes.

No other language in human history has returned from the dead. The story of how biblical Hebrew — silent as a spoken tongue for seventeen centuries — was revived through Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and reborn as the living language of a nation.

A barren, neglected land was made to flourish again — swamps drained, forests planted, and the Negev desert taught to yield through drip irrigation. The agricultural revival the world never predicted, and the prophets long foresaw.

Every other scattered nation of antiquity vanished; the Jewish people endured expulsion, the Inquisition, the pogroms, and the Holocaust — and then stood up as a sovereign nation, exactly as Jeremiah promised Israel never would cease to be.

Beyond the military victory of June 1967 lies a deeper question of meaning: the return of Jerusalem after nineteen centuries, the ‘set time to favour Zion,’ and the hand of God in history — drawing the whole story of modern Israel together.