Israel — Then & Now

How Israel Made the Desert Bloom: The Agricultural Miracle of Isaiah 35

When the Jewish people began returning to their ancient land in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they did not return to a garden. They returned to a land that centuries of neglect had left barren and exhausted — malarial swamps in the north, rocky and eroded hillsides in the center, and in the south a great desert that seemed fit for nothing but sand and stone. Travelers of the age described the country as desolate and largely empty. No serious observer of the time would have predicted that this worn-out land could be made to bloom. And yet, within a few generations, it did — in a transformation so striking that the world coined a phrase for it: making the desert bloom. It is one of the most remarkable agricultural stories of the modern age.

The desolation was no exaggeration of later Zionist propaganda; it was recorded by travelers who had no stake in the matter. When the American author Mark Twain journeyed through the Holy Land in 1867, he found a country that wrung from him some of the bleakest descriptions in all his travel writing. He described a desolate land whose soil was rich enough but given over wholly to weeds, a silent and mournful expanse in which one could ride for hours without seeing a human being. He called it a hopeless, dreary, heartbroken land. This was the verdict of an honest and often skeptical observer upon the country as it lay under centuries of foreign neglect: not a paradise wrongfully taken, but a ruin waiting for someone to love it back to life. That such a land should become, within a hundred years, one of the most agriculturally advanced nations on earth is the measure of the miracle.

A Land Waiting to Be Reclaimed

The early returning pioneers faced conditions that broke many of them. The valleys of the north were choked with disease-bearing swamps; reclaiming them cost lives as well as labor. The pioneers drained the marshes, planted forests where there had been none, cleared stones from hillsides by hand, and coaxed the first crops from soil that had lain neglected for centuries. It was slow, brutal, and often heartbreaking work. But it rested upon a conviction the Scriptures had planted long before: that this land, however ruined it appeared, was not abandoned but waiting — promised one day to flourish again under the hands of a returning people.

There is a striking detail here that the friends of Israel have long noticed. For all the centuries that the land lay under other rulers, it remained stubbornly barren. It was only as its ancient people returned that it began, in earnest, to flourish again — as though the soil itself had been waiting for them. The land that had refused to yield its strength to strangers began to give it freely to the children of those who had first received it as a promise.

The labor of reclamation was measured in human lives. In the Jezreel and Hula valleys of the north, the standing water of the marshes bred the mosquitoes that carried malaria, and the early pioneers who set themselves to drain those swamps did so knowing that many of them would sicken and die before the work was done. They dug drainage channels by hand, planted eucalyptus trees to draw down the water table, and buried their dead and pressed on. Where the hillsides of the center had been stripped of their trees and their topsoil washed away by centuries of erosion and overgrazing, the returning people cleared the stones, terraced the slopes anew, and planted forests where for ages there had been only bare rock. Tens of millions of trees were set into the ground over the decades, until green returned to hills that had been brown within living memory.

It is worth being clear and fair about what this was and was not. The transformation of the land owed a great deal to human ingenuity, sacrifice, and sheer stubborn labor; the believer need not pretend that the orchards sprang up untouched by hands. But the pattern of it — a people returning to a long-desolate land and finding it ready to flourish again under their care, exactly as the prophets had said it would — is the kind of thing that gives the reader of Scripture pause. The pioneers themselves, many of them not religious men, often reached instinctively for the language of the Bible to describe what they were doing, for no other language fit so well.

Much of this labor was carried out by the collective farming communities — the kibbutzim and moshavim — that became one of the defining institutions of the returning nation. Bands of young idealists, many of them fresh from the cities of Europe with no experience of farming, settled on hard and unpromising land and learned, by trial and bitter error, to make it yield. They pooled their labor and their meager resources, shared the harvest and the hardship alike, and turned swamp and stone and sand into field and orchard. Many failed; some settlements were abandoned, and not a few of the settlers were broken by the malaria, the heat, and the sheer relentlessness of the work. But where they succeeded, they did more than grow crops. They demonstrated that the land could be redeemed, that the prophecy of a flourishing homeland was not a fantasy but a thing that determined hands, given time, could bring to pass. The green fields of the modern nation are, in a real sense, a monument to those first communities and the price they paid.

Teaching the Desert to Yield

The greatest test was the south — the Negev, a desert covering roughly half the country, where rainfall is scarce and the sun is merciless. To grow food in such a place demanded not only labor but invention. Israeli agronomists and engineers pioneered methods that have since spread across the arid regions of the world. The most famous of these is drip irrigation: a system that delivers water and nutrients drop by drop, directly to the roots of each plant, wasting almost nothing. With it, fields of vegetables, orchards, and even flowers were raised in the heart of the desert, watered with precision where rainfall failed.

The story of drip irrigation is itself a small parable of the larger one. The modern technique grew out of the work of an Israeli water engineer, Simcha Blass, who noticed that a tree beside a leaking pipe grew larger than its neighbors, nourished by a slow and steady seep of water at its roots rather than a flood upon the surface. From that observation came a system, developed and spread by the Israeli company Netafim and others, that brings water in measured drops precisely where the plant can use it, losing almost nothing to evaporation or runoff. In a land where every drop is precious, this was revolutionary, and it has since been carried to dry lands on every continent. A method born of Israel’s necessity now helps feed the world, drop by patient drop.

Drip irrigation was only the beginning. Israel learned to treat and reuse the great majority of its wastewater for agriculture — recycling a far higher share than any other nation on earth, so that water used once in the cities is cleaned and sent out again to the fields. It built great desalination plants along the Mediterranean coast, drawing fresh water from the sea on an industrial scale, until a country once defined by its scarcity of water found itself, astonishingly, with a surplus. Its scientists bred crops that could thrive in heat and tolerate the brackish water drawn from aquifers beneath the desert, raising tomatoes and melons, dates and pomegranates where nothing had grown for centuries. In the arid Arava, on the very edge of the wilderness, farms now produce a large share of the nation’s agricultural exports, sending fresh produce and flowers to the markets of Europe in the depth of winter.

Israel learned to recycle the great majority of its wastewater for agriculture, to draw fresh water from the sea, and to breed crops that could thrive in heat and salt. A nation with little rainfall and less arable land became a net exporter of food and, more remarkably, an exporter of the knowledge of how to farm the desert. Today nations across Africa, Asia, and the Americas grow food on once-hopeless land using techniques first proven in the deserts of Israel, and Israeli experts are sent out to teach dryland farming to the hungry nations of the world. The blessing promised to the seed of Jacob — to fill the face of the world with fruit — has taken on a meaning the pioneers could scarcely have imagined.

The scale of the reversal is easy to state and hard to overstate. A land that within living memory was reckoned mostly desert has seen its desert steadily pushed back, reclaimed acre by acre for cultivation and forest. A nation that began with a few struggling agricultural settlements clinging to malarial valleys now feeds itself and exports its surplus to scores of countries. Israeli oranges, dates, avocados, and flowers reach markets around the world; Israeli agricultural technology — the drip lines, the sensors, the water-recycling systems, the desert-bred seeds — reaches still further, carried to dry and hungry lands on every inhabited continent. A country smaller than many a single farming county has become one of the world’s teachers in the art of coaxing food from difficult ground. The phrase the world coined for it — making the desert bloom — turns out to understate the case, for Israel has not only made its own desert bloom but has helped others do the same with theirs.

The Desert Shall Blossom as the Rose

Of all the words the prophets spoke about the flowering of the land, none has fastened upon the imagination of the friends of Israel quite like the opening of the thirty-fifth chapter of Isaiah. The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose. It shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice even with joy and singing. The image is vivid and particular: not merely a desert made productive, but a desert that rejoices, that sings, that breaks into bloom like a flower opening. Isaiah piles up the comparisons — the glory of Lebanon with its famous cedars, the beauty of Carmel and Sharon, the lush and fertile regions of the land — and lays them upon the wilderness, as if to say that the most barren places would one day wear the splendor of the most fruitful.

Honesty requires the believer to handle this prophecy with care, for serious readers of Scripture differ over it. Many hold that Isaiah 35 looks forward chiefly to the age of the Messiah’s reign, when the transformation of the natural world will be complete and miraculous, and that the agricultural revival of the modern state, impressive as it is, is at most a foretaste and not the full and final fulfillment. There is wisdom in that caution. The chapter goes on to speak of the lame leaping like a deer and the tongue of the dumb singing, of sorrow and sighing fleeing away — a restoration that plainly reaches beyond what drip irrigation can accomplish. The friend of Israel gains nothing by claiming more than the text will bear.

And yet, even granting all of that, something remains that is hard to wave away. The prophet said the desert of this particular land would one day blossom; and the desert of this particular land has, in our own time, begun to blossom, in the hands of this particular people, returned to it after the long exile the same prophets foretold. Whether one calls the present flowering a partial fulfillment, a foreshadowing, or a sign pointing toward a greater fulfillment still to come, the convergence of the prophecy and the history is real. Isaiah named a barren land that would rejoice and bloom; the friends of Israel have lived to see roses, quite literally, grown for export in the sands of the Negev. The believer may hold the future fulfillment in hope while still giving thanks for the foretaste he has been permitted to witness. The roses of the Negev do not exhaust the promise; they confirm that the One who made it is at work, and that the fullness is coming.

The Prophets Foresaw the Flowering

The agricultural revival of Israel is more than an impressive feat of engineering. For the reader of Scripture it is the visible echo of a promise repeated through the prophets. Isaiah foretold that the wilderness and the solitary place would be glad, and that the desert would rejoice and blossom as the rose. He spoke of waters breaking out in the wilderness and streams in the desert, of the parched ground becoming a pool. Amos foresaw a day when the plowman would overtake the reaper, when the mountains would drip with sweet wine, and when God would plant His people upon their land never to be uprooted again. Ezekiel promised that the desolate land would be tilled, and that men would say, “This land that was desolate is become like the garden of Eden.”

What is striking about these prophecies, taken together, is how tightly they bind the fruitfulness of the land to the return of the people. The prophets did not foresee a desert blooming for its own sake, or under any hands that happened to till it; they foresaw the land flourishing when its own people were brought back to it after their long exile. Ezekiel makes the connection explicit: the mountains of Israel are to shoot forth their branches and yield their fruit to my people Israel, for they are at hand to come. The flowering of the land and the regathering of the people are, in the prophetic vision, two halves of a single promise. That is precisely the order in which the modern history unfolded: first the people returned, and then, under their hands, the long-barren land began to bloom. The sequence the prophets described is the sequence the world has watched.

The Garden and the Gardener

The Christian must, as always, read with care. The Scriptures are not a farming manual, and the believer ought not to claim that every greenhouse in the Negev is a verse come true. But neither can the honest reader miss what has occurred. The prophets foretold a barren land restored to fruitfulness in the hands of a returning people, and that is precisely what the world has watched unfold across the past century. The desert that no one predicted could bloom has bloomed — not by accident, and not by the strength of the gardeners alone. Behind the drip lines and the orchards stands the same promise that brought the people home: that the God who scattered them and the land alike would gather them both, and make the wilderness rejoice. The desert in bloom is, in the end, a sermon written in soil and water — a quiet, growing testimony that the word of the Lord does not fail.

There is a particular comfort in this image for the believer, beyond the borders of any one nation. A desert made to bloom is the Bible’s own picture of what God delights to do — to take the barren and make it fruitful, the dead and make it live, the wasteland and make it a garden. The same prophets who foresaw the flowering of the land of Israel used that flowering as a sign of a deeper renewal: of dry and weary souls revived, of a parched and hopeless world made glad. The desert of the Negev, green and fruitful where once there was only sand, stands as a visible token of an invisible promise, that the God who can turn a wilderness into a garden can do the same with any life laid open to His care. What He has done in the soil of the Negev, He is able to do in the soil of the human heart.

And so the friend of Israel looks out over the orchards of the Galilee, the date palms of the Arava, the vineyards reclaimed from rocky hillsides, the very roses grown in the desert sand, and gives thanks. He does not worship the achievement, nor mistake the gardeners for God. But he reads the prophets, and he reads the history, and he sees the two run together, and he cannot help but say what the people who first returned to this land so often said as they cleared its stones and drained its swamps and planted its trees: that this, too, is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes. The desert has blossomed as the rose, and the One who promised it has kept His word. The friends of Israel pray for the day when the promise reaches its fullness — when not only the land but the people, and not only the people but the world, shall flower under the reign of the One who first called the wilderness to rejoice.