- Herod the Great built the second Jewish Temple. JC said soon, not one stone would be left standing. Forty years later, it was destroyed. The temple walls were fifteen stories high, with gold-trimmed marble walls. Rome enslaved many of the Jews.
- Fifty generations later, distress is off the charts. Signs and prophecy fulfillments abound. Masters of deception are everywhere. Wars and rumors of wars are everywhere. Uprisings abound. Earthquakes, floods, global warming, and famines have become commonplace. John the Revelator sees Jesus as the Lamb of God. He opens the first of seven seals on a scroll.
- The four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are Death. Known as ‘The Pale Rider. Famine, war, and pestilence are the other three.
- Death is the leader of the Four Horsemen and is the strongest and most feared of the angelic-demonic siblings. This is the start of the end, my friend, and Israel is ground zero. Four thousand years ago, God chose the Jews as His people. They resisted, for the most part, accepting Christianity for 2,000 years. Now, they are crossing over to Christianity, big time. (In the manner predicted in the New Testament.)All the Biblical prophets were Jews. Jesus was a Jew while he was on Earth. Heaven-residing Gentiles will outnumber the Jews there, even when you include the end-times Jews who will convert to Christianity. God had to convert Gentiles to Christianity because the Jews never entirely accepted Jesus as Christ. They are still waiting for the correct Messiah to show up. They need to go with the one they already have.
- In 1731 BCE, God appeared to Abraham with a promise of offspring and their subsequent inheritance of the Land of Israel—between the river of Egypt and the Euphrates.
- 1313 BCE, Moses led the Jews out of Egypt. God gave them the Torah exclusively for the Jews shortly after, at Mount Sinai.
- 957 BCE. King David’s son, King Solomon, built the First Temple.
- 924 BCE, King Solomon’s death led to the splitting of the kingdom into two kingdoms, Judah and Israel (also named Samaria). Wars and assimilations became common.
- 722BCE. The Assyrians conquered Isreal. The Hebrew inhabitants were scattered throughout the Middle East.
- 597-586 BCE. Nebuchadnezzar deported the Jews to Babylon. He allowed them to remain in a unified Babylonian community.
- 597 BCE onward, another group of Judaeans fled to Egypt, settling in the Nile Delta. There were three distinct groups of Hebrews: a group in Babylon and other parts of the Middle East, a group in Judaea, and another in Egypt. Thus, 597 BCE is considered the beginning date of the Jewish Diaspora. The Persians, under Cyrus, allowed the Judaeans to return to their homeland in 538 BC, but most chose to remain in Babylon. They were allowed to run their lives under their laws.
- 164 BCE. The Maccabean Revolt rose against the Greek Empire as its king Antiochus outlawed Jewish traditions and ordered a pagan altar to be established in the Temple in Jerusalem.
- 70 CE. The Roman army, led by Titus to suppress the Jewish Big Revolt, was victorious. The Jewish state ended in 70 AD when the Romans actively removed the Jews from the land they had lived in for over a millennium.
- To see how the Jews got back to where they once belonged is covered in the prior post. It was not easy.
- Dome of the Rock was built on the temple’s ruins.
- 1691: Cecaliph Abd all-Malik completes the construction of the shrine “Dome of the Rock” on the Jewish Temple’s ruins in Jerusalem.
- 1099 CE. European forces of the First Crusade waged the siege of Jerusalem, capturing the Holy City of Jerusalem from the Muslim Fatimid Caliphate and laying the foundation for the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem, which lasted almost two centuries.
- The State of Israel was established in May 1948. A Palestinian state was not established. The remaining territories of pre-1948 Palestine, the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), and the Gaza Strip were administered from 1948 to 1967 by Jordan and Egypt, respectively. Zionism is Israel’s national ideology, with Judaism as a nationality and religion. Arabs and Palestinians oppose Zionism. Caza is a strip of land surrounded by Israel but populated by Palestinians. Egypt controlled Gaza until 1967, when Israel occupied it and the West Bank in the Six-Day War. Gaza is governed by the Islamist group Hamas, which was formed in 1987. The intifadas were two Palestinian uprisings against Israel, the first in the late 1980s and the second in the early 2000s.
- Top 10 Countries with the Largest Jewish Populations (2019):
- Israel: 6,894,000 (2021 data)
- United States: 5,700,000 (Possibly 6.7 million.) Sources differ.)
- France: 450,000
- Canada: 392,000
- United Kingdom – 292,000
- Argentina – 180,000
- Russia – 165,000
- Germany: 118,000 (tie)
- Australia: 118,000 (tie)
- Brazil: 92,600
- As Tevye said in The Fiddler on the Roof, “God, once, just once, could you choose somebody else?”
