I, the God of Israel, will not forsake them.
(Isaiah 41:17)
Imagine a people so small you could fit all of them into one mid-sized city and still have room. They hold no empire and no natural resources worth invading for. For most of recorded history they have been the guests nobody wanted: expelled, taxed, blamed for plagues, blamed for banks, blamed for revolutions, blamed for whatever the century happened to fear most. By every rule of history they should be a footnote. Instead they are on the patents, in the laboratories, on the concert programs, in the courtrooms that shaped modern law, and on the Nobel lists at a rate that a statistician would call an error before he would call it luck. They are a fraction of a percent of the human race, and you cannot get through a day without touching something they made. A group that small, hated that consistently, contributing that far out of proportion, is one of two things.
Either history made one very strange exception, or the exception was the point.
***
We left the last chapter with Ramesses II carving his near-disaster at Kadesh into the walls of Egypt, and I want to start this one by asking about the other side of that battle.
The men who ambushed him were Hittites. They were not a village. They ran an empire that fought Egypt to a standstill and then signed a treaty with it as an equal, from a capital called Hattusa in what is now central Turkey, with archives, a legal code, and gods of their own. For much of the nineteenth century, a certain kind of scholar treated them as biblical fiction, since the Bible kept mentioning them and almost nothing else did. Then the archives came out of the ground, and in 1915 a Czech linguist named Bedrich Hrozny cracked their language.
So the Hittites were real. Go find one.
You cannot, and you know it without checking. Nobody speaks Hittite. Nobody lights a Hittite candle or hands a Hittite prayer to a child. The same is true of the Moabites, who left behind a stone slab boasting about a war they won against Israel, so that you can read a Moabite insult today but you cannot meet a Moabite. The same for the Edomites, the Amorites, the Jebusites, the Amalekites, the Philistines. And it is true of the giants who swallowed them, one after another: Assyria, Babylon, Persia, the Greek kingdoms, Rome.
Every people on that list is a museum label now, which is not a tragedy and not an insult. It is simply what happens. It is the rule.
One name on the list is still here. Still reading the same book, in the same language, keeping the same feast on the same night of the same lunar month that their ancestors kept it while Hattusa was still standing. That is not a sentiment. It is the strangest data point in the historical record, and it is easy to feel and hard to weigh, so let us go slowly.
What Is Supposed to Happen
Here are the ordinary rules for how a people disappears, and they are not mysterious.
You lose a war. Your land is taken. Your leadership is deported, because that is how ancient empires prevented rebellions, and the deportees are deliberately mixed into other populations so that the old identity has nothing to hold. Within a generation the children speak the imperial language better than the ancestral one. Within two, the old gods look provincial. Within three or four there is a family memory of coming from somewhere, and a name that used to mean something, and then nothing at all. Assimilation finishes gently what conquest starts.
I want to say something before I make any claim at all, because this argument gets ruined by people who overstate it.
Those rules worked perfectly well on the Jews.
In 722 BC the Assyrian empire came down on the northern kingdom of Israel, ten of the twelve tribes, and deported them. Those tribes are gone. There are legends about them, and groups around the world with claims worth taking seriously, but as living communities with an unbroken chain they vanished exactly the way the Moabites vanished. Two thirds of the family disappeared on schedule.
What came back from Babylon a century and a half later was one small piece: the southern kingdom, Judah. That is where the word Jew comes from. It is the name of a survivor.
So nobody should tell you that Israelites are magically indestructible, because the Bible itself records most of them being destroyed. The strange thing is narrower, and therefore sharper. One branch of one small nation went through the machinery that reliably erases peoples, went through it twice, spent two thousand years scattered across the planet with no land, no army, and no central authority anyone was obliged to obey, and came out the other end still recognizably itself.
The Question Twain Could Not Answer
In 1898 Mark Twain published an article about a riot in the Austrian parliament, and an American Jewish lawyer wrote back with a question that had nothing to do with Austria. Why does this happen to us, everywhere, in every century, even now, in what is supposed to be an enlightened age? Can we do anything about it? Will it ever end?
Twain took the question seriously enough to spend months on his answer. The essay, “Concerning the Jews,” ran in Harper’s in September 1899. Parts of it are wrong, and he later published a retraction of one of the worst parts. But the closing paragraph has outlived everything else he wrote on the subject. He runs the same roll call I just ran, the Egyptian and the Babylonian and the Persian, then the Greek and the Roman, all of them filling the world with noise and splendor and then fading into dream-stuff. The Jew, he says, saw them all and outlasted them all. All things are mortal but the Jew. Then the last line, which is a question and not an answer: what is the secret of his immortality?
He never says. He was a skeptic and he left it open, which I respect more than a tidy ending.
He was not the only one stopped by it. Nikolai Berdyaev, the Russian philosopher, tried as a young man to test the materialist reading of history against the destinies of actual peoples, and wrote later that the theory broke in his hands when he came to the Jews. Their survival struck him as inexplicable on materialist terms, and pushed him toward the conclusion that something other than adaptation was at work. Two centuries earlier, a famously argumentative rabbi in Altona named Yaakov Emden wrote in his prayer book that the survival of his people in exile, hunted in every generation and still holding the Torah, was a greater wonder than the miracles in Egypt.
“The Jews, Sire.”
In the court of King Louis XIV, amid the Enlightenment’s rising tide of skepticism, the king once challenged his advisors to give him a single, irrefutable proof of God’s existence. The room fell silent, until one voice, whether Blaise Pascal or some other chaplain or physician, history does not agree, answered with quiet conviction: “The Jews, Sire.”
It was not a theological argument, nor a philosophical treatise. It was a statement of sheer historical endurance. A people exiled, persecuted, scattered across continents, and yet never erased. Their survival defied the logic of empire and time itself. In that moment the king was handed not a proof of doctrine, but a living witness.
From the very birth of Israel as a nation, we read of an inexplicable hatred aimed at her. When Israel was enslaved in Egypt, Pharaoh was not content with mere oppression. He decreed the murder of every Hebrew baby boy, an attempt at outright genocide (Exodus 1:15-22). This was far more than political fear. It was evil resisting the people through whom God’s redemption would one day come, the Exodus, and ultimately Christ. God intervened and preserved Moses to deliver Israel, thwarting that evil design.
Later, in the days of Esther, a royal official named Haman became the very archetype of irrational anti-Jewish hatred. He persuaded the king of Persia to issue an edict to annihilate every Jew in the empire on a single day, women and children included (Esther 3:13). What had this scattered minority done to deserve such fury? Nothing. It was the same ancient, diabolical enmity against God’s chosen people. And once again God foiled the plot, this time through the courage of Queen Esther, and Haman was hanged on the very gallows he had built for Mordecai (Esther 7:10). The pattern is unmistakable. Time and again, when the enemy sets out to destroy Israel, God provides deliverance, and often turns the evil back upon the one who devised it.
The attempt to annihilate the people of Israel runs like a dark thread through the whole of Scripture, yet history testifies, again and again, to God’s faithfulness. Every empire that rose against Israel eventually fell.
History beyond the Bible has tragically carried the pattern forward. Oppressive regimes, from the Seleucid Greeks who outlawed Judaism and defiled the Temple, to the Roman Empire, all tried to stamp out the Jews or their faith. In the medieval and modern eras, Jewish communities endured expulsions, inquisitions, pogroms, and finally the horror of the Holocaust. The sheer persistence of antisemitism, an irrational and extreme hatred aimed at a tiny group of people, defies any purely secular explanation. Why did the Nazis so fanatically prioritize the extermination of the Jews, even to their own strategic ruin? Why do some today single out Israel for demonization above all other nations? There is a spiritual dimension at work here. Just as the prophet foretold, “Jerusalem will be a cup of trembling… and a burdensome stone for all peoples” (Zechariah 12:2-3). The forces of darkness know that God’s purposes are bound up with the people of Israel (Romans 11:12, 15, 26), and so they labor without rest to destroy or discredit her.
Pharaoh, Haman, Hitler, Hassan Nasrallah, Ali Khamenei, all embody the same demonic spirit that has sought throughout history to destroy God’s chosen people. The names and the faces change, but the force beneath them never does: a relentless hatred, a fixed opposition to the very nation God has chosen to use.
Chosen never meant better, and it never meant blameless. It meant God deliberately picked the smallest and least impressive nation available, the one with no army worth fearing and no land worth envying, so that when they somehow outlasted every empire and everyone who tried to erase them, the only reasonable explanation left standing would be the God who chose them.
The Hatred That Never Goes Out of Fashion
There is a second half to this, and it is not comfortable.
Peoples usually survive by being left alone. The Jews were the opposite of left alone, and that is what gives the record its strangeness: a scattered nation persisted while being singled out, continuously, by the very civilizations that hosted it—Christians included, sadly.
And the hatred keeps changing costume. In medieval Europe the charge was religious: you killed our God; you poisoned the wells; you drank the blood of our babies. Expulsions follow, England in 1290, Spain in 1492, Portugal some years later. Then Europe secularizes and the religious charge loses its grip, so in 1879 a German agitator named Wilhelm Marr popularizes a new word, antisemitism, precisely because it sounds scientific rather than churchy. Now the problem is not your faith, which you could in theory abandon, but your blood, which you cannot. Then comes the political version, a forgery manufactured in Russia around 1903 describing a secret Jewish plan to take over the world. The Times of London proved it plagiarized nonsense in 1921. It is still a bestseller in several countries.
Notice the pattern. The accusation is discarded and replaced; the accused stays the same. Whatever a given century considers the worst thing a person can be, the Jews are accused of being it. Capitalists to the communists, communists to the capitalists. And the hatred routinely outlives the empire that carries it. The Third Reich meant to settle the question permanently and lasted twelve years. World Jewry numbered 16.6 million in 1939 and stands at roughly 15.8 million today, so the wound is nowhere near closed. And yet the funerals keep going the other way.
Judaism did something with all this that I find almost unbearable when I stop to think about it. It set it to music.
At Passover tables for something close to two thousand years, families have sung a line called Vehi She’amda.
And it is this (the promise) that has stood by our ancestors and for us. For not only one (enemy) has risen up against us to destroy us, but in every generation they rise up to destroy us. But the Holy One, Blessed be He, delivers us from their hands.
(Vehi She’amda)
Read the tense again. Not rose. Rise. Present tense, built into the liturgy as an ongoing condition. Generations of Jewish children have learned that sentence at a table with wine on it, and in twenty centuries no generation has ever been able to stand up and say, respectfully, that the line is out of date and should be dropped.
A people marked for erasure in century after century, and still here to sing about it, is either the luckiest accident in history or the subject of a promise.
Only this morning I saw a video going viral on social media, a recording of an imam in Dearborn, Michigan, praying “O Allah, kill every Jew.”
You would think that as a Jew, I would be outraged. But I suppose we have grown used to it by now.
Nobody Writes That Policy
Imagine walking into an insurance office with a proposal.
I want to insure the continued existence of a nation. Small one. It will lose its land twice and its temple twice. Its people will be scattered across every inhabited continent, with no army and no government of their own for two thousand years, legally expelled from most of the countries they live in and periodically massacred in the rest, and in one decade of the twentieth century they will lose almost half of their number. The policy pays out only if they are still a recognizable people at the end, with their book, their calendar, and their language intact.
No underwriter on the planet writes that policy. It is not a difficult risk. It is an absurd one.
Here is the claim of this chapter, and it is narrow and checkable rather than a mood. Somebody wrote that policy. In advance, in writing, in the victims’ own founding document, where it has been sitting in public for the better part of three thousand years.
Deuteronomy is blunt about the scattering:
The Lord will scatter you among all nations, from one end of the earth to the other…Among those nations you will find no repose, no resting place for the sole of your foot. There the Lord will give you an anxious mind, eyes weary with longing, and a despairing heart. You will live in constant suspense, filled with dread both night and day, never sure of your life.
(Deuteronomy 28:64-66)
That much came true, and the honest atheist historian has no trouble with it, since disaster is a safe bet for any small nation caught between empires.
The interesting sentences are the other ones.
Leviticus, in the middle of the harshest chapter of threats in the Torah, stops and adds a clause that ruins the rhythm:
Yet in spite of this, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them or abhor them so as to destroy them completely, breaking my covenant with them. I am the LORD their God.
(Leviticus 26:44)
Jeremiah states it as an asymmetry so specific it is almost reckless:
“I am with you and will save you,” declares the LORD. “Though I completely destroy all the nations among which I scatter you, I will not completely destroy you. I will discipline you but only in due measure; I will not let you go entirely unpunished.”
(Jeremiah 30:11)
Sit with that, because it is a falsifiable claim about comparative national longevity, and it names the losing side in advance. The scatterers perish, the scattered do not. Assyria scattered Israel. Where is Assyria? Babylon scattered Judah. Where is Babylon? Rome burned the second Temple, and Rome is a tourist attraction and a pilgrimage for devotees of carbohydrates.
Then Jeremiah goes further and stakes God’s own credibility on it.
This is what the LORD says, he who appoints the sun to shine by day, who decrees the moon and stars to shine by night, who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar—the LORD Almighty is his name: “Only if this fixed order departed from My presence, declares the LORD, would Israel’s descendants ever cease to be a nation before Me.”
(Jeremiah 31:35-36)
The word for that fixed order is the same word we met in the laws written into the fabric of the cosmos. He is inviting you to test the promise against the sunrise, which is exactly the kind of thing the last chapter said this book keeps doing.
Now go back to the insurance office. The ship sails, the storm comes, and the ship comes home. An investigator can now explain the survival completely: this hull, this ballast, this captain, this route. Every word correct, and none of it touching the question I am actually asking, which is not how did she stay afloat but who wrote the policy before she sailed. Sociology tells you how a people held together under pressure. It has nothing to say about a document written before the pressure that describes the pressure, names the outcome, and stakes its author’s honor on it.
No other people went through all of it at once: two exiles, twenty centuries without a homeland, scattered across nearly the whole planet, and hated the entire time by both Christendom and much of the Islamic world. And none of the other survivors got the ending this one did. The Parsis never went back to Persia. The Roma have no ancestral valley waiting for them. Nobody rebuilt Nineveh and filled it with Assyrians speaking revived Assyrian. Only one scattered people came home, to the same land, speaking the same language it left with. That homecoming is the subject of the next chapter, and of everything the prediction promised, it is the part that had no business coming true.
The Boy With the Strange Name
There is a scene in Isaiah chapter 7 that I absolutely love.
Jerusalem is about to be attacked by two armies at once, and the king is terrified; the text says his heart shook like trees in a storm. God sends Isaiah out to meet him with one odd instruction attached: take your son with you.
The boy’s name is Shear-Yashuv. Two Hebrew words. She’ar, a remnant, what is left over after the loss. Yashuv, shall return.
So the prophet stands in front of a panicking king holding the hand of a walking sentence. It is a brutal name and a beautiful one at once, and it refuses to lie in either direction. The first word admits the catastrophe: a remnant means a loss, and it will be terrible, and most of what you love will not survive it. The second word refuses to end there.
A man who names his child that is either the cruelest father in Judea or the most certain.
And then God adds the insult, because the two kings terrifying the whole city are, in his description, a pair of burnt-out sticks still smoking at the tail end, and both of them would be ash before that boy was old enough to tell right from wrong.
Grading the Argument
I love this argument because I’m Jewish. But a determined skeptic can absorb it. What I will say is what it costs to shrug at. You have to hold, at the same time, a written prediction of scattering, a written prediction of survival that names the losing side in advance, physical manuscripts of both from centuries before the events, two thousand years of the most persistent hatred in human history, and a people still keeping the calendar. Call it coincidence if you like. Just notice how much weight the word is carrying.
Twain asked what the secret of the immortality was and never answered. The Jewish answer was never a secret. It is sung once a year, at a table, with children listening, and it says that the enemies rise in every generation and that Someone keeps reaching in.
And the boy’s second word is still standing there. Yashuv. Shall return.
Return to what? That’s on the next chapter.
This was a free chapter from my book, Why I Am a Jew for Jesus: My 40 Best Reasons to Believe in God and His Messiah
