Israel’s celebration of independence concludes next week with President Shimon Peres’s first annual Presidential Conference in Jerusalem. With President Bush attending as one of the high-profile guests, conference organizers decided on the theme Facing Tomorrow. In looking ahead, Peres draws on the sageness of biblical prophets for help in establishing Israel’s future course. “Across the millennia,” the conference website reminds us, “the echoes of the biblical prophets have been heard, repeated, and often gone unheeded“ (emphasis mine throughout).

It fails to mention what happened to Israel and Judah when they refused to heed warnings from their prophets. Both kingdoms were crushed by invading empires—and their survivors were taken captive.

The Birth of Israel

When the Israelites arrived in the Promised Land under Joshua, each tribe was given its own district, except for the priestly tribe of Levi, which mingled among all the tribes. Yet they were united as one nation, the nation of Israel, much like the 50 states in America are one nation.

Israel reached the apex of its power during the reigns of King David and his son Solomon. God promised David that his kingly dynasty would continue right up to the return of the Messiah (Jeremiah 33:17). But because of Solomon’s sexual perversion and idol worship, God split the kingdom in two, promising to preserve at least one tribe for David’s sake (1 Kings 11:11-13).

Just as God forewarned through the Prophet Nathan, after Solomon died, the northern 10 tribes rebelled against King Rehoboam and seceded from the kingdom, choosing Jeroboam to be their king instead. “There was none that followed the house of David, but the tribe of Judah only,” the Bible says (1 Kings 12:20). Rehoboam tried to subdue the rebels and preserve unity in Israel. He succeeded in retaining the tribe of Benjamin (verse 21). Most of the tribe of Levi also joined Rehoboam’s forces. But God finally told him to stop fighting with Israel, “for this thing is from me” (verse 24).

The northern 10 tribes made Samaria their capital and retained the name Israel. The smaller southern kingdom kept Jerusalem as its capital, but became known as Judah. From this point forward, the Bible deals with Israel and Judah as two separate nations. They dwelt in separate, yet adjoining, regions. Each had different kings. They even fought against one another at times (1 Kings 14:30).

Upon gaining control of the northern kingdom, Jeroboam rejected God’s holy days and introduced idol worship into the nation. This continued over many generations, despite constant pleadings from God’s prophets, urging the Israelites to return to their former ways. But because the people of Israel refused to heed these warnings, God promised to root them up out of their land and to scatter them abroad over the face of the Earth (1 Kings 14:15).

God used the Assyrian Empire as His rod of correction (2 Kings 15-17). If you continue reading 2 Kings in sequence, following Israel’s captivity, you will see that the history of the Jewish nation continued on, though not much longer. They too rebelled against God and His laws. In 2 Kings 23:27, God warned, “I will remove Judah also out of my sight, as I have removed Israel, and will cast off this city Jerusalem which I have chosen.”

By this time, the Babylonian Empire under Nebuchadnezzar was the world’s most dominant power. The Babylonians ransacked Jerusalem over the course of 19 years (604-585 b.c.). In the end, God removed the Jews from Palestine, just as He did the Israelites 130 years earlier—and just as He had warned through His prophets.

The Jews Return

The Persian Empire succeeded Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylonian rule. Seventy years after the destruction of Solomon’s temple and Judah’s captivity, God inspired the Persian King Cyrus to send a band of about 50,000 Jews back to Jerusalem to rebuild the second temple. These Israelites all hailed from the small southern nation of Judah though, as is clearly recorded in Ezra 1:5 and 2:1. The northern 10 tribes had been scattered across Europe, lost from world view, and never returned to Palestine. Known as the “lost 10 tribes,” they lost their Hebrew language, their customs and traditions—even their own identity—while in captivity.

Under the leadership of Zerubbabel as their governor (and later Nehemiah), the Jewish captives Cyrus allowed to rebuild the second temple also reconstructed much of the ruined city of Jerusalem and built a wall around it. (All of this history is recorded in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah.) This Jewish revival, as George Friedman described in his May 4 analysis, was Israel’s second manifestation on the world stage, positioning the Jewish state “as a small actor within the framework of larger imperial powers, a situation that lasted until the destruction of the Jewish vassal state by the Romans.”

Not long after the Jews completed work on rebuilding the temple, they again rebelled against God’s laws. It was during this time period that God again sent His prophets—the so-called minor prophets—to warn the Jewish people of their impending captivity if they failed to repent and turn to God. Haggai and Zechariah, for example, delivered their messages to the Jews while the temple was being built. God sent His Prophet Malachi to warn the people soon after the second temple was finished.

By the time of Jesus Christ, the second temple was still standing (although it had been significantly remodeled and enlarged by Herod the Great), but the Jewish religion had morphed into something a lot different than what God had revealed to Moses 1,500 years earlier.

In the Gospels, there are numerous confrontations recorded between Christ and the Jewish leaders of His day. One especially contentious exchange is found in Matthew 23, where Christ called the Pharisees “white-washed tombs” for being more concerned about appearing to be righteous on the outside, while full of corruption and decay from within.

You are the children of those who killed the prophets, Christ said to them (verse 31). Not only were the warnings of prophets generally ignored, the prophets themselves were driven into exile—sometimes killed!

“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!” (verses 36-37). Of course, this message is for all of mankind today—not only Jews.

But notice how Jesus Christ, not unlike the organizers of the upcoming Presidential Conference, pointed His disciples to the warningmessage that came from Israel’s prophets. God would have gathered in Israel and Judah anciently, instead of sending them into Assyrian and Babylonian captivities, had they simply heeded the warnings from His prophets and returned to God. He would have gathered in those who re-established a Jewish vassal state during the days of Ezra and Nehemiah had they only heeded God’s prophetic warnings.

What Christ is saying here is that if all mankind would learn the lesson from Jerusalem’s history, the devastation and bloodshed, followed by the captivity, could all be avoided!

If you continue the Gospel account in Matthew 24, upon leaving the temple for the last time, Jesus Christ uttered a prophecy, echoing the warnings of Israel’s many prophets. In pointing to the temple and its surrounding structures, Christ told His disciples, “There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down” (verse 2).

This prophecy, of course, was fulfilled with astonishing precision after the Roman army, under Titus, invaded the Jews’ beloved city in a.d. 70, destroying it entirely. The Jewish historian Josephus, who knew nothing about Christ’s prophecy, witnessed the siege and lived to write about it afterward (Jewish War, Book 7, Chapter 1):

Caesar gave orders that they should now demolish the entire city and temple … it was so thoroughly laid even with the ground by those that dug it up to the foundation, that there was left nothing to make those that came thither believe it had ever been inhabited. This was the end which Jerusalem came to … a city otherwise of great magnificence, and of mighty fame among all mankind.

That’s what happens when the repeated warnings of biblical prophets are heard, but not heeded.

It would be more than a millennia and a half before the Israelite people would reemerge right at the center of the world stage—and this time in direct fulfillment of a mind-boggling prophecy uttered centuries before Moses and the establishment of ancient Israel!

(To be continued next week.)