Palestine

PALESTINE (‘land of the Philistines’) Although P. has been a place of culture from prehistoric times with a settlement in Jericho from around 8000 BC, it derives its name from the Philistines who invaded it concurrently with the Jews. At the height of its biblical expansion, the land was encompassed by Mount hermon in the north, the Negeb desert in the south, the Mediterranean in the west and the Transjordan Plateau in the east, and included the province of Judea, Samaria and Galilee, to be distinguished from the ‘Palaestina Syria’, a merger of Roman Palestine and Roman Syria that existed from 135 to 390 (see below) It became the cradle of Christianity from which all Christian denominations take their origin, including the Eastern Churches, because Jesus Christ was born there in ca. 4 BC (*Dionysius Exiguus), taught there and died there (30 AD) Biblical Palestine. Known as the Promised Land because God promised it to Abraham and his descendants (Gen 15:18–21), P. was inhabited by the Canaanites (Ex 15:15), who were succeeded by the Amorites and later by the hyksos, who had seized Pharaonic Egypt (cf. Ex 1:8) Gradually the hebrew people, who had emigrated to Egypt, were enslaved. God ordered Moses to liberate them (Ex 3), and Joshua brought this dream to completion (Josh) As is recounted in the OT, the hebrews passed under the protection of the Judges, Gideon (Judg 6–8), Samson (Judg 13–16), and Samuel (1 Sam) until they established a monarchy, with Saul as their first king (1 Sam 8–11) The boundaries of biblical P. were fixed with the forty-year reign of David (d. ca.

970; 1 Sam 16–1 Kings 1–2), but the unity of the country broke down after the reign of his son Solomon (d. ca. 930) Rehoboam, Solomon’s son, initially ruled over a united kingdom (1 Kings 11:43), yet lost a great part of it after listening to foolish advice to increase taxes (1 Kings 12:6–20), retaining only the Southern Kingdom, known from the 8th century BC onwards as Judea with *Jerusalem as its capital, and comprising the two tribes of Judah and Benjamin. The Northern Kingdom or Israel, known also as Samaria and Ephrem, with capital in Sichem, and comprising the other ten tribes (1 Kings 12; 14:12–31), went to Jeroboam, the ringleader of the insurrection against Rehoboam and a former master of forced labour under Solomon (1 Kings 11:28) In 734 the Assyrian King Tiglath-Pileser deported the population of Samaria en masse. Later on, in 587, the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II (d. 562 BC), destroyed Jerusalem and its Temple. In 538 BC, after the Babylonian Exile (587–538 BC), Cyrus II of Persia, the Great (d. 530 BC), permitted the exiles to return to their homeland. Yet P. was never the same as before; the exiles from Samaria had lost their former identity through intermarriages with non-Jews, whereas the Jews came to consider them as foreigners in their own land. When Alexander the Great (d. 323 BC) destroyed the Persian Empire, he implanted the seeds of hellenism which was to dominate until 146 BC. In order to create an empire of equal peoples based on a common culture and a common language or koine, Greek, he played down national identities, including the religious particularities of the Jews.

The Persian King Antiochus IV Epiphanes (r. 175–164 BC), an extreme hellenizer, pursued the dream of a universal culture rooted in the Greek ideals of 5th–4th-century Athens, the Golden Age of Pericles (ca. 495–429 BC), fused with cultural and religious ideals of the Middle East, enforcing the cult of Zeus as the supreme god (2 Macc 6:1–12) Antiochus thus provoked the revolt of the Maccabees (1 Macc 1–2), who presented Jewish law as the best antidote for false gods and pseudo-progress. Although this revolt led to the short-lived independent hasmonaean Kingdom, internal strife prompted both sons of Queen Salome Alexandra, who had ruled alone over Judea (75–67 BC), to call on Pompey to take over. Jesus was born in P. towards the end of herod the Great’s rule (73–4 BC; r. 47–4 BC) The hebrews revolted against Rome in AD 66, but after the Jewish war and the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, P. was governed with an iron hand by a legate of Rome. After crushing the revolt of Bar-Kochba (d. 135), the Romans re-named Judea, now annexed to Syria, ‘Syria Palaestina’ After Constantine. With the Roman Emperor *Constantine came the cessation of persecution against Christians, and Christians began to make devotional pilgrimages to Palestine. The first account of a pilgrimage in 333 describes the praetorium, Golgotha, and the holy Sepulchre nearby within an imposing basilica.

The most famous account of a journey to the holy Land, from the 4th century, was discovered in the 1880s in an incomplete codex that was transferred to Arezzo from Montecassino during the Napoleonic upheavals (*Egeria) It reveals otherwise unknown aspects of the monastic, ecclesiastical and liturgical life in Palestine of the time. In 358, the region was divided into Palaestina and Palaestina Salutaris. It was further subdivided in 400: Palaestina prima with its capital Jerusalem, Palaestina secunda with its capital Scythopolis (*Cyril of Scythopolis), and Palaestina tertia (formerly Palaestina Salutaris) with its capital Petra. The Persian incursion. The solid establishment of Chalcedonian monasticism in Palestine would render the territory impervious to anti-Chalcedonism. In 614, a Persian raid took place with the sacking of the territory, the theft of the True Cross, and the capture of Patriarch Zacharias. Persia was punished by Emperor *heraclius, who recovered the Cross of Christ in 628. Muslims. Ten years later, in 638, the followers of a new religion arrived in P. The Church of P. continued its existence under *Islam, even if no longer subject to the Byzantine emperor. From that time on the patriarch of Jerusalem was politically accountable to the Umayyad caliph (*Umayyads) The Muslims recognized the sacredness of al-Quds, the holy place, as *Jerusalem was called. Caliph al-Ḥākim (r. 1008–1020) went against traditional Islamic tolerance: he forced some Christians to convert to *Islam and destroyed churches, including that of the holy Sepulchre.

All the same, the *Crusades did not begin under the caliphate of al-Ḥākim, nor immediately afterwards. Other factors influenced the Western movement that led Pope Urban II to promote the liberation of the Christian East from Islam at the Synod of Clermont in 1095. In 1099, the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem and established the first Kingdom of Jerusalem. It lasted about a century until Saladin defeated the Crusaders in 1187. Saladin (r. 1174–1193), writing to Richard the Lionheart, explained that certain places holy to Jews and Christians were revered by Muslims as well. Jerusalem became for the Muslims a privileged place for Islamic spiritual retreat, or ḫalwa. Jerusalem returned to the hands of Crusaders thanks to the diplomatic ability of Frederick II in 1229. It may be said that the efforts of the Crusaders to liberate the Sepulchre of Christ by the use of arms with a religious aim in mind proved to be counterproductive. When they conquered the holy City, they found only Muslims and Jews there, and massacred them, conceding safe passage only to the Fatimid governor Iftihar and his bodyguard. Once they formed their kingdom, the Crusaders allowed local Christians to flock into the city, while permitting only a handful of Jews to return. Benjamin of Tudela, a Castilian Jewish rabbi, who returned to Spain in 1172 via Palestine during the time of the First Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, refers to the presence of few Jews in the city, who were primarily engaged in the trade of dyeing. °Mamelukes. In 1244, a Turkish expedition sacked Jerusalem, and from that time on the centre of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem became St John of Acre. It did not help that the Mongols occupied *Baghdad in 1258 and murdered the Muslim caliph.

The Sultan Baibars defeated the Mongols at ʻAyn Ǧalūt in Palestine. By now the Crusaders could not even dream of an alliance with the Mongols, who then converted to *Islam themselves. St John of Acre, the last Crusader bastion in Palestine, fell in 1291. The idea of a Crusade in the West was now directed against the Turks. The Mameluke rule was to last until 1517, a period in which Christians were tolerated but heavily taxed. Under the Ottomans. A long period of the history of Palestine is concurrent with the Ottoman era, which lasted for four centuries, from 1517 to 1917. Certain features of the presentday situation cannot be understood without taking into account the status quo that was codified under the Ottoman Empire. The Turkish system of legal recognition of a community, or *millet, by means of a signed decree carried with it a certain degree of bureaucracy and also of bribes which in Turkish are called baksheesh (bakšīš), a word used throughout the Near East. The same system also functioned for the awarding of control over the Christian holy Places. In fact, the signed decree issued in February 1852 by the sultan Abdul Mejid regarding the distribution of the holy Places among the various Christian confessions, confirmed by the Treaty of Paris of 1856 and again by the Treaty of Berlin of 1878, constitutes the status quo to which the current law of the State of Israel still refers. It concerns the Church of the holy Sepulchre and the monastery annexed to it, the Sanctuary of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives, and the Tomb of the Virgin in the Valley of Josaphat, along with the Church of the Nativity and Grotto in Bethlehem. The State of Israel. There are Christians in Palestine today, even though, unfortunately, their proportion has diminished since 1948.

The last sixty years have been a particularly tragic period on account of violence and bloodshed, even though all three monotheistic religions— Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – consider Palestine a privileged land. For Jews, it is the promised land and the site of the Temple and the Wailing Wall. For Christians, it is the land of the manger, and of the passion, death, burial and resurrection of Christ. For Muslims, it is the land of the Sanctuary of Abraham, Ḥaram al-Khalil, the Dome of the Rock, the night journey of the Prophet, and of the Mosque at the top of the world. For all three religions, Palestine has eschatological or final meaning. The prophets of the OT affirm this: ‘They shall live in the land that I gave to my servant Jacob, in which your ancestors lived; they and their children and their children’s children shall live there forever, and my servant David shall be their prince forever’ (Ezek 37:25) The Book of Revelation or Apocalypse re-echoes this same universal and eschatological message for Christians: ‘See, the home of God is among mortals. … Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away’ (Rev 21:3–4) For Muslims, the narrow bridge over which the believer walks to test his salvific faith.

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