The land of Israel. The most hotly contested region in the world. The Jewish people say it is theirs, and the Arabs say it is theirs. Yet God tells us clearly to whom it belongs: In the last days, He says, “I will also gather all nations, and bring them down to the Valley of Jehoshaphat; and I will enter into judgment with them there on account of My people, My heritage Israel, whom they [the Gentiles] have scattered among the nations; they have also divided up My land” (Joel 3:2, emphasis added; cf. 2 Chr. 7:20; Isa. 14:25; Jer. 2:7; 16:18; Ezek. 36:5; 38:16; Joel 1:6).
The land belongs to Jehovah, and He says He has given it to the Jewish people as an inheritance forever (Gen. 17:8; 48:4; Ezek. 36:24; 37:14).
Interestingly, this tiny slice of real estate surrounded by enormous Muslim countries has prospered only under the Jewish people. Under the Babylonians, it sat desolate, the dwelling place of jackals and hyenas, while the Israelites lived in captivity for 70 years in the sixth century BC. After the Israelites returned from exile, they rebuilt Jerusalem and its walls, and the situation improved. But in AD 70, the Romans sacked Jerusalem and denuded the land.
Some of the trees were used to construct a framework that was placed around the second Temple and set on fire, causing the Temple to explode into bits. Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, a Jerusalemite who was there, described the devastation in his book The Jewish War: “And now the Romans . . . had cut down all the trees that were in the country that adjoined to the city, and that for ninety furlongs [11 miles] round about, as I have already related. And truly the very view itself of the country was a melancholy thing; for those places which were before adorned with trees and pleasant gardens were now become a desolate country every way, and its trees were all cut down: nor could any foreigner that had formerly seen Judea and the most beautiful suburbs of the city, and now saw it as a desert, but lament and mourn sadly at so great a change.”
The land changed hands many times through the centuries, but remained ruined. When the Ottoman Turks captured it in the early 16th century, they stripped what was left, leaving only barrenness and malaria-infested swamps that were good for nothing.