One hundred and nine years after Jehu became king of Israel, Tiglath-Pileser III, King of Assyria, sacked Damascus and parts of the northern kingdom. Ten years later, after a series of increasingly more serious invasions and deportations, Sargon II of Assyria captured Israel’s capital, Samaria.
The surviving southern kingdom of Judah, composed of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin (and Simeon, absorbed from Israel after its demise) as well as thousands of Levites and others who had escaped the Assyrians by fleeing south, was destroyed one hundred and thirty-six years later. The third siege* of Jerusalem by King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon in 586 BCE ended with the complete destruction of the city and the exile of tens of thousands of Jews to the land of the Chaldees.
Israel was no more.
What then of the Lord’s promises expressed over 2,500 years earlier by the prophets, Jeremiah…
So do not be afraid, Jacob my servant, do not be dismayed, Israel, declares the Lord. I will surely save you out of a distant place; your descendants from the land of their exile. Jacob will again have peace and security and no one will make him afraid. 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… In days to come you will understand this.
Jeremiah 30:10 ff
and Ezekiel…
Behold, I will take the sons of Israel from among the nations where they have gone and I will gather them from every side and bring them into their own land. And I will make them one nation in the land on the mountains of Israel. And one king will be king for all of them…
I will make a covenant of peace with them. It will be an everlasting covenant with them. And I will place them and multiply them and will set my sanctuary in their midst forever. My dwelling place also will be with them and I will be their God and they will be my people. And the nations will know that I am the Lord who sanctifies Israel, when my sanctuary is in their midst forever.
Ezekiel 37:21 ff
Over 2,000 years after these and many other similar promises had been voiced by several prophets, reformation leader Martin Luther, seeing no Israel and, one supposes, no longer holding hope that God’s word would become literally true without his assistance, followed the leads of Justyn Martyr, Hippolytus of Rome and Tertullian and replaced Israel with “the Church.”
But Israel has been restored and the words of the prophet, Zechariah, ring true…
Thus says the Lord of hosts, Old men and old women will again sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each man with his staff in his hand because of age. And the streets of the city will be filled with boys and girls playing in its streets… Behold, I am going to save my people from the land of the east and from the land of the west and I will bring them and they will live in the midst of Jerusalem and they shall be my people, and I will be their God in truth and righteousness.
Zechariah 8:4-8
We are witnesses.
*Some historians ignore the Tanach’s account in the Book of Daniel describing what would be the first siege of Jerusalem in approximately 605 BCE and therefore refer to the city’s fall to Babylon in 586 BCE as “the second deportation,” following what they agree upon as “the first deportation” in 597 BCE.