Not long ago, a secular Israeli friend tried to explain why, after building a successful life in North America, he was still thinking about going “back home” to Israel.
He is not religious. He is not part of a settler movement. He is weary of war and politics. Yet he told me, almost apologetically, “I don’t even know why. It’s like there’s a magnet. I just feel I belong there.”
That “magnet” is everything and nothing at once: family, Hebrew, history, trauma, culture — and, if Scripture is to be believed, the hand of God.
What makes his story so striking, especially for readers of ALL ISRAEL NEWS, is that the Jewish people are returning to their ancient land largely in unbelief. Most Israeli Jews today do not confess Yeshua as Messiah, and many are secular or loosely observant. And yet, after two thousand years of dispersion, they are home again — in roughly the same numbers as before the Holocaust, and on the same narrow strip of land the Bible calls Israel.
For many evangelicals who love Israel and follow the headlines — from the trauma of October 7 to the ongoing war of words and rockets — that combination of return and unbelief can feel confusing. For the prophets, it was expected.
This is not a glitch in God’s plan. It is part of the script.
A demographic miracle in the shadow of the Shoah
On the eve of the Holocaust in 1939, there were about 16.6 million Jews worldwide. The vast majority lived in Europe. Six years later, after the Nazi death machine and its collaborators did their work, only about 11 million remained. More than one-third of the entire Jewish people had been murdered.
Nearly eight decades on, the global Jewish population has only recently approached that pre-war peak. A 2023 analysis by the Jewish Agency for Israel and reporting in the Times of Israel estimate about 15.7 million Jews worldwide, with roughly 7.2 million living in Israel — about 46% of world Jewry.
Later updates show the trend continuing: On the eve of Rosh Hashanah 2024, the global Jewish population was estimated at 15.8 million, with about 7.3 million Jews in Israel and 6.3 million in the United States — again, roughly 46% of world Jewry in Israel.
In 1939, by contrast, only about 3% of the world’s Jews lived in what was then British Mandate Palestine — fewer than half a million people. Today, close to half live in the modern State of Israel. According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, summarized by Israel’s official portal and outlets such as i24News, the country’s population recently stood at around 9.9 million, including over 7.4 million Jews.
Within a single lifetime, the Jewish people have gone from being a mostly European people, with a small foothold in the land of Israel, to being a people whose largest and most dynamic community is back in that land. Israel is now the demographic engine of the Jewish future.
No honest historian in 1939 — or even 1945 — would have predicted that outcome. Yet the Hebrew prophets, writing 2,500–2,700 years ago, described a future in which God would scatter Israel to the ends of the earth and then bring them home again.
The prophets saw this second homecoming
Isaiah takes Moses’ theme and looks far beyond the Babylonian exile. He foresees a future in which the Lord:
“will raise a signal for the nations
and will assemble the banished of Israel,
and gather the dispersed of Judah
from the four corners of the earth.”
— Isaiah 11:12
This is not simply the return from Babylon, which involved a relatively small number of exiles returning from a single empire. Isaiah speaks of a worldwide regathering “from the four corners of the earth,” tied closely to the Messianic reign of Isaiah 11:1–10.
Ezekiel develops the same theme in unforgettable images.
In Ezekiel 36, the Lord promises to bring Israel back to their land, to multiply the people, and to rebuild the ruined cities. Only after they are back in the land does He promise to sprinkle clean water on them, give them a new heart, and put His Spirit within them (Ezek. 36:24–27).
Then comes the valley of dry bones in Ezekiel 37. Ezekiel sees scattered bones come together, then sinews and flesh cover them. Only later does the breath (ruach) of life enter them so that they stand as a vast living army.
Jewish and Christian readers alike have long seen in this a two-stage restoration:
A physical regathering of the Jewish people to their land while still in unbelief — bones and sinews, a national body without spiritual life.
A spiritual renewal when God breathes His Spirit upon them and brings them to faith.
Look at modern Israel through that lens:
A people regathered from “the four corners of the earth,”
In a land long desolate and contested,
Speaking ancient Hebrew as a modern tongue,
Yet mostly secular or non-Messianic.
It looks suspiciously like the first stage Ezekiel described.
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