Jack Kinsella
By every measurable historical standard, the city of Jerusalem should have fallen into oblivion centuries ago. The city was destroyed in AD 70 by the Romans and its founders and traditional inhabitants were killed or fled into exile in foreign lands.
It has no natural wealth. It has no coastline. It sits inconveniently upon a mountain. It overlooks nothing of strategic military value.
It is on no ancient trade route. The King’s Highway of David’s time ran north and south through modern Jordan. Jerusalem was well off the beaten path — folks didn’t pass through Jerusalem on their way to somewhere else — Jerusalem was the end of the line.
Like other historical ‘end of the line’ cities, once its reason to exist was extinguished by the destruction of its native population, so should its history.
The once-great city of Babylon, for example, is little more than a living museum, devoid of influence or even much interest outside scholarly circles.
Over the centuries, it has been fought over by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, Ptolemies, Seleucids, Romans, Byzantines, Persians, Arabs, Seljuks, Crusaders, Mongols, Mamelukes, by the Turks, the British, Jordan and most recently, by those Jordanians who became ‘Palestinians’ after Jordan’s defeat in the 1967 War.
Jerusalem remains one of the most contested cities on earth to this day. That list doesn’t include the approximately two hundred million Islamic fundamentalists or Islamic states like Iran or Saudi Arabia who have conducted a decades-long shadow war to ‘liberate’ the city from Jewish control.
Despite two thousand years of war aimed at destroying the Jews and seizing their city, in this generation, the Jews again inhabit an undivided Jerusalem.
“And they shall fall by the edge of the sword, and shall be led away captive into all nations: and Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled.” (Luke 21:24)
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