The Hebrew Bible, the primary source for the history of Judaism, is a text composed centuries after the Prophet Moses. Therefore, the history and events narrated in the Bible are, in general, the story, legends and hopes of the people of the Kingdom of Judah, which existed as a regional principality that was abolished in the sixth century B.C.
The Kingdom of Judah, which never had an effective presence in the Middle East, maintained its existence through alliances with the Egyptians, Assyrians and Babylonians, the regional powers of the time. With the defeat of the rival northern Israelite principality of the same religion in the north by the Assyrians in the eighth century B.C., a significant population of the region would defect to the southern principality of Judah. Thus, the principality of Judah, which is widely known as the Kingdom of Judah today, would become the sole country of the followers of the religion of Moses, giving them sole authority over the interpretation and representation of the religion, hence the heavy presence in the Jewish Bible of texts criticizing the northern principality of Israel and its leadership.
However, the Kingdom of Judah, which was first dealt a major blow when it broke its treaty with the Egyptians, would later be completely wiped out when the Babylonians invaded its territory in the sixth century B.C. Thus, the people of Judah, formerly known as Hebrews, along with the elite of the society exiled to Babylon, would take the name Judahites, or Jews.
The Torah and the other books of the prophets that make up the Hebrew Bible, recompiled in the hands of the Jews under these circumstances, was transformed from a religion centered on the consent of God as preached by Moses into a book that tells the history of the founding of the principality of Judah, its destruction and the hope of its restoration. Thus, it can be said that the events narrated in the Jewish Bible are composed of the common sacred history accepted during the period of the principality of Israel, and the history of the Judeans themselves, which was added to it later on and made the core of the text.
Therefore, when one reads the Jewish Bible, one should not lose sight of the fact that it is composed of different layers in which different events from these different periods are described. Accordingly, the basis of the idea and belief in the biblical expectation of the Messiah, the savior who will come in the end times, is the expectation of the re-establishment of the principality described as the state of Judah. The belief in the Promised Land also expresses the hope of a return to the lands of this lost principality. Again, the fact that the borders of the Promised Land were specified differently to the Prophet Abraham and to Isaac, Jacob and Moses is a result of the compilation of texts from different periods.
The Judeans would interpret their expulsion from this "holy" land, which they believed had been brought to them under the leadership of Moses and settled by subsequent tribal leaders and commanders, as the consequences of their sin against God. According to them, the settlement of this land by their spiritual ancestor Abraham was the result of a covenant with God.
In the book of Genesis, the first part of the Torah, God asks Abraham to leave the Chaldean city of Ur, where he lives and where the Chaldeans do not give him peace, and go to and settle in an undesignated land, which is "the land of Canaan," today's Palestine, where he can live in peace. However, God tells Abraham to fulfill certain conditions in return for being in the land that God has promised to him and his descendants.
According to the covenant God made with Abraham, under which God promised that he and his descendants would live in that land, Abraham and his descendants would recognize God alone, obey his commandments and his law, and every male would be circumcised. The covenant would later be renewed with Moses and Joshua and later, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph. God would remind them repeatedly in the Bible to follow the laws and to be a people who abstain from sin. As long as the Israelites observe the Torah's commandments, Yahweh will take them as his people and be their God (Exodus, 6/7; Leviticus, 26/12).
It is therefore a "holy" land, free from all evil, which must not be defiled with the dirt of sin. Living in the holy land required the fulfillment of certain conditions. The Jews did not see the land they lived in as a 'land' inherited from their ancient ancestors who lived there in prehistory. It was the land that had been sanctified by a covenant between God and their spiritual ancestor Abraham. Moses had brought them out of Egypt to live in this holy land. Indeed, they were to live in this land.
Because they lacked the spiritual competence to live in that land, they could only enter it after they were cleansed of their sins and qualified to live in there. God made a covenant not only with Abraham but also with his son Isaac and his son Jacob under these conditions.
This understanding was adopted in the Talmud, the holy book of the Jews after the Torah, and was similarly accepted by Jewish scholars from the Middle Ages to the early 20th century. Jewish scholars unanimously agree that the promise of return to the land in question will be realized under the leadership of the Messiah when the Jews are spiritually pure enough to return there. Otherwise, a mass exodus would be considered a grave sin that would lead to catastrophic consequences and God's punishment. Therefore, the idea of establishing a country or a state in the modern sense in this "holy" land has always been opposed by Jewish scholars. When the Zionists invoked this belief in "the promised holy land" to realize their own political idea of establishing the "State of Israel," they faced the greatest backlash from the traditional clergy.
The biblical boundaries of the "promised land" in the covenant with the Prophet Abraham was "the land of Canaan." Yet these boundaries were first extended to "the region from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates," and then even to the whole world, as the covenant with the prophet Moses "all the land where the sole of your foot shall tread shall be yours" puts it, provided, they worship God and obey his commandments.
Therefore, as the Jewish researcher Yakov M. Rabkin has pointed out, the borders of the state, which the Zionist ideology has from time to time presented as the borders of the Promised State, have been recognized as an inversion of the Jewish religious understanding of the "holy land." From the very beginning, the Zionist ideology's use of the religious texts of the Jewish religious community as a basis for its worldly ideology has been recognized by the Jewish clergy, on whose behalf it claims to act, as a gross heresy and a distortion of religious references.
