If Elijah had been on this Palestine pier in 1948, this British guard would have called him a Palestinian. (Life magazine photo by Dmitri Kessel)
It’s a fun story:
About 1925 BC, the Lord told Abraham, “To your descendants I have given…” (Genesis 15:18) the land called Canaan.
About 1300 BC the Lord told Joshua (1:2), “Go over … to the land I am giving … the children of Israel.” When these children arrived, they fought Goliath and his relatives, the Philistines.
What was it called now?
In 70 AD, the Romans razed Jerusalem, exiled most Jews from Israel to Europe, and re-named the land Philistia. The poorest Jews remained, and some straggled back to their land.
The name Philistia held for centuries. But, beginning in 1882, large groups of Jews returned to the land.
In the 1940s, Palestine’s British rulers called their Jewish subjects “Palestinians.”
On May 14, 1948, the 716,700 Jews in “Palestine” re-declared themselves a nation called Israel.
In 2022, the 7,069,000 Jews in Elijah’s old haunts call the land as he did–Israel.
