Israel & Lebanon Share a Long, Complicated History
The two nations share a legacy of conquests, occupations, and perseverance.
Israel and Lebanon have a very long relationship with intertwined fates. This has been true for thousands of years.
The land of Canaan refers to what would become Lebanon as well as Israel. Their languages were very similar, their two alphabets almost identical. Both the Phoenician alphabet and the old Hebrew alphabet (which was replaced in ancient times) developed from an older Canaanite Semitic script. The Phoenician alphabet would inspire other alphabets throughout the world: through Greek would come most of the writing systems of Europe, through Aramaic most of those of Asia. The Phoenician civilization would develop out of the northern Canaanite culture of what we call today Lebanon.
Interestingly the Aramaic alphabet basically became the Hebrew letters we all recognize, the Hebrew of the Torah, Bible, Talmud, Siddur and Israel today — that is, the medieval and modern Hebrew alphabet (replacing the old paleo-Hebrew alphabet).
One of the flourishing cities of the Phoenicians was Tyre (Sidon, Byblos and Beruit being three other city-states). King Hiram of Tyre became an ally of King Solomon. Together they sent a merchant fleet into the Red Sea and across the Indian Ocean to far off destinations. Hiram donated many of the famed cedars of Lebanon for the construction of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, built by Solomon in the 10th century BCE.
In the northern kingdom of Israel in the ninth century BCE lived a vacillating monarch named Ahab who was controlled by his Phoenician wife and queen, Jezebel. She consistently encouraged the forces and priests of Baal as we read in the Book of Kings in the Hebrew Bible. Opposing her at every turn was the prophet, Elijah.
The Phoenicans were disunited; like the Greeks, their civilization was composed of city states. Largely they were conquered, like the Israelites and Judeans, by the same empires: Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, Greece/Macedonia and Rome over a 1,000-year period. Eventually, the Christain Byzantine Empire would control both Lebanon and the Land of Israel for hundreds of years, beginning in the 300s of the common era. In the seventh century would begin a long period of Arab rule for both the land of Israel and for Lebanon: the Rashidun, Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, followed by the Mameluks — eight centuries of Islamic rule broken by a period of Crusader domination in the medieval period, again in both countries.
Eventually, both Lebanon and the Land of Israel would fall to the Ottoman Turks in the early 16th century. The Ottoman sultans would rule for about 400 years until the end of the first world war.
Lebanon is an unusual Middle Eastern country in that Christians are prominent in the government and culture. The Maronite Church, an Eastern church in communion with the Roman Catholic Church, took refuge in the Lebanon mountains more than 16 centuries ago. Even after the Muslim conquests, the Christian enclave in the mountains persisted. The white capped appearance of these mountains gave Lebanon its name: the white (land), referring to its Semitic heritage, from the root “l-b/v-n,” as in Hebrew, meaning “white.”
In the Land of Israel, the Jews also lived continuously throughout the long periods of Arab, Crusader, and Ottoman rule, as well as the League of Nations mandate in the early 1920s. The Jews never attained self-rule under the Ottoman Empire as the Maronites eventually did but would, of course, eventually establish the Jewish State after World War II, the Holocaust, and many decades of great effort.
As we pray for a short war and a just peace between Israel and Lebanon, we reflect on a long shared history (as with Jordan), of conquests, occupations and perseverance through thousands of years. And as was the case between Israel and Jordan also, we hope soon for a lasting understanding between two proud, ancient and linked cultures.
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