Two weeks ago I wrote a short post called “God Told Me to Take Your Home,” and in it I said that what Israel is doing in the West Bank and Lebanon is “kind of like” what the Hebrew Bible describes in Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Joshua. I have been thinking about that “kind of” ever since. It was a hedge, and I don’t like hedges — not in other people’s writing and not in mine. It is either like it or it isn’t. So here is the longer version, with the homework done first. It is like it. But the reason why is not the one most people expect, and it starts with an uncomfortable question: did the original conquest even happen?

Start with what the Bible actually claims, because the claim is the whole subject. In the story, the land of Canaan is not empty and it is not unclaimed. People live there — had lived there for generations. God promises the land to Abraham’s descendants anyway, and when the time comes, the books of Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Joshua describe the taking of it as an act of obedience: God assigned the land, so Israel was to march in and possess it, city by city. The moral logic inside the text is plain. The possession is justified because God said so. The people already living there are not consulted, because in the text’s own terms they don’t have to be. Their title doesn’t count. God’s does.

Now the record. The Hebrew Bible was written down — composed, edited, assembled — mostly between the 8th and 2nd centuries BCE, which is centuries after the conquest it describes. And when archaeologists went looking for that conquest, the ground declined to cooperate. Kathleen Kenyon’s excavations at Jericho in the 1950s dated the city’s great destruction to around 1550 BCE, the end of the Middle Bronze Age — and found Jericho small or unoccupied in the Late Bronze Age, when Joshua would have needed a walled city to conquer. Radiocarbon work since has backed her dates. Ai is worse: at et-Tell, the site identified with Ai, there is no Late Bronze Age city at all. The excavators’ own conclusion was that the conquest story in Joshua 8 “cannot be based on historical reality.” Then there is the problem of scale, the one that first caught my eye. The text fields armies in the tens and hundreds of thousands. The “cities” being conquered ran about two or three hectares — a few hundred people inside the walls, at most. You could not fit the biblical host into the biblical towns. The demography alone falsifies the story as written. The mainstream view among archaeologists today, including plenty who are not hostile to the Bible, is that there was no single conquering invasion at all: Israel emerged gradually, largely from within Canaan’s own population. Egypt, which kept records on everything, has left us exactly one early mention — the Merneptah Stele, about 1207 BCE, naming Israel as a people already in Canaan. Of a 400-year captivity in Egypt and a mass exodus, Egypt’s records say nothing at all. The one famous artifact on the other side, the Tel Dan inscription naming a “House of David,” dates from roughly a century and a half after David’s supposed reign and proves, at most, that a dynasty carried his name. Of Solomon — his great court, his foreign marriages, his diplomacy — no inscription, no letter, no mention exists anywhere outside the Bible itself. Some of these people may well have been real. The bulk of the stories, I have come to think, are of Israel’s own creation: some history mixed in with some fantasy, and less history than I once assumed.

Here is why any of that matters, and it is not to score points off an old book. A claim does not need its event to be real in order to work. “Our ancestors conquered this land” is one kind of sentence — history, checkable, and in this case it fails the check. “Our book says God gave us this land” is a different kind of sentence entirely. Archaeology cannot touch it, because it was never really about what happened. It is about what was written. And sacred history does not have to be literal to be politically powerful — to be fair, many believers will tell you exactly that themselves. The claim in the text survives the collapse of the event. That is the thing to watch, because the claim is still in use.

Which brings us to the modern use, and here I want to quote before I judge. In 1977, the Likud party — the party of every recent Israeli government that matters here — wrote into its founding platform: “The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable… Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” Read that again. Between the sea and the Jordan — the whole land — as a matter of eternal, indisputable right. That is 1977, stated in plain language, nearly fifty years ago, long before anyone was chanting the Palestinian version of the phrase. In 1999 the same party’s platform declared that its government “flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river.” And in July 2024 the Knesset itself voted, 68 to 9, that it “firmly opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state west of the Jordan,” in what the resolution itself calls “the heart of the Land of Israel.” In all the years between, that 1977 sentence has never been repudiated. I want to be careful with that word, because silence is not the same as agreement — but it is not disagreement either. A platform plank left standing for half a century, through government after government run by the party that wrote it, is that party’s position until the party says otherwise, out loud. The burden of taking it back sits with the people who put it there. Nobody has picked it up.

And it is not only platform language. In 2017, Bezalel Smotrich — then a member of the Knesset, now Israel’s finance minister and the man effectively running civilian affairs in the West Bank — published his “Decisive Plan” for the Palestinians, and he built it openly on the Book of Joshua. As he presented it, drawing on the old commentaries, Joshua sent the people of Canaan three choices: leave, stay as resident aliens under a standing inferiority — “according to Jewish law there must always be some inferiority,” he explained — or resist, in which case the army “will know what to do.” His stated purpose was “to erase all Palestinian national hope.” That is not a politician borrowing a Bible verse for a speech. That is a governing official modeling twenty-first-century policy on the conquest narrative itself, by name. In Lebanon the same whole-land logic runs more on security arguments than on scripture, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise — but in the West Bank, the deed being waved is not a metaphor. It is the text.

Fairness requires a paragraph here, because not every Israeli argument is a biblical one. Israel also rests its case on the 1947 United Nations partition vote — mostly agreed to by the world, rejected by the Arab states, which is what started the first war — on the wars themselves, on security, on purchase and continuous presence; plenty of Israelis are secular and argue law and history, not Genesis. And the world had its reasons in 1947, post-Holocaust guilt plausibly among them, though nobody can prove a motive. Palestinians, for their part, make their own ancient and sacred claims to the same ground. All of that is true, and none of it changes the subject of this post, which is narrow: the specific claim that a book written by a people’s own ancestors, between roughly 800 and 200 BCE, assigns them land that other people live on now — and that this assignment settles the question.

So, the verdict. The real problem is not the conquest. The conquest, as written, mostly didn’t happen — the walls weren’t there, the cities weren’t there, the armies couldn’t have fit. The real problem is the modern use of the claim: a story of doubtful history, written down centuries later by the claimants themselves, carried into the present as a title deed. Back in May I wrote about a man named Jeff who might show up at your door one day with an old family paper, explaining that your house is actually his. I ended that post by noting that when God gave the Hebrews the land, he did not arrive carrying a deed. Five months on, I would put it this way: the only deed in this case was never filed with the county. It’s in a book they created for themselves, over two thousand years ago — and people are being put out of their homes today on the strength of it. In that same May post I wrote, “The weapons are different, the goals are the same.” Having now done the reading I should have done before writing either post, I see no reason to take a word of that back.