The Jewish patriarch Jacob was renamed “Israel” twice in Genesis: during his repatriation into the Holy Land promised to his forefathers in the aftermath of an angelic wrestling encounter in Chapter 32 and again by Divine pronouncement in Chapter 35. The modern Jewish State of Israel was so named only once, during the throes of its birth in May of 1948. What does “Israel” mean and why should we care?
There were many contenders for the name of the new country, but the frontrunners were some version of “Zion” or “Judea” – Biblical references to the geography of the Holy Land which had emotional currency with a Western world, then still sensitive to the gravity of scriptural terms.
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