continued . . . So the future of God's people now rested with the southern kingdom of Judah, the Jews. How does this all square with the covenant made with Abraham? This covenant was to do with the land, as an unconditional and everlasting promise. The outworkings of this covenant are unchangeable, despite the coming and goings of particular inhabitants of the land. Just as the New Covenant promises us, as Christians, eventual eternal life in heaven, the personal journey is not necessarily a smooth one. So it is with the Abrahamic Covenant with the Jews. Their ultimate and rightful home is the Land of Israel, but the historical journey is a rocky one. Israel provoked the righteous judgement of God and disappear into exile, but Judah remained as a living remnant of Abraham's descendants and it is to them that we now direct our attention.

The Kings of Judah were, on the whole, a better bunch than their Israel counterparts, with a liberal seasoning of good kings, though Rehoboam was weak and managed to lose the treasures of the Temple and the royal palace to an Egyptian invader. The first good king was Asa, 'his heart was fully committed to the Lord all his life' we read in 1 Kings 15:14. His son, Jehosophat, too was a good 'un, but the following two kings, perhaps influenced by their relatives in Israel, were bad 'uns. Yet there is a continuing theme with God's treatment of the bad kings of Judah. Knowing that the Davidic line (i.e. ancestors of David) had to be kept intact both to preserve the Jewish people and to eventually produce the promised Messiah, God refused to curse the people of Judah. We read of this in 2 Kings 8:19, "Nevertheless, for the sake of his servant David, the Lord was not willing to destroy Judah. He had promised to maintain a lamp for David and his descendants for ever". There followed a few mor e good kings, although even they were flawed inasmuch as the high places, alternatives to the Temple in Jerusalem, were never removed. Then we get to a really evil one, King Ahaz. He not only sacrificed his own son to alien gods but attempted to do a deal with the Assyrians, even going as far as defiling the Temple with a pagan altar.

Perhaps the judgement that this deserved was forestalled by the actions of his successor, King Hezekiah. Here was a really good king, one who even destroyed those high places. 2 Kings 18:5 tells us that "There was no-one like him among all the kings of Judah, either before him or after him". But the Assyrians were threatening, confident after their defeat of Israel and attempted to attack Jerusalem, which was a big mistake. The angel of the Lord killed 185,000 of them in their camp and the rest withdrew to Nineveh, their tails firmly between their legs! That was the Assyrian threat seen off, but a new threat was on the horizon. Babylon was stirring.

It is hard to believe that the most godly king of Judah could have a son who was the most evil of all. Manasseh was his name and this was his catalogue of shame in his 55 year reign. He rebuilt the high places and erected a variety of altars to pagan gods, even in the Temple itself. He practiced sorcery and divination and was responsible for the shedding of much innocent blood. God declared, in 2 Kings 21:9, "Manasseh led them astray so that they did more evil than the nations the Lord had destroyed before the Israelites". God was angry and judgement was not far off now. He promises, in verse 12 that "I am going to bring such disaster on Jerusalem and Judah that the ears of everyone who hears of it will tingle".

Judgement was forestalled again by the actions of a righteous king. This was King Josiah, who read the newly-found Book of the Covenant out aloud at a meeting of the great and the good (and the bad) of the land. By doing so, he rededicated his people to God and, in return for this, was told "your eyes will not see all the disaster I am going to bring on this place" in 2 Kings 22:20. Remember, judgement was forestalled, not averted. And, about 30 years and four dodgy kings later, the Babylonians came, saw and conquered. Nebuchadnezzar lay siege on Jerusalem and, after two years, broke through. The Temple and most of Jerusalem was burned down and the people of the city, and indeed the rest of Judah (apart from some of the poorer folk left behind to work the vineyards and the fields), were led into exile, mostly to Babylon itself

The difference between this exile of Judah and the earlier exile of Israel is important. Israel was dispersed to a variety of places and, for all intents and purposes, leave the story. Judah was largely deported, as a whole, to one place, Babylon. They kept their identity, as Judeans, or Jews and this is demonstrated very ably in the Book of Daniel, which was written totally in a Babylonian context. So the Promised Land was now only sparcely populated, with refugees from elsewhere in the Assyrian empire in the north and poor farmers in the south. Jews were still in the land, but with the smallest population since the heady days of Joshua and the Israelites. God's tenants may have been largely in Babylonia at this time, but the Promised Land was still firmly locked into the eternal contract made between the Lord and Abraham.

But empires come and empires go and the mighty Babylonian empire wasn't to last long. Within fifty years, Babylon itself had fallen to the Medes and Persians and, at the order of Cyrus in the 6th Century BC, Jewish exiles were allowed back into the Promised Land, along with the captured Temple treasures. Why did he do it, this seemed an odd act from a leader of a mighty Empire? The answer is given in Ezra 1:2-3 and it shows who really is the 'Boss of history'. It reads, "This is what Cyrus king of Persia says: 'The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdom of the earth and he has appointed me to build a temple for him at Jerusalem in Judah. Anyone of his people among you - may his God be with him and let him go up to Jerusalem in Judah and build the temple of the Lord, the God of Israel, the God who is in Jerusalem'". The Second Temple was completed in 516 BC and it took twenty years to build, largely thanks to Zerubbabel.

The rest of the Babylonian refugees returned to Jerusalem, led by Ezra. Nehemiah, the cupbearer to the King, also returned and it was he who took responsibility for rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem. Ezra seemed to have been given the responsibility as spiritual advisor to the nation and he had a real job on his hands getting the people right with God, particularly as there had been many intermarriages with the other nations. But he led the people into repentance and revival, as did Nehemiah, the wall-builder. A decade later Nehemiah was recalled to Babylon and, in his absence, the people fell into their old ways - intermarriage, corruption and the like. Malachi was the latest prophet sent by God to warn and chastise His people. He was to be the last prophet of the Old Testament.

So this has been an Old Testament review of the Jews in their Promised Land, first Canaan at the time of the Exodus, then Israel and Judah, then finally as a remote outpost of the Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian empires. But at no point was this not God's land. In Leviticus 25:23 we read, "…the land is mine and you are but aliens and My tenants." Even the mighty Cyrus knew this when he stated that God was "in Jerusalem". It is God's land then, as now, but it is also Covenant land and the tenants may have occasionally been forced to sub-let, everyone who lives in His land does so only by permission from the 'Author of History', for His purposes.