#1 The Truth Behind Israel's Claims to Israel - Who Owns (or should have rights) to the Holy Land?

The biblical figure of Joseph is entirely fictional. Some scholars have referred to the Joseph story7 as the first novel ever written. Its purpose was to join up the patriarchal traditions with the Mosaic tradition in order to form one continuous narrative. There probably was an historical Moses, for his name is Egyptian and not Hebrew. He probably did lead a migration back to Canaan but it was relatively small, say, about five thousand people. On entering the Holy Land they linked up with their fellow Hebrews and made a tribal treaty with them; memories of this amphictyony, as it technically called, are found in the covenant described in Joshua, chapter 24.

But these early tribes did not annihilate the Canaanites, as the book of Joshua implies, though there were some fierce local skirmishes.

SHOOT: It is a fascinating area of research, and striking that this question is seldom asked. Who owns the right to the Holy Land historically? In answering this question, one needs to have a contemporary mindset as well. If we say the original inhabitants have the highest rights to land, then America should be handed back to the Native Americans, South Africa to the Bushmen etc. Of course we know that to a large extent when it comes to land ownership, might is (or becomes) right. As it turns out, Jews have some claim to Israel, but by no means an exclusive claim. This is the first in a series of 10 posts on the subject.

Read the next 'claim' here or click on the label below:claims to holy land.

clipped from www.westarinstitute.org Who Owns the Holy Land? What is the Holy Land? We start with the Israeli claim to the possession of the Holy Land. The Holy Land is a relatively small piece of territory. In ancient times it used to be called Canaan and was said to stretch from Dan to Beersheba. At Dan, the northern boundary, the chief source of the Jordan river pours out as a large spring from the foot of the snow-capped Mt. Hermon. Beersheba in the south was on the edge of the desert which stretched all the way to the Gulf of Aqaba, and joins the Sinai Peninsula. Since special rights of ownership are accorded these days to indigenous people; so we should first ask: Who were the indigenous people of the Holy Land? No one can say! Being the bridge between Africa and Asia this land was inhabited from very early times. But the earliest inhabitants of whom we have any historical knowledge were the Canaanites. They were a Semitic people, basically of the same stock as the Phoenicians, who occupied ancient Lebanon.