One Land, Three Faiths
A closer look at the oldest history behind the newest headlines
Whenever the news turns to the Middle East, it is tempting to reach for the oldest books on the shelf and ask what they actually say. Strip away the commentary and the shared history is genuinely striking: Jewish and Islamic scripture trace this land back to the very same root story.
In Surah 5:21, the Qur’an records Moses commanding his people to enter the holy land God had assigned them. Centuries earlier in the biblical account, Genesis 13 and 15 describe Yahweh telling Abram to look north, south, east, and west, promising his descendants the whole of Canaan, from the border of Egypt to the Euphrates. Two traditions, two scriptures, one shared point of origin.
That covenant is usually dated to roughly 2000 B.C., and one detail is easy to miss: the peoples living in the land at that time — Kenites, Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Jebusites — do not include the Philistines. They had not arrived yet. Because the promise passed through Isaac rather than Ishmael, the family line eventually settled in Egypt for four centuries before returning during the Exodus, conventionally dated around 1445 B.C., though it is worth noting that a good number of scholars favor a later, thirteenth-century date instead. By the time of King David, roughly 1000 B.C., his kingdom stretched across much of that promised territory.
So where did the Philistines come from? The prophet Jeremiah, writing around 627 B.C., identifies them as migrants from Caphtor — generally understood to be Crete — who sailed across the Mediterranean and settled coastal cities such as Gaza. It is one of the better-supported theories of Philistine origin, even if archaeologists still debate whether Cyprus or Anatolia played a role as well.
From there, empire after empire rolled through the region. Babylon conquered Judah in 586 B.C. and carried its people into exile, until Cyrus of Persia permitted their return and Zerubbabel led them home by 516 B.C. — the point at which people descended from Judah began to be called, simply, Jews. Alexander the Great swept through not long after, bringing Greek rule before his death in 323 B.C., at which point his generals divided the territory among themselves.
Rome came next. Pompey took the region in 63 B.C. and imposed a heavy occupation. When the Jewish population revolted in 66 A.D., the generals Vespasian and Titus marched in, leveled Jerusalem by 70 A.D., burned the Temple, and enslaved tens of thousands. A second, larger uprising — the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132 to 135 A.D. — scattered many Jewish families across North Africa and the wider Middle East, though a Jewish presence remained on the land throughout.
The religious landscape kept shifting. Christianity spread rapidly after 33 A.D. despite persecution, and gained legal toleration under Constantine through the Edict of Milan in 313 A.D. — a separate development from his later decision, in 330 A.D., to move the imperial capital to Constantinople. By the early seventh century, a merchant named Muhammad married a wealthy widow, Khadija, in Mecca around 595 A.D. Her cousin Waraqa ibn Nawfal, a Christian familiar with scripture, was the one who reassured Muhammad after he described a revelation in a cave in 610 A.D.
Muhammad died in 632 A.D., and his successors Abu Bakr and Umar expanded Arab rule outward. By 637 A.D., Arab forces held Jerusalem. Within a generation, three major faiths — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — were sharing the same small stretch of land. Over the following centuries, continued Arab migration gradually made Arabs the demographic majority in the territory Roman maps had labeled Palestina, alongside the Jewish and Christian communities who remained.
History moves fast, and it is worth sitting with what this record actually shows: three faiths, one shared point of origin, and nearly four thousand years of overlapping claims, migrations, and returns. It is far more entangled than a headline can hold.
What it does not do, however, is settle a modern political argument. Reading a Bronze Age covenant as a verdict on twenty-first-century sovereignty is an interpretive choice — one particular argument, made by particular voices, not a plain fact the history hands us. Many serious scholars, including many within the Christian tradition itself, would not treat it as settled. The honest takeaway from this history may simply be that these three faiths belong to one another far more deeply than the evening news lets on — and that the oldest books deserve to be read carefully, not conscripted.