A young Hebrew man named Abraham lived in the city of Ur. It was a modern city for its time with plumbing and many other conveniences. Abraham lived there with his wife, father and extended family. It came the time for Abraham to leave the city and move to land near the Jordan River, in the land that is now called Israel. It is understood that Abraham was following the direction of his God.

Abraham and his family traveled for quite some time. There was no transportation then as there is today. They had to walk and they didn't have any relatives waiting there to put them up for the night. They were sojourners in a strange land.

A period of time passed when Abraham and his wife had no children. A woman of that culture considered being barren as the worst thing that could befall her. According to an ancient custom, Abraham's wife advised her husband to give her a child by her housemaid. Abraham complied with his wife's request and the maid became pregnant.

At the appointed time for the child to be born, he was given the name of Ishmael. The descendants of Ishmael still live in the area of what is known as Palestine. But what does this have to do with Israel, you might ask? That is a good question and the answer explains a lot about modern events.

Some years after the birth of Ishmael, Abraham's wife became pregnant and she too had a son. He was given the name of Isaac and his parents loved him very much. Abraham's wife didn't want her maid's son to share the family inheritance, so she asked that the young man and his mother be sent away. Abraham complied. The Hebrew people now had an enemy in the land.

When Isaac was about forty years old, his mother had died and Abraham was very old, Isaac got married. His wife had moved to the area from the place of Abraham's beginning, from the people who were his relatives.

Isaac and his wife had two sons, twins. They named them Esau and Jacob. Esau was born first and would have received two portions of his father's inheritance as was the custom at the time. Because of the lives they led, and the beliefs they held, Isaac's wife arranged for Jacob to get his brother's inheritance. This led to enmity between the two brothers and Jacob fled the area in order to stay alive. Jacob now had an enemy as had his father. His own twin brother hated him as Ishmael had hated Isaac.

Jacob went to live with the relatives of his mother. As it turned out, he took two women as his wives. By one wife he had several sons. By the younger sister of this wife, who in fact was his second wife, he had two sons. Both wives gave him their housemaids as women with whom to have more children. In all, Jacob had twelve sons and one daughter.

During this time, Jacob was given, by his God, the name Israel. Thus he and his offspring were the beginning of the people known as the Israelites. Each of his twelve sons was the patriarchal head of a tribe, thus they were known as the twelve tribes of Israel.

From Abraham, to Isaac and then to Jacob, we follow the earliest history of the nation of Israel. They and their offspring lived in the land for hundreds of years until the destruction of their temple and city by the Roman armies. This tragedy led to the disbursement of the peoples to many countries, near and far away from their homeland.

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