A little about Israel

Starting with some raw numbers, the country of Israel is about 10,425 square miles in size and stretches 263 miles from north to south and ranges in width from 71 miles to just 9.3 miles at its narrowest point.  In relative terms that most reading this blog will understand, Israel is just slightly smaller than Massachusetts. 

Getting a little off topic, it’s always interesting* to compare the sizes of countries I visit to the various states in the United States.  Israel, a country smack dab in the middle of almost everything that goes on in the Middle East is smaller than the 44^th largest state in the U.S.

Israel makes up for their lack of size somewhat in the number of people living there.  A 2013 estimate indicated just over 8 million residents.  In comparison, Massachusetts counted 6.6 million people in their 2012 population estimate.  That’s a little surprising to me given the amount of desert and how intense the summer heat can be.

Getting back to geography, Israel is smaller than 10 of the 18 countries that make up the Middle East.  In case you’re wondering, Bahrain, Cyprus, Northern Cyprus, Kuwait, Lebanon, Palestine, and Qatar are smaller than Israel.  The Middle Eastern countries larger than Israel are Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.

The country is considered to be a part of Western Asia and is on the south-eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea.  In addition to the water on its west, it shares land borders with Lebanon to the north, Syria in the northeast, Jordan and Palestine in the east, Egypt and the Gaza Strip on the southwest, and the Gulf of Aqaba in the Red Sea to the south.

Early human tool artifacts dating back over 1 million years have been discovered in what is the current state of Israel.  The earliest written evidence of classical Hebrew dates to about 1000 BCE** and written using a Paleo-Hebrew alphabet.  Around the 5^th century BCE, the Jews began to adopt the Aramaic alphabet, which eventually led to the present day Hebrew alphabet, which consists of 22 consonants and is written from right to left.

Throughout history, Israel has fallen under the ruling authority of numerous dynasties – the Babylonians, Persians, and Romans being among the early big names.  During the Middle Ages the Arabs ruled a while then of course the Crusaders stopped by for a bit until the region was conquered by the Ottoman Empire.  The area came under Turkish rule in 1517 and lasted until 1920.

That gets us to the early 20^th century.  I’ll add another post shortly with more history that will get us a bit closer to present day.  See you soon.

Tim

*Interesting to me.  Remember this is my blog

**BCE stands for Before Christian/Common Era and is an alternative to BC