In 1899, Mark Twain published an essay in Harper’s Magazine that ended with a question he never answered. He listed the empires that rose and vanished, Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome, and then turned to the Jews. “All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”
Twain was a sharp observer, but he looked in the wrong places. He searched history for the answer. The answer sits in the first book of the Bible, in a story every Bible reader knows: the long, painful wait of the mothers of Israel.
God promises Abraham a nation. He takes him outside on a clear night and tells him to count the stars: “So shall your offspring be” (Genesis 15:5). Abraham is already past seventy-five when he first hears the promise of a great nation. Ten years go by, then twenty, and the tent stays quiet. By the time God announces that Sarah will have a son, Abraham is ninety-nine and Sarah is nearly ninety.
The next generation repeats the story. Isaac marries Rebecca at forty and becomes a father at sixty. Twenty years of waiting. Then Jacob marries Rachel, the woman he loves, and she waits too, year after year, until “God remembered Rachel” (Genesis 30:22). Three of the four mothers of Israel faced the same struggle.
God selects one family out of all humanity to become His nation, a people meant to outnumber the stars. Then, generation after generation, He holds back the one thing a family needs to become a nation. Why would God build His people on families that could not get started?
The Sages offer one answer. Rabbi Yitzchak teaches: “Why were our forefathers barren? Because the Holy One, Blessed be He, desires the prayers of the righteous” (Talmud, Yevamot 64a). The Bible supports him.
The waiting drew these families into prayer.
But that does not explain why the pattern repeats three times at the very foundation of a nation. For that, look at the brothers who never waited at all.
Ishmael arrived without delay. The angel describes him before birth as “a wild ass of a man” (Genesis 16:12), and he grows up in the wilderness and becomes a bowman. Esau came into the world red, hairy and ready, and “became a skillful hunter, a man of the outdoors” (Genesis 25:27). Both men hunt and live off the land, and both thrive by their own strength. Other cultures would have made them heroes.
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of Britain, saw this contrast as deliberate. Ishmael and Esau belong to nature, while Isaac and Jacob would not exist if nature had its way, and neither would the people descended from them.
This message carried enormous weight in the ancient world. The Canaanites worshiped Baal, the storm god who sent the rains and made the fields yield. In their eyes, nature itself was divine, and every good harvest proved the gods’ power. The God of Abraham rejected that whole picture. He did not live inside nature. He created it and stood above it, and He chose to found His nation in the place where nature said no.
He said so directly. When Sarah laughed at the idea of a son in her old age, God answered with a question of His own:
The prophets saw the same pattern play out on the scale of a nation. Centuries later, with Jerusalem in ruins and the people scattered in exile, Isaiah reached back to the image of the barren woman and applied it to Zion herself: “Shout, O barren one, you who bore no child! Shout aloud for joy, you who did not travail! For the children of the wife forlorn shall outnumber those of the espoused, said the LORD” (Isaiah 54:1).
The empty tent of Sarah became the empty land of Israel, and the prophet promised the same ending. God would fill what nature left empty.
Ezekiel saw a valley of dry bones and heard God ask him, “O mortal, can these bones live?” (Ezekiel 37:3). By every natural measure, the answer was no. Nations that lose their homeland disappear into the peoples around them. The Philistines, the Moabites and the Hittites all did. A nation scattered across the earth for nearly two thousand years does not come home, revive its ancient language and rebuild its capital.
In 1948, about 650,000 Jews lived in the newly declared State of Israel. Today the Jewish population of Israel exceeds seven million. In June 1967, with the armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan massed on its borders and Arab leaders promising to destroy it, the tiny state not only survived but retook the Old City of Jerusalem, nineteen years after Jordan expelled its Jews, and returned the Temple Mount to Jewish hands for the first time in nineteen centuries. Paratrooper commander Motta Gur radioed headquarters with words no Jewish soldier could say for almost two thousand years: “The Temple Mount is in our hands.”
Which returns us to Mark Twain. He searched for the secret of Jewish survival in the qualities of the people, their energy, their intelligence, their stubbornness. Sarah, Rebecca and Rachel give the real answer. From its first generation, God built the Jewish people so that nature could never explain their existence. The strong brothers founded tribes that faded into history. The children of the empty tents became an eternal nation, and they are still here, back in their land, exactly as the prophets said they would be.
That answer reaches past the Jewish people. Sarah laughed because she knew her own body and her own age, and by every reasonable calculation she was right. God did not argue with her calculation. He simply asked whether anything is too wondrous for Him, and a year later she held her son. Anyone who has stood in front of a closed door and done the math can take the same question to heart. The God of Abraham specializes in the impossible, and He has spent four thousand years proving it through one small, stubborn, undefeated nation.
Mark Twain marveled at Jewish survival but never found its source. Part of the answer lies in the Sages, the teachers who kept faith and learning alive through exile, persecution and return. Our Bible Plus course, Jewish History Through the Lives of Israel’s Sages, tells the story of Jewish resilience through the people who led it.
