Known by millions around the world as ‘the Holy Land’, Israel is an exceptional country. The story of this land and its people is truly like nowhere else on earth. 

The first five books of the Bible itself are about the origins and cosmology of the ‘people of Israel’, the Jews, from around 2000BC.

Fleeing slavery to conquer and settle in Canaan (broadly the same land as modern Israel), Jewish culture evolved around worship at their Temple in Jerusalem, built around 1000BC. Several attempts by foreign powers to eradicate Israel ended in failure, until in AD135, after some 70 years of war with Jewish rebels, the Romans destroyed Jerusalem, expelled the Jews, and renamed Israel as ‘Palestine’.