At long last, an American son of Israel is freed and has returned home. Edan Alexander, a 19-year-old born in Tel Aviv and raised in New Jersey, was serving in the Israeli Defense Forces when Hamas launched the deadliest attack against the Jewish people since the Holocaust. On October 7, 2023, Hamas-led terrorists killed 1,195 in Israel, injured thousands more, and took 251 people hostage (including Alexander and several other Americans, many of whom died in Hamas custody). As the last known living American hostage, Alexander spent 584 days in Hamas captivity. During that time, millions of Americans came to recognize his name and face, which was plastered and projected on dormitory walls, temple facades, and across the halls of Congress. His safe return is a powerful symbol for more reasons than one.
At the most basic level, Alexander’s release in the lead up to President Donald Trump’s Middle East trip proved the difference that strong leadership can make in protecting the lives of Americans all around the globe. The October 7 attacks, Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan all happened on President Biden’s watch.
But the return of the last American hostage revealed something even more profound than the importance of sustained American military dominance and the willingness to use it. The human heart longs for stories of deliverance from captivity and long-awaited homecomings. All of the greatest literature of Western civilization points toward this longing. The Exodus history, held in common by Christians and Jews alike, is the quintessential tale of emancipation from bondage.
The biblical account of God’s deliverance of his people out of Egyptian captivity permeated and defined Western culture to such an extent that even some of the more secularist of America’s Founding Fathers sought to understand the American Revolution in terms of the story of the Exodus. A revolutionary committee that included Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin initially proposed using the Israelites’ miraculous escape across the Red Sea for the fledgling nation’s seal. Likewise, even illiterate American slaves who were never taught to read took to Exodus to understand their situation, singing “Go Down, Moses” as they waited eagerly for a far-off freedom.
Pagan literature tells a similar tale. The Odyssey is a story of the long-awaited return of Odysseus, delayed ten years by war and another ten by his ill-fated wandering, seven of which he spent in captivity. One recurring Greek word drives the drama of the Odyssey: nostos (or “homecoming,” from which we get the word “nostalgia,” a kind of home-ache). In fact, more than half a millennium before the New Testament, The Odyssey records the earliest known usage of a Greek word for gospel (evangelion). Homer’s gospel, first told by Odysseus to simple herdsmen, is the news that he, the master, is returning to his lands. Odysseus’ people did not recognize their master, because he was disguised, coming in a different form than they expected. And then, when he returned to his home, he found it overtaken by those who did not receive him as their rightful ruler. Perhaps that sounds a little familiar.
As the gospels testify, Jesus’ coming marked the return of the Lord of the world to his land and to his people in order to deliver them. Jesus’ birth was also proclaimed to common herdsmen. And as the Gospel of John records, “He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.”
Pop religion and pseudo-intellectual punditry gets the whole significance here backwards. This is not a mere human “monomyth” that the first Christians cribbed to invent a new religion out of whole cloth. While G. K. Chesterton was quick to admit that “he who has no sympathy with myths has no sympathy with men,” he also knew what Joseph Campbell and Jordan Peterson have never grasped that “he who has the most sympathy with myths will most fully realize that they are not and never were a religion. … All their gods were unknown gods. And the real break in history did come when St. Paul declared to them whom they had worshipped.”
The prophet Haggai called this dim but real longing of the pagan world the “desire of the nations.” That the return of Edan Alexander, indeed, the return of any lost son or daughter resonates so strongly with entire nations—not just his friends and family—is because these stories all point to the one true story of Jesus Christ, whose death and new life has delivered the sons of man from spiritual bondage.
And so, just as a shepherd rejoices over the return of a single lost sheep, “there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents” (Luke 15:10).
