Songfacts®:

• After hearing Ernest Gold's orchestral theme to the 1960 film Exodus, Pat Boone added lyrics and recorded a vocal version, which he called "The Exodus Song (This Land Is Mine)." In a Songfacts interview with Boone, he told the story: "It was Christmas Eve, and I was just trying to get an idea for a lyric to submit to a professional writer. I wasn't thinking of writing it myself then. But when I put the needle down on the record, my wife was begging me to stop doing that and help her get the presents under the tree so we could go to bed. So, when I heard it again for the 40th time [sings melody], the words came - 'This land is mine.' And I thought, 'Wow, that is the whole message of Exodus.' And [sings the melody], 'God gave this land to me.' It was like the melody was singing to me, itself. I started writing it down on the first piece of paper that I could find, so I wouldn't forget.
  
  And then, in 25 minutes, I had written the whole lyric - as if I was taking dictation. I turned over the piece of paper, and it was a Christmas card. Now, that Christmas card is on display on the wall of the Righteous Gentile in Yad Vashem, the holocaust museum in Jerusalem, where they asked if they could have whatever I wrote those words on, because they want every Jewish child in Israel to know those words by heart. And for a Christian Gentile guy from Nashville to have written those words, which have become virtually the second Jewish national anthem, is the milestone in my life."
• Boone made many trips to Israel after releasing this song, which he considers the most important in his catalog. "Not only has it become the second Jewish national anthem," he told Songfacts, "But it evokes Biblical truth about God calling his people back together after they were dispersed around the world, and they would come and Israel would be born in a day. That's a prophetic utterance in the Bible, that a nation would be born again in a day - and it was, on May 14, 1948."