JERUSALEM — He died in the land he protected like a lion.
Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli prime minister, a warrior statesman famed for his brilliance and bravery on the battlefield and his skill as a politician, died Saturday after eight years in a coma brought on by a stroke.
Dubbed the “Lion of God,” Sharon, 85, goes down in history as a maverick military leader who led Israeli troops during battles that changed the geography of the Middle East.
He seemed destined for a career in the military.
Sharon, the younger of two children, grew up on a moshav, a collective farm, where his unhappy Russian immigrant parents were always fighting with their neighbors.
Outside the moshav, his father was ambushed by Arab villagers and took to carrying a pistol. His mother slept with a gun under her mattress.
At the age of 13, he stood ready to defend the collective with a club and a dagger he got for his bar mitzvah, according to the Jerusalem Post.
He joined Hagana, the underground guerrilla army fighting for independence.
When Israel became a state, he signed up for the military. He wrote in his autobiography that it was there he first experienced expressions of familial love that he had missed out on as a child, according to Time magazine.
He rose quickly through the ranks.
By age 20, Sharon was a platoon leader.
He was seriously wounded by Jordanian forces in the War of Independence and nearly 140 of his men were killed during an attempt to lift the brutal Arab siege of the Jews in Jerusalem.
In a 2001 interview with the Jerusalem Post, Sharon described how his unit was ambushed and how helpless he felt.
“There was no chance of getting out of there. I was seriously injured in my hip and in my knee, and there were many losses. During this battle, two soldiers in my unit crawled to me,’’ he told the newspaper.
“They asked, ‘How will you get us out of here?’ . . . And I told them that at every place I managed to bring them home. I then said they should go back to their positions and do what I tell them to do.’’
Sharon went on to earn a reputation as a bold war strategist while commanding a special-ops infantry company charged with destroying enemies from behind their lines throughout the 1950s.
Always a trail-blazer, he was known at times for blowing off orders from his superiors — even as he played a pivotal role in capturing the strategic Mitla Pass during the 1956 Suez Crisis.
His operation was a success, but it cost him 40 men and his disobedience temporarily derailed his career.
He defended himself by saying the patrol was sent on a reconnaissance mission and was trapped by Egyptian fire.
But his superiors believed the patrol itself was not necessary, the Jerusalem Post said.
He could not, however, be held down for long.
His once-again rising military star reached legendary heights in the Battle of Abu-Ageila during the Six-Day War of June 1967.
In charge of Israel’s most powerful armored division, Sharon led a multitude of daring simultaneous, small-scale attacks that crushed Egyptian defenses and secured the path to the strategic crossroads of the Sinai Peninsula.
During the Yom Kippur War of 1973, a picture of him standing at the Suez Canal wearing a bandage on his head cemented his reputation as a war hero.
He retired from the army to enter politics in 1977 and went on to become Israel’s minister for agriculture and eventually defense.
He always kept his eye on the big picture.
“Arabs may have the oil,’’ he famously noted in 1992. “But we have the matches.’’
And he told Time in 2005, “As a Jew, it is my historic responsibility to defend the Jewish people. I feel this responsibility for the survival of the Jewish people.’’
Sharon was elected prime minister in 2001 in a landslide victory against incumbent Ehud Barak, whose peace talks with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat were seen as a failure.
To celebrate the outcome, Sharon paid an uninvited visit to the Temple Mount, where one of the holiest Muslim sites, the Dome of the Rock, is located.
The visit sparked a round of rioting that sent Arabs and Israelis into a bloody conflict that would last until 2005.
He later erected a permanent barrier in the West Bank and ordered the Israeli armed forces into Palestinian cities, a move credited with halting a wave of suicide bombings.
Sharon encouraged new Jewish settlements, but was always pragmatic.
He eventually ordered Jewish settlers to pull out of the Gaza Strip in an effort to promote peace talks with Palestinians.
He ruled through the second Palestinian uprising, which raged until 2005.
But his tenure was controversial.
Sharon was accused of “indirect responsibility” for the 1982 massacre of hundreds of Palestinian refugees in Beirut by Lebanese Christian militiamen allied to Israel.
That led to his resignation as defense minister the following year.
Palestinians — who branded him a murderer after the violence and nicknamed him the “Butcher of Beirut” — celebrated his death by distributing candy and praying for his divine punishment.
They said they regretted that he was never held responsible for what happened in Beirut.
Sharon remained in the political spotlight and in 1999 rose to the command of the Likud Party, which eventually catapulted him into the premiership he would hold until his 2006 stroke.
His personal life also made news.
When his first wife, his childhood sweetheart Margalit, died in a car crash in 1962, he married her sister, Lili.
He also never lost touch with his family farm in the Negev, asking for information when every calf was born.
Sharon was larger than life in every sense — at one point he weighed over 300 pounds. US intelligence monitored his weight to predict his actions, theorizing that the more food he consumed the more adventurous he would behave, according to Time.
Sharon’s son, Gilad, told reporters gathered at the hospital where his father died that the country’s ex-leader “passed when he decided it was time to go.’’