Arranged for full Orchestra, Hatikvah is the national anthem of the State of Israel. Part of 19th-century Jewish poetry, the theme of the Romantic composition reflects the 2,000-year-old desire of the Jewish people to return to the Land of Israel in order to reclaim it as a free and sovereign nation-state. The piece's lyrics are adapted from a work by Naftali Herz Imber, a Jewish poet from Złoczów, Austrian Galicia. Imber wrote the first version of the poem in 1877, when he was hosted by a Jewish scholar in Iași, Romania.

The text of Hatikvah was written in 1878 by Naftali Herz Imber, a Jewish poet from Zolochiv (Polish: Złoczów), a city nicknamed "The City of Poets", then in Austrian Poland, today in Ukraine. His words "Lashuv le'eretz avotenu" (to return to the land of our forefathers) expressed its aspiration.

In 1882, Imber emigrated to Ottoman-ruled Palestine and read his poem to the pioneers of the early Jewish villages—Rishon LeZion, Rehovot, Gedera, and Yesud Hama'ala. In 1887, Shmuel Cohen, a very young (17 or 18 years old) resident of Rishon LeZion with a musical background, sang the poem by using a melody he knew from Romania and making it into a song, after witnessing the emotional responses of the Jewish farmers who had heard the poem.Cohen's musical adaptation served as a catalyst and facilitated the poem's rapid spread throughout the Zionist communities of Palestine.

Imber's nine-stanza poem, "Tikvatenu" ("Our Hope"), put into words his thoughts and feelings following the establishment of Petah Tikva (literally "Opening of Hope"). Published in Imber's first book Barkai [The Shining Morning Star], Jerusalem, 1886, was subsequently adopted as an anthem by the Hovevei Zion and later by the Zionist Movement.