If we consider Christians’ attitudes towards Israel, I suggested in my last post that there is a need to identify what they actually mean by the term “Israel.” The Bible gives a surprising number of options. Here I’m mainly going to list as many of the meanings as I can, and even then I may miss some. Today I’ll focus on the Hebrew Bible, with a follow-up post on the New Testament, and my conclusions, next time.
OLD TESTAMENT
- First of all, Jacob was renamed “Israel” when he wrestled with God (perhaps a theophany of Christ?) and prevailed (Gen 32). It seems more prophetic of his descendants, in an eschatologically promising way, than descriptive of Jacob’s life. The people of Israel still wrestle with Yehovah, but are prophesied to prevail in the eschaton.
- As The Book of Exodus starts, “Israel” means simply the descendants of Jacob in Egypt – a tribal group with patriarchal promises, but apparently only the vestiges of a religious identity.
- But on their escape from Egypt, they become a nation, though for forty years landless. Note, however, that along with Jacob’s descendants is also “a mixed multitude” (Ex 12:38), and presumably those from that crowd who join the covenant through circumcision and obedience to God’s commandments through Moses become part of Israel too. Effectively, Jacob’s history becomes their history.
- In Judges Israel is a loose affiliation of tribal entities struggling to subdue the territory of Canaan. Many Canaanites must have been assimilated into the nation over the centuries, sometimes through marriage. Most notably Rahab the Canaanite and Ruth the Moabitess even became ancestors of the Davidic (and Messianic) royal bloodline. The genetics of modern Jews are pretty heterogenous, which is not surprising in that Hebrew descent was, in biblical times, patrilinear, and in modern Judaism matrilinear.
- Conversely, under the Mosaic Covenant one could be “cut off” from Israel for sins such as eating leaven at passover, working on the sabbath, defiant sin, defiling the tabernacle, eating blood, sexual perversion, spiritism, etc. Lev 20:1-3 prescribes stoning for sacrificing children to Molech, but then says that God will set his face against the offender and cut him off from his people. This implies spiritual damnation is linked to “cutting off” from Israel. Hence Paul’s statement that “not all who are descended from Israel are Israel” has a firm basis in the torah.
- Under the united monarchy, Israel became a true nation-state as well as a people. David’s officer Uriah was a Hittite, but politically (at least) also an Israelite.
- The breakup of the united monarchy saw Israel, as a State, becoming the northern kingdom of ten tribes centred on Samaria and its heretical cult, whilst the southern kingdom of Judah, often at enmity with Israel, had Solomon’s temple and the Davidic dynasty, and remained more faithful to the covenant, at least for a time.
- The northern prophet Elijah, despairing that he alone remained in the Covenant, was reassured by God that he had retained 7,000 in Israel. “Israel” here references that northern kingdom – but are the 7,000 not the true Israel at that point, together of course with the faithful in Judah?
- Yet the prophets often treat “Israel” as the spiritual nation consisting of all twelve tribes, historically scattered but, sometimes, promised reunification in the last days. To God Israel remains a spiritual reality apparently indifferent to political and religious realities on the ground.
- After the northern kingdom’s destruction, King Hezekiah tried unsuccessfully to re-incorporate its remnant religiously, if not politically, when he celebrated Passover and invited the northern remnant, most of whom stayed home.
- Prophets from Judah tend sometimes to use “Israel” for the people of Judah alone, under the premise that the rest have been scattered. Foreseeing Judah’s own exile, though, Isaiah speaks of a future remnant as “Israel,” not “Judah” – but Ezekiel also sees this hope as the reuniting of both fractured kingdoms into one.
- After the return from exile, Ezra and Nehemiah apply the term Israel to the people they govern, ie the remaining people of Yehovah, necessarily meaning primarily the remnant of Judah, Levi and the tribal minorities that had constituted the southern kingdom. The Samaritans are left outside that designation because of their intermarriages.
- Yet politically, the land remained the property of the various succeeding empires, and so its official names and borders changed over time. But even under the Jewish Hasmoneans, gaining short-term independence, there had no longer been a political entity called “Israel” since the Assyrian exile. And the influence of Babylonian, Persian, Greek and Roman occupiers was not only reflected in the culture, language, and religious syncretism (such as the fashion under the Seleucids for trying to reverse circumcision surgically), but through intermarriage with their occupiers. If Queen Esther had children by Artaxerxes, were they Jewish or Persian?
And so by the time we reach the birth of Jesus, the identity of “Israel” had become every bit as complicated genealogically, politically, culturally and even religiously as it was in the centuries after Jesus (which few of us study without getting thoroughly confused, especially once the Arabs invent Islam). And yet Israel was a reality which, as we shall see next time, the New Testament takes as a given, and of first importance to Jesus and the Gospel.
I suppose the one unifying factor is the Covenant, which every Jewish faction from Sadducees to Essenes relied on even when their understanding of it differed fundamentally. The God of Jacob was their refuge… except when like Samaritan Simon Magus or Jewish Elymas the sorcerer they invoked his name only to promote their ungodly deception. Then, as now, Israel remained “the Circumcision” – though even that wasn’t a universal, as the case of Timothy shows: with a Greek father and a Jewish mother, he was only circumcised when an adult, by Paul, to facilitate his evangelistic ministry among the diaspora.
Next time, we’ll see just how flexibly, and possibly radically, the New Testament refers to Israel.
