Israel and the land: the story continues

The question of Israel and the land—and the extent of the land—is very much on our minds these days. A while back, Ian Paul posed the question: “Does the State of Israel have a divine right to the land?” It’s a measured piece, and it got me wondering—not for the first time—how this issue might look in narrative-historical perspective. He appends a defence of the view that when Paul says that “all Israel will be saved” (Rom. 11:26), he means “all those who are part of God’s new Israel i.e. all those now redeemed through Jesus,” not ethnic Israel. I disagree and will give my reasons for taking the ethnic Israel line in another post.

So my hermeneutic here is consistently historical. On the one hand, history—not theology—determines the scope of any biblical argument about Israel and the land, including Paul’s argument about the possible salvation of “all Israel.” On the other, we ourselves are faced with large-scale historical developments beyond the purview of both the Old and the New Testaments; therefore, we need to take responsibility for the sapiential-prophetic interpretation of events.

Sapiential-prophetic?

Well, it occurs to me that there is a significant wisdom component to the prophetic writings—just good historical and social analysis on covenantal grounds. Paul’s critiques of the Jew and of the Greek in Romans, for example, owe a lot to Wisdom of Solomon. Wisdom, therefore, as critical reflection under the terms of the covenantal narrative, should be part of our rethinking of the place and function of the church in a changing world.

But the point to be made here is that such events as the rise of secularism, the collapse of Christendom, the globalisation of the church, Israel’s reconquest of the land, the growth of science and technology, catastrophic climate change were not foreseen in scripture but have biblical-level significance and need to be talked about.

The horizon of the apostolic mission

Historically speaking, the dominant, though not the final, horizon of the prophetic-apocalyptic outlook of the New Testament was the conversion of the nations of the Greek-Roman world. The apostolic mission was westward towards Spain; there was no organised effort to proclaim the future kingship of Jesus in the East or in Africa, no hint of it even. The good news was that Israel’s God was about to annex the peoples of the Roman Empire for his own worship and governance. This was the coming kingdom of God. No more, no less.

What did this mean for Israel and for the Jews, for Israel in the land and for the synagogues of the diaspora?

The destruction of Jerusalem and the temple by the Romans and the loss of the land was not a foregone conclusion for Paul. He appears to have been less pessimistic than Jesus was. Twenty-five years or so after the execution of Jesus, he still held to the hope that his people would repent of their disbelief in the message of Jesus’ future rule over the nations, if not before, then after they were subjected to the wrath of God.

If Israel and the synagogues had repented and had confessed Jesus as Lord, then the expectation may have been that Jerusalem would become a revitalised holy city as envisaged in the prophets, where the one true God would be served by a righteous priestly people, to which the nations would come in pilgrimage, displacing Athens or Rome as the political-religious centre of that world. But this is speculative: nothing is said in the New Testament to this effect as far as I can see. The hope of the priest Zechariah to be saved from Rome and to serve (latreuein) “the Lord, the God of Israel,” presumably with reference to worship in Herod’s temple, doesn’t get us very far.

Jesus’ own vision of the future was remarkably negative and restricted: a period of distress for the righteous in Israel and for his followers as they continued his prophetic mission, declaring a coming great and terrible day of the Lord (Acts 2:17-21). The horizon was the war against Rome as punishment for a wicked and adulterous generation (Acts 2:40). There would be a great feast celebrating the restoration of the righteous with the patriarchs, from which many would find themselves excluded; and Jesus and his followers would be gloriously vindicated and rewarded in the sight of unbelieving Israel (e.g., Mk. 13:26-27; 14:62).

This would be the fulfilment of the eschatological movement kicked off by John the Baptist, but we are given little sense of what things would look like in the happy-ever-after.

The arc of New Testament thought seems to move in the direction of a de-centred, empire-wide demonstration of the fact that God is not of the Jews only but also of the nations which have for so long opposed YHWH and his people (cf. Rom. 3:29). The assumption seems to be that in this new era Jesus would reign over the nations of the oikoumenē or empire from a new Jerusalem in heaven, seated at the right hand of God. There is no need for a dedicated land, and the whole notion of God’s people as a new creation becomes redundant. The churches constitute instead a scattered, landless, temple-less, Spirit-inspired priesthood for the nations, in place of the old, derelict pagan priesthoods.

The whole world is not God’s Holy Land

I disagree, therefore, with Tom Wright’s well known contention that not Israel but the whole world is God’s Holy Land.

• As in other contexts, Wright confuses the creational and political or kingdom dimensions of the biblical story.
• Even in its most idealistic modes, the Old Testament story does not lose sight of the boundary between the Holy Land and the nations.
• Wright over-interprets the Old Testament language of the glory of God filling the earth. Psalm 72 is a prayer for the just and prosperous rule of Israel’s king—to the degree that nations will bow down to him, render him tribute, serve him. On the basis of his righteous governance, people will be blessed in him and all nations will call him blessed. Because this will be the work of “YHWH, the God of Israel,” the whole earth will be filled with his glory. Israel remains the Holy Land, but the fame and reputation of Israel’s God will spread among all peoples. It is in that sense that his “glory” will fill the earth. This is not a new creation, it is a renewed political-religious order; Israel’s king is still only Israel’s king, not “the true image-bearer, the true human being” (italics removed).
• Wright also cites Psalm 2, but the thought here is again only that Israel’s king will rule govern the nations, having broken them with a rod of iron and dashed them in pieces like a clay pot. The nations are ruled from God’s Holy Land; they do not become God’s Holy Land.
• After the loss of the land, the renewed people of God is not instructed to be fruitful and multiply and fill the whole earth; the expectation is that they will serve as a dispersed priesthood for nations that have abandoned their idols to worship instead the living God.
• Paul does not argue in Romans 8:18-27 that the whole world or creation is God’s Holy Land. To be sure, “our vocation as Christians includes the vocation to be in prayer at the place where the world is in pain,” but we do that as a priesthood now dispersed across the whole globe. The whole world has not been given to us as our possession. What this passage has in view, I argue, is not the renewal of the world or of creation but the end of a civilisation which subjected the materials of God’s creation to the futility of idolatry.
• There is no prospect of the comprehensive renewal of the present creation. Heaven and earth will flee away, there will be a final judgment of all the dead, and the sea will be no more, before the making of a new heaven and new earth in which God will live with his people, in which there will be no suffering and death (Rev. 20:11-21:4). Until then, the vocation of the church remains the same: to be a priestly people, devoted to the service (latreia) of the creator God, in a changing world.

Israel after the happy-ever-after

The historical embodiment of the New Testament hope in the institutions of European Christendom has long since dissolved. New secular priesthoods have entered the space. The church has become a global entity and may have over-reached itself. In some sort of sapiential-prophetic mode we are trying to re-imagine how the story is now to be told.

So what are we to make of the fact that in this post-Christendom moment Israel has been restored to the land, with the encouragement and support of the West?

There are many in the churches who regard this as the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy. I don’t think the scriptures see anything beyond the immediate clash with the western powers and the triumph of the Word of God over Rome—certainly nothing having to do with Israel’s re-occupation the land 1800 years later.

We cannot examine all the purported counter-claims here, but here’s one example I happened upon.

In that day the Lord will extend his hand yet a second time to recover the remnant that remains of his people, from Assyria, from Egypt, from Pathros, from Cush, from Elam, from Shinar, from Hamath, and from the coastlands of the sea. (Is. 11:11)

It has been argued that this refers to a “second” return from exile after the first return from Babylon. Thus: “Over the past 120 years or so, more than 3.5 million Jews have immigrated to the Land of Israel from all over the world… in literal fulfillment of God’s promises.”

This is a misreading of Isaiah, I think. The context is the Assyrian invasion of the northern kingdom of Israel in the time of Ahaz. The nation is already being devoured by the Syrians and the Philistines, but “For all this his anger has not turned away, and his hand is stretched out still” (Is. 9:12). The point is repeated in what follows (9:17, 21; 10:4). So YHWH first stretches out his hand to punish his people.

But eventually the wrath of God against Israel will come to an end, he will turn back the Assyrians, and “A remnant will return, the remnant of Jacob, to the mighty God” (10:21). A Davidic king will be established, peace will be restored, and the Lord will “extend his hand” a second time—not to punish but to recover “the remnant that remains of his people” from the regional diaspora.

So I don’t think that a return to the land following a second exile is envisaged or prophesied in the Old Testament. It’s not an unreasonable extrapolation in purely Jewish terms: if there is no final expulsion from the land, the hope of restoration is bound to persist, and there is a compelling biblical logic to the modern recovery or reconquest of the land with the assistance of friendly pagan empires.

There is precedent but not prescription. We are having to make our own judgments, add commentary to events as they unfold, quarrel over plot development, redact our sources, and so on. But it is now unavoidably part of the story that the Jews are again fiercely in possession of the land promised to Abraham.

• Israel was excluded from the land throughout the long age of the hegemony of the Christian West. It is probably not coincidental that the return to the land coincided with the end of that hegemony.
• Modern Israel is a fraught and contradictory amalgam of religious and secular programmes, but to the limited extent that it purports to be a theocracy, it remains accountable to Torah and ought to be judged according to Torah.
• Israel in the land presumably must again consider itself as “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation,” serving not its own ends but the interests of the living God who bought them out of Egypt (Exod. 19:6).
• There are fairly clear biblical criteria by which we may determine whether Israel’s presence is a blessing to the nations or not.
• If the name of God is blasphemed among the nations on account of Israel’s behaviour, then, as before (cf. Is. 52:5; Ezek. 36:20; Rom. 2:24), we might expect it to be considered a failed national priesthood, and the heavy wheel of history turns again.
• The church cannot abandon its conviction that Jesus, who was rejected by the Jews in the first century, is—in very Jewish terms—Lord and Christ, seated at the right hand of God, even if that status is no longer reflected in the political-religious structures of Christendom.