The People of God & the Story of God

Executive Summary

     In what follows, I (briefly) tell the biblical story of redemption/salvation, understood as being the fulfillment, in and through Jesus of Nazareth, of the promises of God to Abraham (around the 20^th century B.C.).  One could define the (Hebrew) Bible as being the story of how the Creator God promised to save/rescue the world through Abraham and his descendants, and the “New Testament” as being the story of how God fulfilled those promises in and through Jesus, understood to be the Messiah (promised King) of Israel and therefore, the Lord of the world.  As far as biblical soteriology is concerned, it’s all about Abraham (and by extension, the nation of Abraham’s descendants, Israel).  This “Israel dimension” of biblical theology has often been neglected in Christian doctrinal theology, but is now making a comeback within the world of biblical studies thanks to the recent prominence of narrative approaches to theology.  Within this approach, the Bible is understood, not to be an encyclopedia of doctrinal statements, but rather as being a coherent story (43 % of biblical literature is narrative in genre) of what the Creator God has done to rescue humanity and the rest of creation from evil – i.e. from all that defaces humans and the creation and prevents the world from being the fruitful garden it was always intended to be.

     Along the way, we will realize that the story the Bible tells about God is also the story of the storytellers – the “history” of the people who composed the biblical texts, those ancient Israelites who told the story of the God who, Israel believed, had called her into existence and endowed her with a unique destiny among the nations of the Earth.  The fact that Israel’s (hi)story as a nation is so tightly bound up with the story Israel told about God is unique among the religious texts of the world.  The Bible is premised upon the conviction that Israel’s god was the one true God who had created the world and that this God had acted within the life of the nation of Israel in order to rescue her (ultimately, in the Exodus from Egypt) and, through her, to rescue the entire creation.  We will consider the questions of “election”, of “covenant”, and the development of monotheism in ancient Israel.  We will also consider Jesus’ project of covenant renewal within Second Temple Palestinian Judaism, and the origins of the Christian movement and its fundamental belief that Israel’s scriptural hopes had been fulfilled through Jesus.  We will consider the first-century AD “parting of the ways” between Judaism and Christianity, resulting in the existence of two religious communities sharing a common history and Scriptures, with each community interpreting those Scriptures differently.

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Which people?

     So who wrote the Bible?  Which community produced, read and handed on these texts over the centuries?  Answer: the ancient people of Israel.  The Bible takes on the big questions of life – Where did we come from?  What’s wrong with the world (and with me)?  What can be done about the mess we’re in?  When will the solution arrive?  How should we live?  What does it mean to be human?  How should society be organized?  How should we worship God?  How do we know what is right and wrong?  Etc.  The answers that any culture gives to these questions together make up that culture’s worldview, i.e. their way of understanding the world as well as their place within it.  So, the Bible contains the worldview of ancient Israel (and, in the New Testament, the worldview of the early Christians).

“Israel”, ancient & modern.

     Before we go any further, it’s important that we differentiate between ancient Israel, on the one hand, and the modern state of Israel, which was founded on May 15^th, 1948, on the other.  There are indeed links between ancient and modern Israel – the most important link is the geographical link, the strip of land along the Eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea which is home to the two modern nations of Israel/Palestine and which was also home to the ancient Israelites during (a portion of) the biblical period.  Another link between ancient and modern Israel is the Hebrew language.  Israel’s Scriptures were written (for the most part) in Hebrew, a language that “died” following the removal, by the Romans, of all Jews from Palestine in the second century AD.[1]  Following these events, Jews spoke the languages of the various countries in which they settled.  However, the appearance of the modern state of Israel in 1948 caused the Hebrew language to be “resurrected” and updated, and it is once more a spoken language, used by many Jews in Israel today.

The “chosen” people: the question of the “election” of Israel.

     The ancient Israelites believed that their nation had been “elected” by the Creator to be his “chosen” people, endowed with a special destiny/vocation.[2]  The Israelites believed that they had been called by Yahweh (God’s personal name) to represent him to all the other nations of the Earth (cf. Ex. 19.5-6) – in a word, they were the true humanity and they were called to demonstrate to all nations what genuine humanness looked like.  Israel’s understanding of its own identity as a nation was inseparable from its understanding of Yahweh.  Historians debate the exact origins of the Hebrew/Israelite people – did they originate in Mesopotamia or in Egypt?  The way that the ancient Israelites told the story (the way the Bible tells the story) of their origins as a nation was to begin with the calling, by God, of a Mesopotamian man named Abram (Abraham).  The story of the first 4 generations of Abraham’s family is found in the book of Genesis, chapters 12-50.  At this early stage of Israel’s history, Yahweh was known as “the God of Abraham (Isaac, and Jacob)” and the “nation” of Israel existed only as the promise that Abraham and his wife Sarah would have a son despite their advanced age and that their family would grow and become a “great nation” (cf. Gn. 12.1-3; 15.4-6).

Which god?  Yahweh & the idols.

     The Bible is very aware of the fact that the word “god”[3] is not univocal; i.e. during the biblical period, just like today, the word “god(s)” means different things to different people.  Every tribe or nation or civilization throughout history has had its own pantheon of divinities,[4] most of whom represented different aspects of the natural world, e.g. the goddess of fertility, the god of thunder – the Sun itself was sometimes worshipped as being divine.  Monotheism – the belief that there is only one God (capital “G”) – developed gradually during Israel’s early history.  Before encountering the god who called him to leave his country and journey to the “Promised Land”, Abraham was a typical Mesopotamian polytheist; i.e. he worshipped many different gods (cf. Joshua 24.2).  There is no indication in the Abraham story that he ever became a strict monotheist.  At no point in the story does the god who called him tell Abraham that he is the only God.  What Abraham knew was that this god was his god, that this god had called him and had made promises to him.

The one true God.

     Centuries after Abraham, after rescuing his people from slavery in Egypt through the leadership of Moses,[5] Yahweh reveals himself to the Israelites at Mt. Sinai as the one true God and prohibits the manufacture of idols (Ex. 20.1-6).  “There is one God, and Israel is his people”.  It was common practice in the ancient world for gods and goddesses to be symbolized by statues, before whom their worshippers would offer both animal and human sacrifices.  As Yahweh gives his “law” to Moses and the Israelites, a unique change is occurring in the history of the Ancient Near East – a people will commit itself to worshipping only one God and they will do so without building an idol of their God, without representing him with a statue.  So, the (Hebrew) Bible emerged from the nation of Israel and tells the story of this people and the God they worshipped – the God who had called Abraham to be the “father” of the chosen nation and had revealed himself to Moses as the one true God.

What about the other nations?

     Though Israel was the nation specially chosen by Yahweh, the other nations – sometimes referred to as the “pagans” or the “gentiles” – also figured into God’s plan of salvation.  In fact, God’s promise to Abraham to make of him a great nation included hope for all the nations of the Earth.  God promised Abraham that through him and his descendants, all the nations of the world would be “blessed”.  In the context of the book of Genesis, to say that someone or something will be “blessed” is to say that that person or thing will experience healing from the “curses” pronounced on humankind and all of creation after Adam & Eve’s disobedience in the Garden of Eden (cf. Gn. 3).  After the “fall” of Adam & Eve, the whole world finds itself under a divine curse – doomed to corruption, decay, violence and death.  The Creator’s intention in making the world was that it be a place of life, light, beauty, justice, peace and vitality.  The Bible tells a story about the Creator’s plan – beginning with Abraham – to once again “bless” his world and undo the effects of the curse.

The covenant.

     The “mechanism” by which the divine blessing would be able (eventually) to come upon all the nations of the world was called a “covenant”, a sacred mutual agreement entered into by Yahweh and his people – beginning with Abraham (cf. Gn. chapters 12, 15 & 17).  This was the agreement: Yahweh made many promises to Abraham; he committed to blessing Abraham, to giving him numerous descendants as well as a land where those descendants could thrive as God’s free people.  For his part, Abraham committed to obeying Yahweh’s command to leave home and set out towards “the Land that God would show him” and to trusting that Yahweh would keep his promises, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.[6]  The initial covenant made with Abraham was later expanded at the time of Moses.  Now, the entire nation of Israel was invited by Yahweh to commit herself to the covenantal life.  The sign of commitment to the covenant was obedience to the “Law of Moses”, i.e. the collection of commandments that Yahweh transmitted to Moses that would regulate every aspect of Israel’s life – worship, morality, criminal and civil affairs as well as politics.

Israel’s unfaithfulness to the covenant with Yahweh.

     So, the election of Abraham’s descendants (Israel) as his special people was the Creator’s way of addressing the problem of humanity’s rebellion against him.  However, Israel often mistook her responsibility to manifest genuine humanness for all the nations of the Earth for a private privilege (that of being God’s favourite people).  Predictably enough, throughout her history, Israel also repeatedly rebels against Yahweh, worshipping other gods and refusing to listen to the call of the prophets to return to God’s law, to be faithful to the covenant that Yahweh established between himself and his people.  The people of the solution had also become part of the problem.  It’s like if an ambulance on the way to the scene of an accident is itself involved in an accident.  Now the ambulance and its crew, who were supposed to rescue the victims of the original accident, are themselves in need of rescue.  Israel had been chosen by God to be the agent of salvation, of rescue for the whole world, but now Israel herself needs to be rescued so that God’s salvation can extend, through Israel, to all peoples.  However, there were consequences to rebelling against Yahweh.  In the book of Deuteronomy, there is a double list of blessings for covenant faithfulness and curses for being disloyal to the agreement with Yahweh (cf. Dt. 28).  The most disastrous possible consequence for having broken the covenant was for Israel to be exiled from the Land that God had promised to give to Abraham…

The curse of exile.

     The exile of the kingdom of Judah by the Babylonians in the 6^th century B.C. seemed to destroy the hopes of the Abrahamic promises ever coming true.  Even after a small minority of Jews had returned to the Land of Israel a couple of generations later to rebuild the Temple and the city of Jerusalem, there was no sign of the promises coming true; Judea remained a small province in the vast Persian empire and would remain subjugated to a series of pagan empires during the centuries leading up to the birth of Jesus.  The Jewish hope during the “Second Temple Period” was for this situation of “exile” and servitude to pagan empires to come to an end and for Yahweh to decisively act to rescue Israel from her enemies and inaugurate the “Age to Come”, a worldwide period of justice and peace, with Israel recognized as being the chosen people of the Creator (as well as perhaps ruling over/taking revenge on the pagan nations!).

Pagan persecution & Jewish nationalism.

     During this period of pagan domination, it was easy for Israel to lose sight of the “universal” scope of God’s promises to Abraham.  The Jews experienced different levels of persecution from the various imperial powers, culminating in a brutal campaign of “cultural cleansing” at the hands of the Seleucid dynasty (cf. the Books of Maccabees).[7]  The Seleucid king Antiochus IV was determined to eradicate the Jewish way of life and passed laws forbidding the Jews to circumcise their male children (the sign of the covenant that Yahweh had established with Abraham), to observe the Sabbath day or to respect the kosher laws.  The fact that Antiochus targeted these 3 Jewish practices in particular – circumcision, as well as the observance of the Sabbath and the kosher laws – was no accident.  These were the three “identity markers” that distinguished Jews from members of other nations – the social practices which identified Jews as Jewish and traced a clear line between Jews and pagans.  Antiochus targeted these practices as part of a totalizing program of assimilation throughout his kingdom.  Antiochus’ persecution provoked the Maccabean Revolt, a revolution in which the Jews succeeded in winning their independence for a brief period, until civil strife led to intervention in Israel’s affairs by a new power from the West…  In such conditions, the conviction that Israel was God’s chosen instrument of salvation for all nations (as opposed to simply being God’s preferred nation) was difficult to maintain.

Jesus and the renewal of God’s covenant & God’s people.

     Jesus’ objective as he conducted his prophetic-messianic ministry was to fulfill Israel’s covenant with Yahweh and thereby get God’s rescue plan for the whole world back on track.  Jesus set out to renew and reconstitute God’s chosen people[8].  Jesus purposed to do what, according to his interpretation of the Scriptures and his personal sense of vocation, he believed was necessary for Yahweh’s promises to Abraham to come true at last.  In order for this dream to become a reality, a number of things had to happen: Israel’s sin and rebellion had to be forgiven, the new covenant had to be inaugurated, the dark forces that had been seeking the destruction of Israel and all of creation by leading humanity to idolatry, self-destruction and death had to be defeated and the kingdom of Yahweh established.  Jesus’ way of accomplishing all this was … to die on the cross.  Once the new covenant was established, Yahweh’s salvation could once again extend through the renewed Israel[9] to all the nations of the Earth, thereby fulfilling Yahweh’s promised to Abraham that through him all the people of the world would experience the new life of God that would finally reverse the effects of the curse resulting from humanity’s rebellion.

The birth of Christianity from the womb of Judaism.

     After the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, this is indeed how his followers interpreted his death: as being the atonement for Israel’s sin, the defeat all the anti-God forces, the institution of the new covenant and the founding of the kingdom of God.  Although it involved several serious debates, the early Christian movement began to welcome pagans into the community of those who believed in Jesus (i.e. the Church), without requiring them to become Jews first; i.e. without requiring male converts to be circumcised (cf. Ac. 10-11, 15; letter of St. Paul to the Galatians).  This was a momentous occasion in the history of the young Church and would determine the shape that the Christian movement would take from that point onward.  Also, the decision to integrate pagans into the Christian community effected the observance of the other two Jewish identity markers – the observance of the Sabbath and the kosher laws.  Though Jewish Christians continued to go to the synagogue or the Temple on the Sabbath (Saturday), it didn’t take long before Christians began to gather for worship (amongst themselves) on the first day of the week (Sunday).  Also, certain Christians adopted a very relaxed attitude to the question of pure/impure food (cf. 1 Co. 8).

The Messianic community.

     The fact that the early Christians ceased to observe the Mosaic Law in the same way as their non-Christian Jewish brothers did not mean that they had rejected their heritage or considered themselves to be disloyal to the God of the covenant.  Far from it!  The early Christians believed that the God of the covenant had, through Jesus, fulfilled his promises to Abraham and had launched the Age to Come through Jesus’ resurrection.  They believed themselves to be living in the first days of the “end times”, the time when the Creator would re-create his world and flood it with his life.  They believed themselves to be God’s renewed people, membership in which was now open to all those who put their faith in Jesus as Israel’s Messiah and the world’s Lord.  Far from flouting the heritage of ancient Israel, the early Christians were celebrating the arrival of the moment that God’s people had been awaiting for centuries.

Estranged sisters: the “parting of the ways” between Judaism and Christianity.

     Several factors contributed to what is called “the parting of the ways” – the moment when Christianity began to develop independently of the Judaism within which it had been born.  Obviously, there was the theological factor – mainstream Judaism did not recognize Jesus of Nazareth as having been Israel’s Messiah; rather, Jesus had been condemned by the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem as being a false prophet, a dangerous heretic.  The belief that Jesus was the Messiah was the key factor that divided “mainstream” Jews from those Jews who believed that Israel’s hopes had been fulfilled in Jesus.  There was the political factor as well.  In the year 66 AD, the Jews in Palestine launched a revolt against Rome which is known as the “First Jewish War”.  The rebellion ended in disaster in the year 70, when both the city of Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed.  During the rebellion and its aftermath, it was important for Judaism’s survival that Jewish belief be uniform.  There was no question of risking the fragmentation of Judaism by allowing those Jews who believed that Jesus was the Messiah to remain a part of the community; no, they were perceived to be heretical traitors to the faith.  There was also the fact that more and more pagans were joining the Christian movement; that, coupled with the fact that after the year 135 AD[10], there were no more Jews in Palestine, created a “geographical” and ethnic separation between Judaism and the emerging Christian Church, which existed for the most part outside of Palestine, with local communities scattered throughout the Roman empire.

Rabbinic Judaism & a universal Church.

     After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD, Israel’s sacrificial system came to a definitive end.  Following upon the momentous events of the year 70, Judaism began to take on a predominantly Pharisaic, text-oriented character, eventually developing into “Rabbinic Judaism”.  The Jewish oral tradition of biblical interpretation and rabbinic legislation was codified into the “Mishnah” and the “Talmud”, texts which would become, along with the Tanak, authoritative within Judaism.  On the other hand, the Christian Church would author the books of the “New Testament”, which was appended to the Tanak (“Old Testament”) to form, by the 4^th century AD, the Christian Bible as we have it today.  From this point on, there were two communities (“religions”) claiming to the people of the God of Abraham, one reading the Bible as pointing towards the eventual arrival of the Messiah, and the other reading the same Bible as speaking of the Messiah who had indeed come – the Messiah whose name was Jesus of Nazareth.

THE STORY OF THE PEOPLE OF GOD

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[1] It was the Romans who gave the name of “Palestine” to the provinces of Galilee, Samaria and Judea following the “Second Jewish War” (132-135 AD).  The new name that they gave to Israel’s ancient homeland stuck and is still used today by “Palestinians”.

[2] The idea of a nation or an individual being possessed of a special destiny/vocation is an idea that originated with the ancient Israelites.  Unlike other ancient Near Eastern cultures, ancient Israel did not have a fatalistic outlook on life and the world; i.e. they didn’t believe that things had to happen a certain way, due to divine determinism, etc.  The ancient Israelites believed that they could chose to create their own future, a future that was open-ended and not pre-determined.

[3] When the word “god” is spelled with a capital “G”, it is assumed that the author is discussing (the god who is perceived by a certain person or group to be) the one true God. 

[4] It appears that most ancient cultures were polytheistic, i.e. they believed in several gods.  However, there are some researchers that claim that there is evidence that monotheism (belief in one God) existed in many ancient cultures before degenerating into polytheism over time.

[5] To whom the God of Abraham had revealed himself as “Yahweh” (“I AM”, “LORD”): cf. Exodus 3.1-15.

[6] First of all, there was the fact that not only were Abraham and his wife Sarah well on in years, but Sarah was also sterile, incapable of bearing children! (cf. Gn. 11.30).

[7] Part of a Helleno-Syrian kingdom which had been formed after the breakup of Alexander the Great’s empire (2nd century B.C.).

[8] Symbolized by Jesus choosing 12 apostles, reminiscent of the 12 sons of Jacob (Abraham’s grandson whose name was changed from “Jacob” to “Israel”), from whom descended the 12 tribes of ancient Israel.

[9] Those members of God’s people [and the pagans who would join themselves to them] who believed that Jesus was the promised King [Messiah] who would inaugurate the Age to Come.

[10] The “Second Jewish War” lasted from 132-135 AD.  It was another failure on behalf of the Jews to overthrow Roman rule, and ended with the expulsion of all Jews from the territory of Palestine.