The Bible in the Israel-Palestine Conflict, Chapter 1: Land
Does Someone “Own” the Holy Land?
God’s Promises and Their Fulfillment
Middle East after snow, December 2013. Photo credit: NASA space weather station.
Navigating Through Scripture to Shalom: Priority of the Hope
I begin with an approach that is accessible to both Jewish and Christian audiences by drawing on the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament. One reason for doing this is to engage both Jewish and Christian audiences.
Following the events of October 7, many people on social media circulated maps of Israel and Palestine, both modern and historical. These came with timelines. Some were “pro-Israeli” and some “pro-Palestinian.” Some people were obviously Christian, some Jewish, some critical of religion in general; with others, I couldn’t tell. At every opportunity, I posted a short comment in reply. I wrote:
What about this promise? 21 So you shall divide this land among you according to the tribes of Israel. 22 You shall allot it as an inheritance for yourselves and for the aliens who reside among you and have fathered children among you. They shall be to you as native-born of Israel; with you they shall be allotted an inheritance among the tribes of Israel. 23 In whatever tribe aliens reside, there you shall assign them their inheritance, says the Lord God. (Ezekiel 47:21 - 23)
What was the response? Despite posting this comment about a dozen times, I only ever got a few “likes.” No one commented in reply. Now, I do not take social media engagement as an indication of much. But perhaps my argument seemed to be unfamiliar to many people.
Most people rely on claims about the past: who has more right to settle the land now, based on a claim about being in the land first, or for most of the time, or in 1948 when the modern State of Israel was constituted, or in 1967 when the Six Day War was fought. Some people make historical claims using the Bible. Some people make historical claims about who suffered most, and who deserves a peaceful homeland. Claims about the past, however, tend to be not just selective, but quite exclusive.
By contrast, I take encouragement from visionary, future-oriented passages in the Hebrew Scriptures, which picture God bringing Jews and gentiles together in the land to share it in peace. Ezekiel’s vision is quite remarkable and inspiring. The prophet Isaiah spoke of that future in a similar way: God will bring in a “new” or “renewed” creation where He will call people from “all nations and tongues” to a renewed Jerusalem. God will make some of them spiritual leaders, remarkably, “as priests and as Levites” (Isaiah 66:18 - 23).
While much can and must be said about those passages of Scripture, they present a fundamental challenge to anyone who believes that claiming the past determines people’s rights in the present. But the Bible itself does not always look to the past, but also to the future. This is a simple introduction to a much bigger and deeper topic.
Zionism and God’s Promise to Abraham
One brand of Christian and Jewish Zionism envisions a “Greater Israel”[1] from the Nile River to the Euphrates River based on God’s promise to Abraham in Genesis 15:18 - 21:
18 On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the River Euphrates, 19 the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, 20 the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, 21 the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.” (Genesis 15:18 - 21)
Daniella Weiss, a prominent, longtime Israeli activist for Israeli settlements in the West Bank since the early 1970s, and a former mayor, supports the displacement and/or political disempowerment of Palestinians on the basis of this text. In response to the question of whether the Jewish homeland stretches to the Nile River, Weiss replied, “Of course,”[2]though “the river of Egypt” might refer to a smaller river closer to Israel, and not the Nile River per se. Also, Revisionist Zionism,[3] which is influential in Israel’s Likud Party, envisions Israel occupying the land immediately east of the Jordan River all the way to the Euphrates River, which would subsume Transjordan, i.e. the modern nations of Jordan, Lebanon, and parts of Syria and Iraq.
However, how does the rest of Scripture understand and receive this promise? The Pentateuch itself already understands Abraham’s “descendants” more expansively than simply “the twelve tribes of Israel.” God included all the non-Israelite children of Abraham in His promise concerning this land between the Nile and the Euphrates. Abraham had other descendants by Hagar, i.e. Ishmael and the twelve tribes descended from him (Genesis 16:7 - 15; 25:12 - 18); he had even more descendants by Keturah, i.e. Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak and Shuah (Genesis 25:1 - 11); and he had still more descendants through his grandson Esau, the brother of Jacob, i.e. all the Edomites (Genesis 36). In other words, God honored the free will of Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, and Keturah, along with Jacob and Esau in their brotherhood, and acknowledged all Abraham’s descendants. How was this honor expressed? The other descendants of Abraham settled throughout this region. Consequently, to the tribes of Israel per se led by Moses, God narrowed the land boundaries (Numbers 34:1 - 15, though the Euphrates River was also retained as a different northeastern boundary in Deuteronomy 1:7; 11:24; Joshua 1:4). Moses told Israel not to take the lands of Esau, Moab, and Ammon because God had already given these kindred peoples those lands “as their possession” (Deuteronomy 2:5, 9, 19; 19:14).
In other words, God was still working out His initial promise to Abraham. He was not “superseding” one promise with another. God did not suspend the Abrahamic covenant to activate the Mosaic, while supposedly leaving Himself the option to return to the Abrahamic covenant at a future time. This inner-biblical or canonical approach is important because some people, Protestant dispensationalists especially, tend to read God’s promises as if they were completely static as given. So when they read a reiterated but modified version of that promise later in Scripture, they think God gave a second and different promise. They claim that one promise or covenant “supersedes” another. This is poor reading. It is like reading a will which says that all assets should be divided equally between all children, and then trying to read the later-born children out of the will just because the will was written before all the children were born.
Protestants have a tendency to denigrate what God offered “conditionally” and to elevate what God offered “unconditionally.” This peculiar fascination may be helpful to understand how the covenant unfolded and developed, but this fascination goes awry when Protestants think they perceive two or more different covenants and two different peoples of God.
Augustine’s influence surely plays some role in the rise of this fascination. Augustine of Hippo (354 - 430) was a Christian bishop in Hippo Regius in Roman North Africa and a prolific Latin writer who broke with Greek-speaking Christian thought when he expressed radical skepticism about human motivations, efforts, and decisions.[4] The Lutheran and Reformed traditions absorbed Augustine’s skepticism, and these traditions have a long legacy in Western Christianity.
By contrast, the earlier Orthodox and Catholic streams of the Christian tradition did not share Augustine’s skepticism about human effort. Therefore, Orthodox and Catholics, on paper, believe that God invites human beings into a real partnership. God made human beings in His image, so much so that He made us co-creators with Him. For example, God invited human beings to name animals (Genesis 2:19 - 20) and presumably used those names, too. By the same token, God also invites his human covenant partners to shape aspects of His own promises, and participate in how those promises are fulfilled. This relational dynamic is already present in the Pentateuch and affirmed by the biblical narration.
For example, God imposed moral conditions on ancient Israel’s enjoyment of the land of promise. These conditions held from the time of Joshua to the Babylonian Exile of 586 BC. First, God told Israel that they did not own the land directly; He did, in principle: “The land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants” (Leviticus 25:23), a sentiment repeated by King David as he passed the throne to Solomon near the largest point of the united kingdom (1 Chronicles 29:18). Second, God told Israel that their presence and full enjoyment of the land was contingent on their faithfulness, especially to the vision of family and social life God gave them. God warned the Israelites that the land itself would “vomit” them out like it did the Canaanites before them (Leviticus 18:24 - 30; 20:22 - 26). Their life on the land was dependent on their demonstration of God’s justice: “Justice, and only justice, you shall pursue, so that you may live and occupy the land that the Lord your God is giving you” (Deuteronomy 16:20). The definition of justice included treating non-Israelites well, with the frequent reminder that Israel was once enslaved in Egypt and not treated well (Leviticus 19:33 - 34; Deuteronomy 10:17 - 22; 16:11, 14; 24:10 - 22; 27:19). Unless God gave special instructions to treat non-Israelites differently, they were to be treated equally from a legal justice standpoint (Leviticus 24:22).
The consequence was exile from the land and while on the land (more on this below), which the Pentateuch itself regarded as eventual and certain (Deuteronomy 27 - 28). This exile, mirroring the initial exile of Adam and Eve from the first garden land (Genesis 3:21 - 24), will be resolved only by a combination of a messianic figure (Genesis 3:14 - 15; Numbers 24:15 - 24) and a divine act of healing that transforms human nature: “circumcision of the heart” (Deuteronomy 30:1 - 6; Jeremiah 4:4; 9:25 - 26; Ezekiel 44:7).[5] This expression draws on the Jewish rite of circumcision to express a deeper, internal, surgical work associated with internalizing God’s commandments so deeply that the corruption of sin would be cut away (Deuteronomy 10:16). If Israel humbled their “uncircumcised hearts”, then God would remember His covenant with Israel and “remember the land” (Leviticus 26:40 - 42). On the other side of exile, God would call to His people while they were “among the nations” in some manner and sequence which was at that time unspecified, but intrinsically related to offering them “circumcision of the heart” and restoring them to the land in its fruitfulness, “the land which the Lord swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give them” (Deuteronomy 30:1 - 20).
In other words, the holy land could not simply be “claimed” back then, and neither can it simply be “claimed” today. Not only did ancient Israel fail the initial moral conditions back then; the biblical storyline itself indicates another resolution to this problem - a problem actually addressing all humanity in the depths of human nature itself.
What Does the Bible Say About God Fulfilling His Promise?
Later biblical writers after the Pentateuch indicate their belief that God had already fulfilled His covenantal promise to Israel regarding the holy land, without distinguishing the conditional language of the Sinai covenant from the unconditional language of the Abrahamic covenant. Joshua expressed his belief by the cities of refuge. Moses commissioned Israel to build a total of six cities of refuge (Numbers 35:6 - 34); he saw to the building of three east of the Jordan (Deuteronomy 4:41 - 43); he tied three more to Israel’s coming into “the whole land.”
8 If the Lord your God enlarges your territory, as he promised on oath to your ancestors, and gives you the whole land he promised them, 9 because you carefully follow all these laws I command you today - to love the Lord your God and to walk always in obedience to him - then you are to set aside three more cities. (Deuteronomy 19:8 - 9)
When Joshua took the land west of the Jordan, he built three more cities of refuge, naming six in total (Joshua 20:1 - 9). Joshua’s fulfillment of Moses’ command indicates what Joshua understood “the whole land” to be, and what God “promised on oath to your ancestors.”
At the end of his life, Joshua said God had “fulfilled” His promise to Israel, and he was quite emphatic about it:
14 Now behold, today I am going the way of all the earth, and you know in all your hearts and in all your souls that not one word of all the good words which the LORD your God spoke concerning you has failed; all have been fulfilled for you, not one of them has failed. (Joshua 23:14)
Joshua’s words are notable because many other commentators on the Pentateuch assert the opposite. For example, Donald M. Lewis, an impressive historian of Christian Zionism, asserts that God “never entirely fulfilled” His promise in Genesis 12 to Abraham or the twelve tribes of Israel concerning the land.[6] I am uncertain how Lewis interprets Joshua. But should we not consider Joshua to be the commentator on the Pentateuch par excellence?
Joshua went further. He then warned that Israel could and will lose the land God delivered to them:
19 But Joshua said to the people, “You cannot serve the Lord, for he is a holy God. He is a jealous God; he will not forgive your transgressions or your sins. 20 If you forsake the Lord and serve foreign gods, then he will turn and do you harm and consume you, after having done you good.” 21 And the people said to Joshua, “No, we will serve the Lord!” 22 Then Joshua said to the people, “You are witnesses against yourselves that you have chosen the Lord, to serve him.” And they said, “We are witnesses.” (Joshua 24:19 - 21)
Joshua’s certainty that Israel would not be faithful to God within the structure of the Sinai covenant appears to come from his own reading of the Pentateuch (Joshua 1:8). His reading of Moses’ last words in Deuteronomy 27 - 28 appear to make Joshua quite confident of Israel’s failure, exile at some point, and need for God’s restoration which involves God cleansing human nature in that work known as “circumcision of the heart” (Deuteronomy 30:6).
As for the territory that stretched along the Mediterranean coast to the Euphrates River, the narrator of the Book of Chronicles appears to have interpreted that as the provenance of the Davidic kings. King David extended his reign northward along the coast to the Euphrates River (1 Chronicles 18:3), and not east of the Jordan River, which would seem to counter what Revisionist Zionists claim for that particular promise. Then, King Solomon expanded the united kingdom to its largest point, which is described by the narrator of the Book of Chronicles close to the geographical markers of God’s original promise to Abraham in Genesis 15:18:
He was the ruler over all the kings from the Euphrates River even to the land of the Philistines, and as far as the border of Egypt. (2 Chronicles 9:26)
Such language cannot be accidental, and it is significant that Solomon was a king over other kings. His rule did not mean that other peoples were dispossessed of their lands, and the phrase “king of kings” would find more uses later. Generations later, King Jehoshaphat of Judah prayed and said to God, “Did you not, O our God, drive out the inhabitants of this land and give it to the descendants of Abraham Your friend forever?” (2 Chronicles 20:7) Again, the biblical narrators believed that God had fulfilled His promise to Abraham insofar as the Israelites were concerned.
After the exile and the initial return to the holy land, Nehemiah said that God had already fulfilled His promise (Nehemiah 9:8). Notably, Nehemiah did not ask God to fulfill the promises that were yet left to be fulfilled. Even when the Jewish people returned from Babylon to the geographical holy land and were led by Nehemiah, Ezra, Haggai, Zechariah, and others, they confessed that they remained in exile in a theological and spiritual sense, even while Jews lived in the holy land itself, because Israel did not have political independence (Nehemiah 9:36) and God’s shekinah glory had not returned to inhabit the second temple. The Sinai covenant was not considered to be a contractual agreement that could be renewed again, as if it were a modern labor contract, because the Sinai covenant itself is, or at least existed in, a narrative framework described by the Book of Deuteronomy, and Israel had failed their side of the Sinai covenant, which meant that God was moving forward in the narrative. The Hebrew Bible / Old Testament therefore asserted that God would have to do something more, something different, which I will explore, below. Chiefly, the later biblical writers appear to regard the messianic promise to David (Isaiah 9:1 - 6; 11:1 - 10; 42:1 - 4; 49:1 - 7; 52:13 - 53:12; 59:16 - 21; 61:1 - 3; 63:1 - 6; Jeremiah 23:1 - 8; Ezekiel 34:1 - 31; Zechariah 3:8 - 10; 6:11 - 15; 9:9 - 10; 10:1 - 12; 12:6 - 13:9; 14:9 - 21; Psalms 2 and 107 - 150; Chronicles), and not the Sinai covenant involving all Israel per se, as the decisive factor for answering how Israel’s relationship with the land as promised to Abraham would unfold from that point onward.
Even more important, then, is how later biblical writers understood God’s promise to Abraham in Genesis 15:18 unfolding in the future in relation to the messianic age and the Messianic king himself. The prophet Isaiah appears to understand God’s promise concerning the region from the Nile to the Euphrates as indicating Israel’s future spiritual influence, not as a land grant. Isaiah envisions a peaceful and worshipful alliance between Egypt and Assyria, with Israel in between them but not subsuming them (Isaiah 19:19 - 25). Importantly, in Isaiah’s vision, Egypt and Assyria remain distinct peoples and nations. In fact, God will share affectionate and covenantal titles with Egypt and Assyria that once belonged only to Israel. “On that day Israel will be the third party with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth, whom the Lord of hosts has blessed, saying, “Blessed be Egypt my people and Assyria the work of my hands and Israel my heritage.”” (Isaiah 19:24 - 25) That is a remarkable shift away from Israel simply monopolizing the land from the Nile to the Euphrates.
Arguably, the phrase “from the Nile to the Euphrates” itself at least suggests, and perhaps even idiomatically means, the “known world” from an Ancient Near Eastern perspective. This view is corroborated by Psalm 87, where people (Jews in the diaspora? Gentiles?), ranging from Cush on the Nile to Babylon on the Euphrates, are embraced by Zion in some sense. In the Psalms, “Zion” is shorthand for Davidic, and hence Messianic, authority. If so, then Isaiah’s vision needs to be understood as a particular expression of the messianic vision to all the nations. Isaiah’s vision likely informs the New Testament understanding of mission to both the Jewish diaspora, including Samaritans and Ethiopian Jewry (Acts 8), and gentiles, where gentiles in Messiah Jesus become equal “co-heirs” with Jews in Messiah Jesus (Ephesians 3:1 - 6). The apostle Paul believed that the proclamation of Jesus was “to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (Romans 1:16). Isaiah’s vision of Egypt, Israel, and Assyria is the part that represents the whole, specifically the Ancient Near Eastern part that represents the whole world.
Matching that future vision, Isaiah recognizes that God would lift limitations that Moses imposed on eunuchs and certain foreigners. Moses forbade Ammon and Moab, the descendants of Lot, from joint worship (Deuteronomy 23:1 - 7), but Isaiah envisions God undoing that ban (Isaiah 56:3 - 8). This is also remarkable. Perhaps Isaiah asserts this because Sennacherib, king of Assyria, “removed the boundaries of nations” (Isaiah 10:12 - 14), of which the Talmud says, he “scrambled all the nations,” making traditional associations between peoples and lands impossible.[7] Perhaps Isaiah also considered that God brought Ruth the Moabitess into the lineage of King David himself, as she became his great grandmother (Ruth 4:13 - 22) despite Moses’ earlier ban on Moabites (Deuteronomy 23:3), which becomes part of the story of how the Davidic kingly line would both regather the Jewish people and also welcome and inherit “the nations” (Genesis 17:6; 49:8 - 12; Numbers 24:17 - 24; Isaiah 2:1 - 4; 9:1 - 7; 11:1 - 16; 52:13 - 53:12; Amos 9:11 - 12; Psalms 2:8 - 9; 110:1 - 7; etc.) and in what sense would it do so?
What Does the Bible Say About What the Bible Said?
Thus, one critical question to ask is, “What does the Bible say about what the Bible said?” An inner-biblical or canonical reading of Genesis 12:1 - 3 and 15:18 - 21 complicates - insurmountably so - the exclusive land grant theory of a “Greater Israel.” For the inner-biblical reading acknowledges not only what already happened in biblical history (in the Pentateuch and later biblical books), but also what is to come (in Isaiah, for instance). Such an approach appears to also drain away theological support for a territorial nation-state for Jewish people only, while leaving moral and ethical principles to guide pragmatic efforts towards a political pluralism.
Compare this methodological approach to Scripture with that taken by Michael Brown, a leading apologist for the Messianic Jewish faith in Jesus. In a short article, Brown notes how God’s promise to Abraham was reiterated and passed down from father to son in Genesis, but then ignores critical biblical material later in the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament. Ignoring Abraham’s other children vis-a-vis the land, Brown reads Genesis 12:1 - 3 and says, “The “great nation” God made out of Abram was the nation of Israel” alone, and no others.[8] The leap in reading and logic is considerable.
Brown then superimposes onto a few New Testament texts a modern, geopolitically Zionist interpretation of the regathering of Jewish exiles. Granted Brown’s article is short and his reasoning is not well developed, but of the New Testament texts he cites and reasons he gives, here are my objections: Brown cites Romans 11:28 - 29 as if the Zionist proposal is the only reading of Paul, despite how Paul in Romans 4:13 already says that the heirs of Abraham, both Jew and gentile, will inherit the world in an undifferentiated way. Brown cites Luke 21:24 as if Jesus’ pronouncement of destruction on the Jerusalem temple also means that it will be rebuilt one day. He cites Matthew 19:28 as if the “regeneration” is for judgment day and what follows into the future, even though Jesus claims to undo “hardness of heart” in the present, which is why he calls for a renewal of marriage (Matthew 19:4 - 6) and economic sharing (Matthew 19:29) in the present, a “regenesis” of the original “genesis” in the present, not in the eternal future when there would be no marriage at all (Matthew 22:23 - 33).[9] Brown cites Acts 1:6 - 7 and 3:19 - 20 which are not at all straightforwardly supportive of his position, as the Jewish Annotated New Testament shows.[10] Remarkably, Brown says, “Once we recognize that it is God himself who established the modern State of Israel,”[11] but he is far from providing any evidence for it.
In any case, the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament itself prioritizes the future, namely, the messianic future. In the return from exile, God will regather the Jewish people scattered in the diaspora (e.g. Isaiah 40:1 - 11; 42:1 - 7; Psalm 107), and if a physical return to the land is meant in addition to a spiritual return to the Messiah, then we must exegetically maintain that this does not mean a displacement of those designated aliens, foreigners, and gentiles (Isaiah 66:18 - 23; Ezekiel 47:21 - 23). Much still needs to be said about these visions of prophetic hope. Do they take Jewishness in a genetic-ethnic sense or in a creedal-faith sense? Do they envision Davidic political sovereignty connected to a physical return? Do they understand gentiles as people who worship Israel’s God but remain gentile or as people who accept Jewish circumcision and other markers of Jewish identity? What is meant by the temple imagery? Discussing these questions will be increasingly difficult for believers in Jesus to avoid, as if the readings of the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament offered by Jesus and his apostles have no bearing.
Meanwhile, so long as peaceful co-citizenship is possible in the present, as it was between Jews and Arab and Palestinian Christians and Muslims in the nineteenth century, prior to the rise in Zionism and Arab nationalism,[12] then why not take the biblical hope over the biblical past as a guide, interpretive uncertainties and all? All this, even prior to explicitly considering Jesus and the New Testament.
The future takes priority over the past in Scripture itself. I believe claims about the past are vital to understand people’s pain, but peacebuilding must recognize the biblical and theological claims being made and bring them in for critique. And when we do that, we will notice that the Bible itself recognizes the importance of the divine-human partnership in the deployment and application of God’s promises even before Jesus and the New Testament came about. Hence, the Bible gives moral weight to the prophetic vision of God’s future, into which God beckons all humanity towards co-inheritance and peace. So we work and pray towards peace in the present based on God’s future, not based on peoples’ claims about what God did in the past.
[1] Pipes, Daniel. “Imperial Israel: The Nile-to-Euphrates Calumny.” Middle East Quarterly. Volume 1. Number 1. March 1994. https://www.meforum.org/215/imperial-israel-the-nile-to-euphrates-calumny.
[2] Chotiner, Isaac. “The Extreme Ambitions of West Bank Settlers.” The New Yorker. November 11, 2023. https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-extreme-ambitions-of-west-bank-settlers.
[3] Shelef, Nadav G. “From "Both Banks of the Jordan " to the "Whole Land of Israel:" Ideological Change in Revisionist Zionism.” Israel Studies. Volume 9. Number 1. Spring 2004. 125-148. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/169471.
[4] Augustine of Hippo. On the Predestination of the Saints 16. Bradshaw, David. Aristotle East and West: Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 264 – 266. For a fairly extensive list of quotations and citations of patristic sources comparing all other writers with Augustine, see Nagasawa, Mako A. Human Free Will and God’s Grace in the Early Church Fathers. Available here: www.anastasiscenter.org/gods-goodness-creation.
[5] Levine, Amy and Marc Zvi Brettler. “Circumcision of the Heart.” The Jewish Annotated New Testament: New Revised Standard Version. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2017. 260. It should be noted that Scripture also deploys other poetic and idiomatic statements to indicate God transforming the human heart in partnership with humans: writing God’s law on the human heart to overwrite the script of sin (Deuteronomy 6:4 - 9; Jeremiah 17:1 - 10; 31:31 - 34; Proverbs 3:3; 7:3); receiving a new, responsive, and clean heart (Jeremiah 32:39 - 40; Ezekiel 11:18; 36:26 - 36; Psalm 51:9 - 11); fully internalizing the Spirit of God (Isaiah 59:21; Joel 2:28 - 29); and being refined by divine fire like precious metal separated from dross in physical fire (Isaiah 1:25; 6:6; 41:7; 48:10; Jeremiah 6:29; 10:9; Malachi 3:1 - 4; Zechariah 13:9; Psalm 17:3; 26:2; 66:10; 105:19), which was drawn in part from the story of Moses ascending Mount Sinai and passing through divine fire to bear the divine glory in his face (Exodus 34:29 - 35; cf. 29:37).
Two stories in Scripture should be regarded of primary importance in framing the meaning of these idiomatic expressions: the Abraham and Sarah story in Genesis 12 - 22 in which God instituted physical circumcision, and the story of Moses’ ascent up Mount Sinai to meet with God and stabilize the Sinai covenant for Israel in Exodus 19 - 34. Both stories involve the theme of new creation - new humanity.
God called Abraham and Sarah to a new garden land to be a new type of Adam and Eve and becoming the conduit of the original creational blessing (Genesis 12:1 - 3; cf. 1:26 - 28; 2:4 - 25); God promised them a son despite their old age, and childbearing is a “new creation - new humanity” in a simple biological sense. But God called Abraham and Sarah to “new creation - new humanity” in a narrative sense, too. God called Abraham to “cut off” the male privilege of discarding Sarah as his wife and partner (Genesis 12), “cut off” the male privilege of simply naming another man, Eleazar his servant, to be his heir (Genesis 15), “cut off” the male privilege of impregnating a surrogate mother, Hagar the Egyptian (Genesis 16). Incidentally, God called Sarah to “cut off” the female class privilege of being a married woman and using a single woman that way. In other words, Abraham and Sarah had to agree with God to be like Adam and Eve morally and relationally, and thus have a child in the ordinary biological way, even though they were elderly and post-menopausal. And that is when God told Abraham to “cut off” the flesh of the foreskin on his penis by circumcising himself (Genesis 17), resulting in Abraham’s laughter and faith, and then soon afterwards, Sarah’s laughter and faith (Genesis 18). Physical circumcision was a “sign” of the covenant (Genesis 17:11), but humorously a “sign” that Abraham would show Sarah in the privacy of their tent, signifying that he believed God, and invited her to believe God, too. Therefore, circumcision means “new creation - new humanity” in a double sense: first, Abraham and Sarah had to trust that God would bring “life out of death” in the sense of bearing a new human life from their own reproductively dead bodies; second, Abraham and Sarah enacted their likeness to Adam and Eve by doing what they should have done: have a child in the garden land. Therefore, when Moses said, “circumcise your hearts” (Deuteronomy 10:16), he was indicating that a deeper work must be done to help the Israelites truly become a “new creation - new humanity.” Moses knew, however, that Israel would fail and go into exile like Adam and Eve went into exile, and God would have to provide “circumcision of the heart” when He brought Israel back from exile, or as a precondition for it in some sense. When Jesus was circumcised as an infant (Luke 2:21), he received his vocation as an Israelite to circumcise his heart, which he did the next time he shed blood: on the cross. When the apostle Paul applies this to Jew and gentile in Christ, in Romans 2:28 - 29 and Colossians 2:9 - 12, he already understands “circumcision of the heart” to be fact and accomplished by Jesus in his own human journey, and in us by participation in Jesus.
When Moses ascended Mount Sinai, he also enacted a “new creation - new humanity” portrait. Mount Sinai was like Mount Eden in a literary and theological sense. For God made Eden a mountain, indicated by elevation logically required by the four rivers which diverged, not converged, from it (Genesis 2:10 - 14), and also indicated by the fact that Ezekiel called Eden a mountain (Ezekiel 28:13 - 14). Moses therefore traversed through a strange garden up a mountain: He walked from a wilderness where water came from a rock and manna fell from the sky (Exodus 16); he ascended a mountain like Adam and Eve should have ascended a mountain (Exodus 19). However, God had called all Israel, not just Moses, to walk through that strange wilderness garden and up the mountain, but Israel refused in fear (Exodus 19:13; Deuteronomy 5:4 - 5). Therefore, Moses alone went through the divine fire and was purified to some degree so that God’s glory shone in and through his face. When Israel broke the covenant (Exodus 32), Moses mediated for Israel and renewed the covenant (Exodus 33 - 34). God gave instructions for the sanctuary to be built on the model of Mount Sinai, so that the covenant would be renewed every year on Yom Kippur (Leviticus 16) when the high priest’s horizontal movement into the holy of holies retold Moses’ vertical movement to the top of Mount Sinai. The bronze altar in the courtyard of the sanctuary contained the fire that represented the divine fire; it made holy everything that touched it and moved inward into the sanctuary, reminding Israel of how God made Moses holy as Moses entered the divine fire and moved upward up Mount Sinai (Exodus 29:37). Therefore, the entire sanctuary system and the Greek word “hilasterion” for the English “mercy seat” has to do with the expiation of sin and the cleansing of people as Moses was purified - not, as the Protestant Reformers asserted later, the satisfaction of divine retributive justice; God in the Jewish sanctuary system was not blood thirsty; He was like a blood donor, giving back purified life after drawing in Israel’s impurities. For more on this, see Nagasawa, Mako A. “Temple Sacrifices, Part 5: God as Dialysis Machine and the Retelling of Moses’ Purification on Mount Sinai.” The Anastasis Center blog, https://www.anastasiscenterblog.org/temple-sacrifices-a-bloodthirsty-god/post-5-god-as-dialysis-machine. Significantly, divine fire must be understood as God’s invitation to cleanse and purify people; only by refusing and clinging to the impure dross would people experience divine fire as tormenting. Much later, the prophet Isaiah drew from this imagery. The coal that touched his lips to cleanse them was drawn from the bronze altar (Isaiah 6:6). The motif of divine fire is a motif of God’s appearance as the fiery sword guarding the way back to the tree of life and garden of Eden (Genesis 3:24). God wants to restore people from exile, but only by burning and cutting away from us the corruption of sin from the fall. Hence, Jesus’ vocation as an Israelite under the Sinai covenant (Galatians 4:4; Romans 8:3) and anointing of the Spirit as a fire (Matthew 3:13 - 17; Luke 3:20) was a vocation to conquer temptation as one of us and purify his human nature (Matthew 4:1 - 11 Luke 4:1 - 13; Hebrews 5:7 - 10). Jesus is presented as the fiery one whose word is a sword (Revelation 1:12 - 18) - the one who burns and cuts away the corruption of sin in us so that we might return to the garden.
[6] Lewis, Donald M. “A Very Short History of Christian Zionism.” Edited by Cannon, Mae Elise. A Land Full of God: Christian Perspectives on the Holy Land. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishing. 2017. 109. See also Lewis, Donald M. A Short History of Christian Zionism: From the Reformation to the Twenty-First Century. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2021.
[7] Babylonian Talmud, Zeraim, Berakhot 28a:6 - 8. “Rabbi Yehoshua says that Sennacherib “scrambled all the nations and settled other nations in place of Ammon.””
[8] Brown, Michael. “Will God Really Bless Those Who Bless Israel Today?” Edited by Cannon, Mae Elise. A Land Full of God: Christian Perspectives on the Holy Land. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishing. 2017. 68.
[9] Levine, Amy and Marc Zvi Brettler. The Jewish Annotated New Testament: New Revised Standard Version. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2017. 26. Note 19.28. The footnote connects the “renewal of all things, messianic age” in Matthew 19:28 to Daniel’s vision of the Son of Man ascending the throne in Daniel 7:13 - 14, and the commentators connect this verse and the Son of Man prophecy to Jesus stilling the waves on the Sea of Galilee (Matthew 8:20), Jesus telling his disciples about when the Son of Man comes, in the Danielic sense, to his enthronement, for the purpose of judgment (Matthew 10:23), and Jesus’ coming as Son of Man in judgment (Matthew 25:30, 31). Thus, Jesus inaugurated the “regeneration,” the “renewal of all things” and the messianic age in his first coming; the word does not refer to Jesus’ second coming, as Michael Brown suggests.
[10] Levine, Amy and Marc Zvi Brettler. The Jewish Annotated New Testament: New Revised Standard Version. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2017. 199, 205. On Acts 1:7 - 8, “Jesus intimates that the apostles have a faulty understanding; God’s act of redemption is not found in a political change, but in the bestowing of the Spirit” (199). On Acts 3:19 - 21, “by accepting Jesus as Messiah”, people may participate in the “expansion of the Jewish eschatological concept of restoration/turn to include all persons” (205).
[11] Brown, Michael. “Will God Really Bless Those Who Bless Israel Today?” Edited by Cannon, Mae Elise. A Land Full of God: Christian Perspectives on the Holy Land. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishing. 2017. 73. See 67 - 74.
[12] Rotem, Noam. “Before Zionism: The Shared Life of Jews and Palestinians.” +972 Magazine. April 4, 2016. https://www.972mag.com/before-zionism-the-shared-life-of-jews-and-palestinians/