The Bible in the Israel-Palestine Conflict, Chapter 3: Temple

Does Israel Need a Temple Today?

The Western Wall, or Wailing Wall, of the former Second Temple, and the Dome of the Rock, in the old city of Jerusalem. Photo credit: Your way to Israel | Wikimedia. CC-3.0

How Narrative Shapes Ethics

Jews and Christians affirm that both Israeli people and Palestinian people, like all people, are made in the image of God and should be accorded the same human rights as other people.  But this begs the complicated question:  What rights and responsibilities do people have?  Can they be different?  Do those rights and responsibilities depend on what land they occupy?

Jewish and Christian ethics and even approaches to Middle East geopolitics are varied and complex in their own ways, but they all rest on narrative and interpretations of that narrative.  This makes Jewish and Christian ethics unusual compared to other ethical systems, whether Aristotelian virtue ethics, Kantian deontological ethics, utilitarianism, or something else.  Other ethical systems tend to be rooted in propositions which claim to be universal.  Jewish and Christian ethics are rooted in a narrative of exile and restoration from exile, and the reunion of heaven and earth.

Jews and Christians assert that all humanity lives in exile from the original garden of Eden, a fact narrated in Genesis (Genesis 3:21 - 24).  Exile is the condition of home-longing reflected in a rupture between heaven and earth.  God placed a flaming sword between cherubim to guard the way back to the garden of Eden.  Exile was modeled by God to the Israelites by the ark of the covenant in the sanctuary.  God appeared as a pillar of flame between two sculpted cherubim on the lid of the ark of the covenant, representing the idea that God was that flaming sword:  God stood on the threshold of heaven and earth; God Himself guarded the way back to the garden.  Ancient Israel participated in the fallen Adamic condition, which it was called by God, within the framework of the Sinai covenant, to undo.  Exile expressed that participation, for they had not succeeded.

Exile and Temple

In the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament, the Jewish temple was and is thought to be a particular reversal of the exilebecause it was a meeting between heaven and earth, a point of special reunion between God the Creator and the creation He made.  As such, human beings had special responsibilities regarding the temple, at the temple, and towards the temple. 

Rabbi Joshua Berman is one modern Jewish interpreter who connects the restoration from exile to a rebuilt third temple in Jerusalem.  Berman admirably seeks peaceful solutions today.  When he specifically considers the Muslim Dome of the Rock which stands on the temple mount, and whether the Israeli government has the responsibility to relocate or remove it, Berman writes, 

The presence of the Dome of the Rock atop Mount Moriah is not the obstacle towards the rebuilding of the Temple.  Its presence atop Mount Moriah is rather a sign to us that we are not yet deserving of the covenantal symbol that is the Temple.  It is a symptom of the fact that we need arrange our own house, before the House of God is to be rebuilt.[1] 

As a matter of intra-Jewish debate, Berman argues, Jewish faithfulness to the Torah precedes temple-building.  The exile continues, he says, because of Jewish unfaithfulness to God.  He says, critically recognizing that while the second temple itself stood, “For the prophets, the full restoration of Israel’s grandeur was available, but only on the condition that the people served God fully.  If the return had fallen short of expectations, said Zechariah [1:3 - 6], the blame was to be with those who returned.”[2]  Thus, who is responsible today for not proceeding further with the third temple project? Berman is logically required to place the responsibility on the shoulders of the Jewish people, broadly, for their moral and religious unfaithfulness on other non-temple matters.

For Berman, there is no one else besides Jews whose faithfulness to God can produce a restored-from-exile humanity, which for him is synonymous with the presence of a temple in Jerusalem, or at least inextricably linked with it.  Yet the claim of the Qumran community was that the Holy Spirit dwelt among them because they were a faithful representation of Israel, as a subset of Israel.  And Jesus’ claim was that the Holy Spirit dwelt in him because he was the sole faithful representation of Israel, as a subset of Israel and as the messianic king whose vocation it was to represent Israel. 

Previously, only the temple was thought to be the place where heaven and earth touched in quite that way (1 Kings 8), yet Jesus said of himself, “Something greater than the temple is here” (Matthew 12:6).  He claimed for himself functions that were only ascribed before to the temple:  Jesus made whole and clean the people he touched (Matthew 8:1 - 4), like the bronze altar with fire in the sanctuary courtyard which made holy the things that touched it (Exodus 29:37) which itself represented the divine fire which cleansed Moses on Mount Sinai (Exodus 19:18; 34:29 - 35); Jesus claimed his presence was the place where God forgave sins (Matthew 8:5 - 13); Jesus claimed to be the source of “living water” (John 4:14 - 26; 7:38 - 39), which was language reflecting the water that flowed from the temple (Psalm 46:4; Ezekiel 48), itself an image of the water flowing from Eden (Genesis 2:10 - 14); Jesus restored the five loaves of bread that David took from the sanctuary by an order of magnitude (Matthew 14:13 - 21; 1 Samuel 21:15 - 21), authenticating his claim that he was the “something greater than the temple” (Matthew 12:6); Jesus claimed he was the true vine (John 15:1 - 8), where a vine was sculpted on the stone facade of the temple, which represented Israel (Isaiah 5:1 - 7; Psalm 80).  Jesus fulfilled the role of the temple, becoming a “place of prayer for all peoples,” both Jew and gentile (Matthew 21:12 - 13; Mark 11:15 - 17; Luke 19:45 - 46) so that in Jesus, we might all become part of the inheritance promised as a possession to David (Psalm 2:8 - 9), that all might join Israel in the worship of God, not replace Israel (Romans 11:17 - 24).

Post-resurrection, Jesus claimed he had made his human body a proper temple-home for God’s Spirit in the most intensified form possible.  Jesus had returned his human body home to the garden of immortal life because he, by his human faithfulness under the Sinai covenant, cleansed it of the corruption of sin-sickness (Romans 2:28 - 29; 4:25; 6:1 - 11; 8:3 - 4; 1 Corinthians 15:17).  Those people, both Jew and gentile, who profess faith in Christ then come to be found “in him” and therefore are part of Jesus, the unique temple presence of God, sometimes called “living stones” in that temple (Ephesians 2:11 - 22; 1 Peter 2:1 - 5) of which Messiah Jesus is the chief cornerstone (Matthew 21:42 - 44; Mark 12:10 - 11; Luke 20:17 - 18; 1 Peter 2:6 - 10) to which, in this metaphor, the other stones are cut.  Reciprocally, Jesus makes each believer, Jew and gentile, temples of God by coming into them by the Spirit (1 Corinthians 3:16 - 17; 6:18 - 20).  Jesus thus claimed to be the one who will one day reunite heaven and earth to remake planet earth to be the home of those who participate in him and his mission; in that age, there would be no temple, “for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb” (Revelation 21:22).  So the claims about what type of temple God wants are at stake, and deeply connected to the question of why the Jewish people remain in exile theologically.

Temple and the Restoration of Exile in the Biblical Narrative

Thus, central to the Christian ethical vision is a narrative critique of the temple institution and its connection to the exile and the restoration from exile.  But this Christian critique does not float free from the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament; it claims to be rooted precisely in that narrative.  Since God knew that Israel would eventually go into exile (Deuteronomy 27 - 28) because Israel shared the same human nature problem everyone else had (Leviticus 26:49; Deuteronomy 10:16; 30:6), exile should arguably be a hermeneutical consideration for reading the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament, because exile is related to human nature, and the human nature problem takes priority as a problem over any temple. 

In fact, it can be argued on the grounds of the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament that the temple itself was a temporary accommodation on the part of God, and memorialized a type of failure on the part of Israel and a type of spatial distance from humanity on the part of God.  Joshua Berman does not consider, for example, the Pentateuch’s own critique of the first sanctuary, the tabernacle, which would indicate that God wants a “temple people” more than a “people with a temple.”[3]  The Pentateuch itself criticized the Israelites’ failure to come up Mount Sinai to meet with God in Exodus 19.  While the Israelites sent Moses instead, they also failed and broke the covenant while Moses was on the mountain (Exodus 32), so Moses had to mediate and renew the covenant for Israel (Exodus 33 - 34).  The temple sanctuary and its annual sacrificial calendar, by retelling Moses’ ascent year after year, also memorialized Israel’s failure to ascend Mount Sinai, and therefore pointed forward to some greater resolution than the tabernacle-temple sanctuary. 

Similarly, from within the Christian tradition, the above interpretation of the Pentateuch emerges explicitly in the Letter to the Hebrews, which instructs Jewish believers in Jesus not to worship in the second temple and offer sacrifices there.  Not only does Hebrews argue that Jesus’ role as priest, sacrifice, and tabernacle eclipse the sanctuary, the letter makes its case using an inner-biblical criticism of the first sanctuary, the tabernacle.  If Hebrews had merely criticized the second temple on circumstantial grounds, as if what was wrong with the second temple was that it did not conform to prior biblical texts, was not run by the right people, was not run in the right way, and so on, then it would have affirmed those earlier biblical texts in principle; it would have left open the theoretical possibility that the second temple might be corrected or that a hypothetical “third temple” could be built and have meaning for Judaism.  But since Hebrews makes a biblical argument from the Pentateuch, it positions Jewish believers in Jesus to debate their Jewish peers about the importance of the first sanctuary on inner-biblical grounds.  Hebrews shows that logical priority is given to cleansing human nature over maintaining the sanctuary institution from biblical texts.  In other words, Hebrews self-consciously takes up a position about the Pentateuch and other biblical texts in an intra-Jewish debate about Scripture.  Therefore, it commissions believers in Jesus to argue against the relevance of any “third temple,” even for Judaism.

What the Bible Says About What the Bible Said?  Yet Again

In the later material in the Bible, similar temple-critical themes continue.  To highlight this theme from the Books of Samuel and Kings, I engage briefly with Robert Alter, a brilliant Jewish commentator and translator from whom I have deeply benefited.  Alter, remarkably, rearranges biblical material.  In his book, The David Story, he appends the first two chapters of the Book of Kings to the Book of Samuel.[4]  By cutting and pasting stories like this, Alter shifts the meaning of the Book of Samuel.  The Book of Samuel is a tragic narrative about Israel’s leadership failures.  It is a narrative evaluation of the Davidic covenant itself, reversing themes from the Book of Genesis to make its point,[5] and ending in an open-ended way, which is a literary device that poses questions to the reader about what should happen next.  The narrative introduces David as a young man using Adamic imagery of a man bringing order among the beasts (1 Samuel 17:34 - 36; cf. Genesis 2:18 - 25); but when David is king in Jerusalem, he plays the role not of a new Adam, but instead, the serpent destroying a married couple, Bathsheba and Uriah.  God then declares to David that “the sword shall never depart from your house” (2 Samuel 12:10).  David’s sins and God’s curse cast a long, troubling shadow on God’s covenantal commitment to David about a dynastic kingship (2 Samuel 7).  How, then, can the Davidic line lead Israel and the gentiles to repair the world and usher shalom back into the creation?  The Book of Samuel already puts God and the Davidic line into a quandary, for how can the “next David” be simultaneously “of David” but an entirely “new David” who is free from the curse?  By pointing out David’s deficiencies, the book already longs for a messianic “new David” prior to the building of the first temple, which surely has negative ramifications for the first temple. 

The biblical Book of Kings, similarly, levels an insightful and devastating critique on the first temple.  For as King Solomon built the first temple, he became a new type of Pharaoh who led Israel into civil war, divided it into two, and drove the Northern Kingdom away from the presence of God in Jerusalem.  Alter, however, shifts the climax of the Book of Samuel so that the narrative ends on a mixed but arguably victorious note about the ascendancy of young King Solomon, including God’s blessings on the united kingdom and the first temple which Solomon would eventually build.

The relation between temple and exile is further informed by the fact that even when the second temple stood, the Jews who had returned to the holy land from Babylon remained in exile (Zechariah 3:1 - 10; 5:1 - 4; 6:9 - 15; Malachi 3:1 - 4).  God’s shekinah glory did not return.  Yet God had promised that the “latter splendor of this house [the second temple] shall be greater than the former” (Haggai 2:9).  But in what sense?  If Haggai’s promise is taken to refer to Ezekiel’s vision of a restored temple (Ezekiel 40 - 47), as if it should be understood to be literal architectural plans for a restored temple, rather than a literary device related to “jubilee,”[6] then why didn’t the leaders of that generation follow Ezekiel’s plans?  Were they in fact disobedient?  Or, if Haggai’s promise is taken to mean that the second temple would receive God’s shekinah glory as in the first temple, rather than become the place in which Jesus of Nazareth could be presented, learn and grow (Luke 2:22 - 52), and ultimately declare himself king of the Jews, then the result can only be tragic disappointment.  What follows in these alternatives could only be painful and poignant doubts about the reliability of the prophet Haggai, then one level higher to the canonization of the biblical material, and ultimately to God Himself. 

Still another temple-critical voice in the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament is the Book of Isaiah.  A reading of Isaiah as an anti-temple Jewish theologian certainly seems viable, since the Book of Isaiah closes with:

1 Heaven is my throne,

And the earth is my footstool;

So what kind of house could you build for me,

What sort of place for me to rest?

2 All these things my hand has made,

So all these things are mine, says the Lord.

But this is the one to whom I will look: to the humble and contrite in spirit

Who trembles at my word. (Isaiah 66:1 - 2)

 Although much more needs to be said about this, Isaiah seems to read the Pentateuch as meaning that God wanted a “temple people,” not a “people with a temple.” 

Readings of Isaiah by Qumran and the earliest followers of the Jesus movement are also significant because they were engaging in an intra-Jewish debate that cast significant doubt on the second temple, at the very least, and by extension, the meaning of an “eschatological temple.”  The Qumran community saw themselves as the true temple, quoting from Isaiah to make that case.  Significantly, they believed they did not need to offer sacrifices, nor go to Jerusalem.[7]  The document known as the Community Rule, abbreviated as 1QS, uses Isaiah’s “voice in the wilderness” passage (Isaiah 40:3) to refer to the Qumran community as an “advance” of all Israel restored (1QS 8:12 - 14).  The document also quotes from Isaiah’s language of the Holy Spirit in Isaiah 11:2 and 59:20 - 21 to connect participation in the community with atonement and cleansing from sin (1QS 3:6 - 9).  The Qumran document quotes new covenant passages (Jeremiah 31:31 - 34 and Ezekiel 36:26 - 36 in 1QS 3:6 - 9; Deuteronomy 30:6 in 1QS 5:4 - 6) to indicate that it understood itself to be the “eschatological temple” which prioritized the cleansing of human nature as the true purpose of the previous sanctuaries.  To say the least, their understanding of Isaiah comports with the notion that God wanted a “temple people,” not a “people with a temple.”

The apostle Paul also had a vision of all Israel restored, and also drew upon Isaiah to make his case.  I cite Paul not necessarily because I am a Christian but because his argument makes use of Isaiah as part of, I stress, an intra-Jewish debate about key Jewish institutions, not least the temple.  And the Jesus movement was certainly more influential and far-reaching than Qumran.  When Paul composed his Letter to the Romans and made his much discussed remark that one day “all Israel will be saved” (Romans 11:26), he drew the prophet Isaiah into the argument.  Importantly, Paul quoted Isaiah 59:20 to explain his statement, which comports with his frequent use of Isaiah in Romans 9 - 11 and the letter as a whole.  Of course, Paul and other early followers of Jesus believed that Jesus himself had taken the place of the temple and was now gathering people, both Jew and gentile, unto himself.  Since the second temple still stood at the time Paul composed Romans, Paul must have believed Isaiah made an argument against the temple and for the Messiah.  This fact is important because whether one takes a gradualist or sudden interpretation of “all Israel will be saved” in Romans 11:26 of how he thought the Jewish community will turn to Jesus, or whether one envisions a “physical return” to the land in addition to a “spiritual return” to Jesus as Messiah, or whether one takes Israel in a narrow sense as referring only to Jews, or Israel in a broad sense as Jew and gentile in Christ retrospectively, the fact remains that Paul involves the prophet Isaiah as a key witness in his case.  Isaiah, argues Paul and the Jesus movement, prioritizes cleansing human nature over the physical temple institution, and saw the latter as a hindrance to the former.  And, for the record, I believe Paul’s basic view of the Book of Isaiah can be substantiated on exegetical grounds alone, but that analysis would have to be undertaken elsewhere.  All this raises sharp questions about why a rebuilt third temple in Jerusalem should be considered, from the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament, an essential ingredient towards the full restoration from exile.  Should it be?

Jesus Claims the Land, the People, and the Planet

While most of the points made above are based mostly on the Hebrew Bible alone, especially concerning Genesis 12 and 15, and while they can stand quite independently of the New Testament because they demonstrate the style of reading the Hebrew Bible reflected within the Hebrew Bible itself and also by Jesus and the apostles, in the points below, I will explicitly consider and coordinate New Testament passages on these matters.  I will still engage very substantively with the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament, primarily to show that the New Testament stands in strong continuity with the Hebrew Bible.  The arguments should be recognizable, thus, to Jewish readers who do not share a commitment to Jesus. 

For Christians, Jesus’ teaching on economic sharing has direct bearing on how Christians approach conflicts about land and possessions, including the long-simmering Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  This includes land rights in the city of Jerusalem and even the temple mount proper.  Many Protestant Christians, however, especially those who identify themselves as dispensationalists, argue that Jewish Christians and/or Jews in the State of Israel and/or Jews generally, have a heavenly mandate to assert exclusive land rights which the twelve tribes of Israel inhabited during biblical times.  Dispensationalists understand the “kingdom of God” Jesus proclaimed as Israel’s reign over the nations, a state of external, geopolitical affairs from which Israel turned away because they rejected Jesus at his first coming.  Hence, dispensationalists believe that when Jesus announced the kingdom to the Jewish people and they mostly rejected him at that time, that Jesus gave the Spirit to the church while reserving the “kingdom” for Israel at his second coming. However, this theory poses an alternative to affirming that Jesus’ teaching on economic ethics and community applies to all people in standard Christian discipleship.  From a Christ-centered perspective on ethics, neither ancestry nor past occupation is an automatic title to land rights.  Nor is it appropriate to assert that any “people of God” can return to some earlier point in biblical history for property rights.  Why is this?

Jesus, as the ideal Israelite and true king of Israel, claimed not just the land of Israel but the whole planet.  This is seen when Jesus quoted Psalm 37, “the meek will inherit the land,” but changed the phrase to encompass the planet: “the meek shall inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5).  The apostles affirmed from the Book of Genesis that since God promised the “seed of Abraham” the inheritance of “the world” (Genesis 12:1 - 3; 15:1 - 6; 17:1 - 8), and recognized that God also promised the “seed of David” the inheritance of “the nations” (Psalm 2:8).  Jesus, as both “seed of Abraham” without remainder (Galatians 3:16 - 18) and “seed of David” without remainder (Matthew 1:1 - 17; Romans 1:1 - 4), inherited not just the land but the whole world and all people (Matthew 28:18 - 20; Romans 4:13).

Jesus’ own way of life in relation to land and all material wealth is inseparably intertwined with his announcement of the kingdom and the true meaning of his atonement.  Jesus shares the earth with humanity in principle (Romans 4:13; Galatians 3:29).  And in the future age of resurrection and renewal, he will share the renewed earth with those people who share this earth like he does, in partnership with him.  To be specific, Jesus calls people to participate in his lordship over the creation by sharing wealth with others in the same way he shares it with us:  open-handedly, with generosity, hospitality, and sharing (Matthew 6:19 - 34; 13:1 - 21; 19:13 - 30; Luke 6:20 - 49; 10:25 - 37; 12:13 - 34; 14:12 - 35; 16:1 - 31; 18:15 - 19:10; 21:1 - 4), even at his own expense, since he said that he had no place to lay his head (Matthew 8:20).  Jesus calls people to become his disciples and to manifest his lordship over the whole earth in this way.  Our hope for his renewal of the whole earth, then, is not just by verbally acknowledging him while maintaining a private property absolutism, but by living out his teaching and participating in his radical posture of sharing.  We are to explicitly teach others to do so, too, in every nation and in every place (Matthew 28:18 - 20; Luke 24:44 - 49).  And following Jesus, Christians pray for the Father’s kingdom to be manifested on earth as it is in heaven (Matthew 6:10; Luke 11:1 - 4).  Jesus’ ethical teaching intersects with his claim on the whole world and on all people, and allows us to participate in it. 

In fact, if Jesus is the Messianic king of both Jews and gentiles, then why would he not be extending his reign just like this?  It is remarkably similar in principle to the way the first David became king.  This point is important for both Jews and Christians to consider.  The process by which David became king of the Jewish people was long and messy; if that was true for the first David, why would it not be true of the last David?  Consider the precedent of the first David in the Book of Samuel.  David was not acclaimed instantaneously by the Jewish people, certainly not while Saul still reigned as king, but even after Saul died and the tribe of Judah pledged their fealty to David as king, the remaining tribes followed Ishbaal, son of Saul, as king.  For seven years, a civil war was fought between the house of Saul and the house of David (2 Samuel 3:1).  Only when Saul’s son Ishbaal insulted his top general Abner did Abner defect from Ishbaal and lead the rest of the Israelites to pledge themselves to David.  Finally, Ishbaal was betrayed by his allies from the tribe of Benjamin; his head was delivered to David (2 Samuel 4).  All the tribes of Israel then came to David at Hebron, using the very significant marriage language of “flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone” from Genesis 2:24 - 25 to covenant themselves with David (2 Samuel 5:1 - 6).  Thus was effected the theological union of God’s Sinai covenant with the people and God’s kingly covenant with David, through both God’s activity and human partnership.  Israel transitioned from being a people under God as king to being a nation-state under the Davidic kings.  It was a grueling, messy, and very human process. 

Psalm 114 appears to remember and memorialize this process using language that centers the Davidic, not Sinaitic, covenant.  “Judah became God’s sanctuary and Israel his dominion” (Psalm 114:2).  Perhaps one can say that the Psalm recalls the tribe of Judah rather kindly, since the tribe of Judah itself took some time to trust David.  Be that as it may, the Psalm uses sanctuary-temple language as a metaphor, not for all Israel or for the physical temple in Jerusalem, but for people.  Although this usage is metaphorical, it gives more weight to the notion I alluded to above, that a much larger argument can be made for the claim that God has always wanted a temple people, not a people with a temple.  The equally important detail is that the rest of Israel is understood to be a “dominion” like the gentile nations would one day become the “dominion” of the Messianic king (1 Kings 1:19; Psalm 103:22; 145:13) as his “possession” (Psalm 2:8 - 9; 110:1 - 7).  Again, this language is metaphorical, but the important point to be made here is that the perspective is that of the Davidic covenant, where the other tribes of Israel, although already “insiders” from the point of view of the Sinai covenant, are portrayed as “outsiders who become insiders” from the point of the view of the Davidic.  The exilic writings of the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament do this.  They indicate that God will prioritize the Davidic covenant and the Messiah as the means by which He will restore Israel from exile as He promised under the Sinai covenant.[8] 

Thus, if this was the process for the first David, what if the process is similar for the last David?  If the process for the first David, gaining the allegiance of all but one of the tribes of Israel was this complicated, what if the process for the last David to gain the allegiance of people from all twelve tribes plus the gentile nations is that much more complicated?  Since God values human agency even as we interact with God’s covenantal promises, a similar human process to bow the knee to the Heir of David appears to be in order. 

Once we coordinate other biblical themes and problems with the Messianic promise in this way, the case becomes quite serious for Jesus of Nazareth, including Jesus’ renunciation of the Jerusalem temple and his ethics of land and wealth sharing.  Since David’s Messianic Heir must be descended from David, how can he escape or undo the curse on David’s line of perpetual warfare (2 Samuel 12:10)?  Perhaps by coming first in such a way that both Jewish and gentile leaders align with each other by rejecting him?  And since David’s Heir must also be human and Jewish, how can he do what no Jew under the Sinai covenant did?  That is, partner with God so fully and completely so as to produce in his own human nature “circumcision of the heart” (Deuteronomy 10:16; 30:6)?  Who can fully, not just partially, say, “I delight to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart” (Psalm 40:8)?  How can the Davidic covenant emerge from within the confines of the Sinai covenant and produce a world repaired unless the Messiah be utterly faithful to God and produce a human nature repaired?  How else can the Sinai covenant be fulfilled unless it was yoked to the Davidic, as the Scripture says?  Yet, at the same time, how else can anyone inherit not just the holy land but the world in its repaired and restored form, unless the Messiah do the very same things Jesus did, and the Messiah’s followers go abroad in a mission to the diaspora and the gentiles?  If not Jesus of Nazareth, who else can David’s Messianic Heir be?  But if Jesus is David’s Messianic Heir, then how could his mission and ethical standards be anything other than what they are?  Especially concerning developing the same kind of character Jesus had and showing it:  adopting a flexible approach to land rights and sharing radically in the body of Christ while announcing Jesus’ love for one’s enemies and living it out. 

Thus, conflict over land rights anywhere is surely a political challenge anywhere, but remarkably, both the Hebrew Scriptures as understood by Judaism and the Christian interpretation of those Scriptures with the New Testament demand a future-oriented, not past-oriented, framework for understanding the holy land.  In the Christian understanding of Scripture, there is no longer a justification from Scripture for violence in defense of land, since the primary purpose of God in defending and preserving Israel per se prior to Jesus was fulfilled when Jesus came.  For in the traditional Christian understanding, Jesus cured his diseased human nature,[9] simultaneously demonstrating the kingdom reign of God in and through his own human body and human nature, and now offers his healing to all.  But even the non-Christian Jewish understanding of Scripture, which does not include the New Testament and the teaching of Jesus, can be understood in a similar way. For the prophets Ezekiel and Isaiah envision a future where non-Jews co-inherit the holy land with Jews. 

How It Should Have Happened: Two Exilic Communities

All Christians must consider the additional question of what do Christians owe Jewish people today in particular.  As Christians, we are instructed by Jesus and the apostles to regard the Jewish community, no matter where they are located geographically, as beloved by God and specially honored for its historical role, as the apostle Paul wrote in Romans 9 - 11.  Therefore, we must clarify outer boundaries on how we understand Paul’s argument in Romans 9 - 11.  Time and space do not permit me to explain my interpretation of Romans 9 - 11 in every detail.  But the Israeli-Palestinian conflict requires that we explain what Romans 9 - 11 cannot possibly mean.

The New Testament repeats the notion that all humanity lives in exile (Romans 8:18 - 25; 1 Corinthians 15; 2 Corinthians 5; Ephesians 2:1 - 3; 4:17 - 19; Colossians 1:21 - 29; 2:13 - 15).  The current role of the Jewish people, broadly, continues to be seen in its diasporic exile precisely because it instructs us that we are all in exile. 

Thus, Christians are called to identify as being in exile as well, in sociological solidarity with the diasporic Jewish people, for example in 1 Peter, Hebrews 11, and Revelation 2 - 3, but also in Paul’s writings under the story-motif of being like Israel in the wilderness and awaiting a promised land:  Romans 8:12 - 25; 12:17 - 13:10; 1 Corinthians 10:1 - 13; 2 Corinthians 4:1 - 5:21, 8:1 - 9:15; Ephesians 1:1 - 14; etc.  The New Testament consistently speaks of the followers of Jesus as aliens, foreigners, and pilgrims awaiting the homeland and city God promised when He reunites heaven and earth. 

This theological condition of exile does not mean that people must be homeless or unhoused or undocumented and stateless, but it does mean that claims to property by any party cannot be absolute.  In fact, in a general sense, the notion of property is the creation of the human community, human treaties, and political processes.  God appears to have initially assigned land with “boundaries” to human peoples (Genesis 10; Deuteronomy 32:8; Amos 9:7; Acts 17:26 - 27), but those boundaries were subject to both God and humanity:  God made rearrangements on rare occasions having to do with Abraham’s descendants (Deuteronomy 2).  Humans, outside of Israel’s family-land arrangements (Leviticus 25), could peacefully negotiate treaties involving boundaries and stewardship with each other (Acts 2:44 - 45; 4:32 - 37; 5:1 - 4).  Lest there be theft, Jesus’ teaching and embodiment of table fellowship as an expression of inclusion and sharing (Luke 14:12 - 35; 19:1 - 10; Acts 6:1 - 15) suggests that people who are affected by decisions about resources should be included in that decision making.

The role of the Book of Esther and exilic life now rises to significance for its mention of Haman the Agagite and its importance in the Jewish annual celebration of Purim.  If Esther is understood to be the defender against the last of the genealogical Amalekites, then the Jewish Purim sabbath liturgy practice of reciting Exodus 17 takes on a celebratory note, not an ominous tone.  If Esther is understood to be the defender against the first of the ideological Amalekites, however, then it has a missional and ethical meaning.  The Book of Esther recognizes that there was no Jewish king to lead the defense or offense against Amalek, which is required by the Mishnah[10] and later rabbinical authorities,[11] which means there is a new variation on a theme.  Not all those who sought to kill the Jewish people were Amalekites, even if Haman and his ten sons might have been, if “Agagite” is to be taken as a biological link.  God protected the Jews of Persia through an improbable deliverance.  He used the combination of a pagan king’s authority, the legal system of a gentile realm, the courage and intelligence of well-placed Jewish advisors like Mordecai and Esther, Jewish faithfulness and piety, and the people’s self-defense.  The liturgical reading of Exodus and Esther for Purim certainly does serve as a caution and warning that a new threat could arise in the conditions of exile and diaspora, but the story itself hardly encourages helplessness. 

In Esther, the Jews’ presence in Persia leads to several fascinating political outcomes.  Haman sought to force Mordecai and the Jews to “bow down” to him, King Xerxes, and presumably other state officials; the word shachah, bow down, meant worship or near-worship.  Haman claimed that Persian society needed strict conformity to King Xerxes’ laws (Esther 3).  He sought to entrap the Jews in their limited non-compliance.  But Haman’s defeat led to the Jewish minority enjoying a situation that can be described in both religious and legal terms.  Religiously, there was a limited “freedom of religion or religious conscience” put in place for them.  Legally, space was given to them to practice Jewish law and custom, and also to defend themselves when attacked.  The effect of the events of Esther is to move the Persian Empire to clarify itself as having some degree of pluralism on the religious and political levels.  Religiously, Persia for that time no longer required people to bow down to worship state officials.  Legally, Persia allowed a minority community the freedom to govern itself under its own laws.  It is an accomplishment for the Jewish exiles.  But it is not just for them.  The story of one more Amalekite defeat was not just about Jewish survival, important though that is.  It echoes a pattern of high-ranking Jews in gentile empires performing a service to others:  Joseph in Egypt provided bread during a famine for all people roundabout; Daniel in Babylon cared for King Nebuchadnezzar when he was mentally unwell; Esther and the Jews in Persia brought about a legal development to potentially benefit all.  Thus, the Shabbat Zachor is not only for celebrating Jewish survival, but, dare I say as a Christian, a reminder of a missionary goal given to the Jewish people in exile, and now shared by Christians alongside Jews. 

This is a noteworthy development from the standpoint of the biblical theme of empire, the improper relationship of power that humans impose on each other.  Empire began in Genesis 1 - 11 with the motif of the city:  Cain in his city Enoch and Nimrod in his city Babel.  In both cases, we find an authoritarian impulse where everyone must submit to the authority figure or institution.  Cain defied God’s command to wander and instead settled in a city that he named after his son, Enoch.  Cain appears to have imposed on his son the duty to bring forth life from the land because Cain could not do so himself (Genesis 4:11).  Cain thus imposed a hierarchical relationship of power over his son, and power hierarchies are manifest in Lamech’s polygamy and wildly disproportionate retribution (Genesis 4:19 - 24).  Nimrod’s “kingdom” encompassed multiple cities (Genesis 10:10 - 12) and was characterized by complete uniformity at Babel (Genesis 11:1 - 9).  Then in Genesis 12 - 50, God called Abram and Sarai out of Ur of the Chaldees, the region associated with those cities; God taught each generation of parents to let go of their children and let Him be a higher authority than their parents,[12] which prevented them from being like Cain in their temptation to be controlling parents.  Then God called Israel out of Egypt to express laws, values, and habits that were opposite to the empire.  Then God established the Davidic kings to envision a peculiar combination of imperial reign with liberating justice rooted in divine wisdom - imperial reign over their gentile “possessions” with God’s shalom for the needy and vulnerable (Psalm 2:8 - 9; 72:8 - 19; 110:1 - 7).  Isaiah envisioned God using Israel to influence Assyria and Egypt, the greatest of the empires to that point, towards godliness (Isaiah 19). 

Later, massive gentile empires emerged, overtaking Israel with exile.  Although Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon saw the sequence of empires as one glorious statue (Daniel 2), Daniel saw them as separate, grotesque beasts with hybrid parts arising out of a chaotic sea (Daniel 7:1 - 12), a violation of the good creation order of Genesis 1.  Daniel saw that God’s response would be to enthrone a Son of Man over the beasts (Daniel 7:13 - 14), like Adam enthroned over the beasts in the garden (Genesis 2:18 - 20), to restore God’s original creation vision.  When those empires ruled the region and the Davidic line went throneless and the Jewish people into exile, God still had one community to check the authoritarian impulses of human empires, as Daniel and Esther show.  Once Jesus came, God should have had two such communities working in partnership.  For Christians should have understood themselves to be a transnational community of both Jew and gentile professing Jesus as the Heir of David, not replacing “physical Israel” as a “spiritual Israel” as if the gospel had no direct political implications, but joining the Jewish exiles in partnership against the empires.  As the apostle Paul said, “As regards the gospel [that is, the explicit naming of Jesus as Heir of David] they are enemies for your sake, but as regards election they are beloved for the sake of their ancestors, for the gifts and the calling of God [to be a peculiar people, discernibly gathered by God to defy the gentile empires] are irrevocable” (Romans 11:28 - 29).

Correcting Augustine and Others

Hence, we must directly correct the teaching of Augustine of Hippo on the Jewish diaspora.  I do this not because Augustine alone is to blame, but because he serves as a good representative of Christian thought.  Augustine (354 - 430) famously assigned Jews the status of witness in two senses.  The Jew, he said in City of God, "must be allowed to survive, but never to thrive" so they could bear witness positively to the fact that the prophecies existed before Christ came to fulfill them, while their dispersed, outcast status among the nations would bear witness negatively that they were receiving the "proper punishments for their refusal to recognize the truth of the Church’s claims."[13]  To Augustine, this meant dispersion and dishonor among the gentile nations, albeit with some significant protections.  This did have some practical benefit:  Pope Gregory the Great (pope from 590 - 604), influenced by Augustine’s writings, directed the bishop of Palermo not to destroy a Jewish synagogue, which reflects Augustine’s influence on medieval Christian teaching on the Jews, as it was oft-cited.[14]  In the medieval period, Jews even appealed to church and civil authorities for their physical safety based on this view. 

However, Augustine got his facts wrong - not that he was unique in this mistake, but I speak of him in this sense as a representative of other Christian leaders.  The Jewish exile and diaspora began with the Assyrian and Babylonian exiles of 721 and 586 BC, not the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70.  Why did Augustine, among others, connect Jewish exile to the death of Jesus?  The death of Jesus certainly discredited the Roman and Jewish leaders of Jesus’ own day (Matthew 26 - 27; Mark 14 - 15; Luke 20 - 23; John 18 - 19; 1 Corinthians 2:6; Colossians 2:15), which served to position Jesus as the innocent and righteous Messiah not only to gentiles but to the Jewish diaspora.  Irenaeus of Lyons, in the second century, for example, understood this quite well, as I will explore in the next chapter.  But conceptualizing the Jewish exilic diaspora as God’s retributive response to Jesus’ death, rather than Jesus’ death and resurrection serving as God’s restorative response to the Jewish exile and the basis for mission to the Jewish diaspora, and therefore also the gentiles, is precisely backward.  It reversed cause and effect; it portrayed divine justice as retributive, not restorative. 

This massive oversight over the true cause, nature, and start date of the Jewish exile corresponds with the Christian oversight of the Jewish Talmudic tradition.  The Talmudic tradition, consisting of the Mishnah or Oral Torah and the Gemara or rabbinic commentary, grew up around the Hebrew Scriptures for centuries since the Babylonian captivity of 586 BCE.  Christians did not realize that the Jewish sense of sacred text had developed as opposed to remaining static; it had diverged sharply from the New Testament especially during the rabbinic period after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70.  This oversight led to the Christians feeling caught off guard over a millennium later when Jews in France and Germany debated the writings of Maimonides.  Pope Gregory IX convened the Trial of the Talmud, also known as the Disputation of Paris, in 1240.  Two years later, authorities in the Kingdom of the Franks captured and burned thousands of handwritten pages of the Talmud in 1242.[15]  Jeremy Cohen notes that henceforth, the Jews were considered not simply inadvertent but obstinate witnesses for their refusal to believe in Christ, but heretics that endangered Christendom.  The Inquisition, led by Spanish Dominicans, developed the argument that Jews were heretics; Dominicans and Franciscans preached that Jews, since they were heretics and not witnesses, should be expelled from Europe.[16]  In the twentieth century, Raul Hilberg, in his massive study of Nazi bureaucratic texts, The Destruction of the European Jews, draws a straight line from Inquisition-era rhetoric to Nazi discourse on the Jews as dangerous heretics from whom Christians needed to be “protected.”[17]

Augustine should have acknowledged and argued for a third type of Jewish witness, a positive one, flowing from the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament prior to Jesus:  a witness against the empires.  Augustine invested himself and Christians too closely with Jews staying outside the places of Christian power and honor, and also outside the ancestral land and any political sovereignty whatsoever.  But this does not comport with the exilic time stretching from Daniel and Esther into the New Testament period and beyond.  The exilic books like Daniel and Esther attest to Jewish people attaining high influence; consider the high honors and influence lavished on Esther and Mordecai in Persia in the Book of Esther.  Why didn’t Augustine argue that there should be more Jews in honored, influential places in gentile Christian domains?  In historical fact, there were many such Jews, and their presence in high places provoked consternation and jealousy.

Moreover, while Jesus’ judgment on the Jerusalem temple meant that the Jewish people would be without a temple, at least in 70 AD, Jesus did not imply that they would have no access to the land or to some degree of self-governance. The Jewish people who remained in the land were already not experiencing the fullness of the land’s fruitfulness, which is a condition shared by all peoples of the world.  The Jewish theological condition of exile is a reminder about that very same exile for Christians, and not just for Christians, but for all humanity.  For even if and when we enjoy a relative peace and relative stability in a land, we still long for the fullness of the garden of Eden. 

Instead, Augustine bifurcated Jews and gentiles in their relations to land and power.  He put the Jewish diaspora into the position of Cain:  wanderers not to be killed, but prevented from settling.[18]  By doing this, he implied that gentiles do have a strong right to settle, claim property, and assert their belonging in God’s name.  In principle and practice, this helped lead to especially rural gentile Christians seeing and fearing Jews as educated, cosmopolitan immigrants and foreigners.  Augustine’s line of thinking designating Jews as separate from gentiles, whereas he could have understood Jews as representatives of humans in exile, led Christian authorities to imitate Islamic authorities vis-a-vis the Jews:  The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 and the 1234 Decretals of Pope Gregory IX imposed limits on only Jewish moneylending, required Jews to wear distinct clothing, imposed taxes on Jewish owners of land and houses, and forbade Jews from holding public office on the grounds that Jews should not have authority over Christians.  Whether or not Christian authorities uniformly and consciously copied Umayyad policies in Spain or Fatimid policies in the Middle East and North Africa is not the issue here; the sociological similarities are enough.

Furthermore, Augustine proposed that Christians could and should legitimately use military force against the schismatic Donatists in Roman North Africa[19] - the first such proposal by any Christian theologian.  That impulse, too, would be wrongly applied first by Emperor Justinian against non-Chalcedonian Christians in Syria and Egypt in the 500s, and then against the Jews later in the development of European Christian anti-Semitism from 1200 - 1500.  Although Augustine may not have meant to reinforce the Roman imperial story in its newly baptized form, as the Christian revisionist “historians” Eusebius and Orosius did for Emperors Constantine and Theodosius,[20] and although he was more “moderate” in his rhetoric towards the Jews than Ambrose of Milan and John Chrysostom, he nevertheless developed ideas that were drawn into the gravitational pull of the Christian imperial project.  Augustine’s teaching fit with the notion of a “Christian empire” already underway.  His teaching was quite influential in Western Christianity.  Despite his moderation by calling for Jews to be a protected class as “witnesses,” Augustine made the Jews bearers of a unique divine punishment for rejecting Christ and thus a living icon of hell for the damned, instead of an icon of exilic pilgrimage for all. 

A Lesson on Exile and Temple:  The Cost of Not Loving Your Enemy

When Islam developed and spread, European Christians came to fear first Jewish excellence, then Jewish betrayal in their midst.  Christian faith was considered consonant with localism, geographic territories, and a patchwork of political dynasties; anti-Semitism was one of the results.

Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein explain the multiple factors behind how the Jewish farming communities of late antiquity became successful urban communities during the rapid spread of Islam.  The Muslim Caliphate made travel and trade much easier from Portugal in the west to India in the east.  Arabic was similar to Aramaic and Hebrew.  Already highly literate because of the rabbinic Talmudic tradition, Jews moved to towns and cities in Mesopotamia and Persia.  They became skilled craftsmen, artisans, and merchants of various types.  Literacy led to the ability to learn other languages, read the latest scientific and medical works and contribute in those fields, write business contracts, perform mathematical equations involving exchange rates and interest rates, and produce written accounts to communicate over long distances.  “The words “urban,” “highly educated,” “merchant,” “trader,” “broker,” “banker,” “physician,” and “scholar” became permanently associated with the Jews up to today.”[21]  Botticini and Eckstein summarize the literary and physical evidence for large Jewish migrations from 700 to 1200 from North Africa and the Middle East to Spain, Italy, France, Germany, and England.[22]  But from 1200 to 1500, Western Europe expelled the Jews. 

To the Christian, the Jewish diaspora might have represented Pentecost (Acts 2) in a minor key.  If the sabbath rest on the seventh day was a temple in time, and if the temple in Jerusalem was a temple in human space for a season, then Jesus was a temple in the space of human flesh, and Pentecost marked the disciples of Jesus as God’s expanding temple calling humans in all spaces to share in Jesus’ Spirit.  At Pentecost, Jesus signaled his claim on the Jewish diaspora scattered abroad, and with them, all of gentile humanity.  He did this through his disciples speaking multiple languages representing the entire world.  The Pentecost event rested on Sinai-temple symbolism and Jesus’ own humanity.  Pentecost itself commemorated the giving of the Law on Mount Sinai (Leviticus 23:15 - 22), when God descended in fire on the mountain (Exodus 19).  When the Spirit descended as a fire atop the heads of each disciple, each disciple of Jesus became a miniature Mount Sinai.  Since Mount Sinai served as the template for the sanctuary pattern that Israel placed on Mount Zion in order to renew the covenant, Pentecost designated the people of Jesus as a new type of sanctuary in which God’s Spirit dwelled.  Pentecost affirms that God has always wanted a “temple people,” not a “people with a temple.”

Pentecost also designated the people of Jesus as bearing the mission of Jesus to the entire world.  That mission is evident through the languages spoken by the power of the Spirit.  The human Jesus of Nazareth almost certainly spoke multiple languages simply by virtue of growing up in first century Palestine:  Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, and probably Latin.  So in principle, the Spirit’s mission in and through the church can be considered an extension of the speaking of Jesus.  In fact, since people of “every tribe and tongue” will one day be gathered around the throne of Jesus (Revelation 5:9), Pentecost is an expression of the lordship of Jesus, and a microcosm of his claim on all humans.  Diaspora Jews fit into that picture as a middle point between the Jewish Jesus and all nations.  Theological exile should have been the connective tissue, conceptually.

Historians have argued that European Christian self-consciousness developed in response to Islam,[23] and sociologist Jacques Ellul argued that European Christendom developed to imitate Islam.[24]  Islam’s meteoric rise and military expansion under various political regimes across the Middle East, North Africa, and Spain was meteoric.  European Christian powers fought Muslim armies in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, most terrifyingly at Constantinople and Asia Minor, and in Western Europe in Spain, France, Italy, and the Mediterranean islands.  In fact, Julia Ebner, a researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in London, argues in her book, The Rage: The Vicious Circle of Islamist and Far Right Extremism that this dynamic continues to the present.  The Islamist and the far-right (“Christian”) extremist need each other and resemble each other.[25]

In Western Europe, Christians let fear of Muslims spill over into their fear of Jews.  In 902, the Umayyad caliph in Cordoba led forces that captured Sicily, and by 911, Muslims controlled all the passes in the Alps, preventing passage between France and Italy.  In 1009, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem and other Christian buildings were destroyed by the Fatimid Caliph in Egypt.  Christians in Europe developed a conspiratorial rumor that Jews had instigated the "Prince of Babylon" to destroy the Holy Sepulcher.  Popular mobs, regrettably Christian, then attacked Jewish communities in European cities:  Rouen, Orleans, and Mainz.  That the same Fatimid Caliph ordered the destruction of all Christian and Jewish places of worship throughout his lands in 1012 did not quell the rumor or suspicion.  Neither did the 1013 expulsion of all Jews from Cordoba, Spain by the Umayyad Caliph, probably because the year before, Muslim Berbers conquered the city and ordered the execution of half the population.  This conspiracy about the Jews laid a basis for the 1096 Rhineland massacres of German Jewish communities by peasant Crusaders marching to the holy land.

The People’s Crusade, the first phase of the First Crusade, is instructive.  Pope Urban II first called for a crusade in 1095 to take back the holy land from Muslim rule and ensure the safety of Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem.  In 1070, the Seljuk Turks, who had taken over the Baghdad Caliphate in 1055, captured Jerusalem from the Fatimids of Egypt.  That same year, Brother Gerard, a leader of Benedictine monks and nuns who ran the hospices in Jerusalem, organized the Knights Hospitaller, also called Knights of Malta, Knights of Rhodes, and The Order of Knights of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, to physically protect pilgrims to Jerusalem.  Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem returned to Europe with tales of persecution and oppression, as the Seljuks were not as lenient as the Fatimids.  Meanwhile, the Seljuk Turks menaced the Byzantine Christians in Syria, Asia Minor, and Constantinople. 

Church historian Steven Runciman says that while Pope Urban II might have expected a few thousand knights, he did not expect about one hundred thousand mostly unskilled people, including women and children.[26]  Many Christian people believed in the end of the world.  The year 1095 was auspicious because that year, there were meteors, a showing of the aurora borealis, a lunar eclipse, and a comet.  It was roughly a thousand years after the age of Christ and the apostles, and some people surely thought about “the millennium,” even if they could not read Revelation 20, as a historical time period which made their own days special.[27]

The largely peasant crowd of crusaders set out for Jerusalem in the late spring and early summer of 1096.  When they came into the Jewish communities along the Rhine River in France and Germany, the crusaders committed pogroms against the Jews. 

Many crusaders who entered the German cathedral towns had never encountered major groups of Jews before. The majority of these Christians was poor and had suffered greatly during the periods of economic crisis in the late eleventh century. Now they were daringly on their way to begin a new life by becoming soldiers of the Lord. Their first experience of Jews, many of them grown rich through various sorts of business activities, struck them as contrary to God’s will. Christian doctrine taught that the Jews ought to live in visible servitude among the Christians as a divine punishment for their al- leged murder of God’s son and as witnesses to the superiority of Christianity. The mentality of the crusaders was also influenced by the new piety movement of the later eleventh century, the dismaying investiture struggle between the papacy and the emperor, alarming natural catastrophes of the 1090s, and prospects of a sensational re- conquest of the Holy Land with all its chiliastic implications. Ironically, many of these fears and hopes were shared by Jews, especially a conviction that the “final days” before the coming of the Messiah were at hand.[28]

This attentive description demonstrates the danger of even Augustine’s “moderate” view, especially when it was combined with other manufactured bases for zealotry.  The expectation that Jews would be poor and subservient created dissonance for the Christian peasantry who were mobilized by a range of reasons - reasons at best problematic and at worst blasphemous - to undertake the First Crusade.  It should be noted that among these reasons were conspiratorial rumor-mongering; jealousy of Jewish success; suspicions that the Jewish community had a transnational alliance to itself to the point of betraying local people; and speculations about how to interpret the Book of Revelation - all factors which continue in various forms of Christian anti-Semitism and Christian Zionism to this day.  Think of the accusation lobbied by the political right that this or that person has received funding from George Soros.

Between two thousand to twelve thousand Jews were either murdered or committed suicide as an act of kiddush ha-Shem, the sanctification of the name of God.[29]  This number was estimated to be as much as one-fourth or even one-third of the total Jewish population in that region at the time.[30]  Forced baptisms were also reported.  However, it is significant that Europe’s clergy and nobles condemned this action, and forbade the killing or harassment of Jews in later crusades.  The bishop of Speyer saved the Jews there, though he was unable to save eleven Jews from dying in the mob violence.[31]

The Jewish position in Western Europe became even more perilous when the Roman Catholic Church, in the mid-twelfth century, adopted Gratian’s Decretis Gratiani, a collection of canon law which prohibited Christians from lending money with interest to other Christians.  Jews were permitted to lend money at interest, however.  This meant that Jews became the bankers and creditors of Western Europe.  They were in favor and out of favor constantly, because every economy needs some sort of credit and lending market.  But since interest rates were sometimes exorbitant, people hated their creditors.  Since no legal or independent third party held receipts of debts, a debtor had every incentive to murder his creditor or burn his office. 

The case of England is instructive.  The Frankish Norman William the Conqueror welcomed Jews to England when he took power in 1066.  Whereas Anglo-Saxon kings had received taxes in kind, in the form of grain and other tribute, the Normans wanted cash so they could take their proceeds across the English Channel to Normandy.  King William invited Jews to England to facilitate financial exchanges; a relatively small Jewish community emigrated there.  Since the Jewish moneylenders made money, the king also taxed them.  The relationship was mutually beneficial, in a lopsided sense.  The crown protected the Jews, and eventually allowed Jews to hold property in addition to pledges.  However, on the popular level, hatred of Jews as creditors and the Christian slanderous charge of “blood libel” circulated.  And in a short interim period between King Henry II’s death and the coronation of King Richard I, a wave of anti-Jewish violence erupted.  In 1190, a mob of English people in York massacred Jewish men, women, and children in York’s Clifford Tower.  While King Richard I held the ringleaders accountable and renewed the royal pledge of protection, the Magna Carta of 1215 gave local communities and officials more power, which led to local expulsions.  Parliament also demanded concessions from King Edward I, who was forced to expel the Jews from England in 1290.[32] 

In England, the Jews were French-speaking foreigners riding on the coattails of the Norman conquerors.  Within two hundred years, the peculiar combination of political back-scratching, the financialization of an economy, and a Christian attempt at constraining privatized usury from one source led to popular anger about high interest rates from another.  Jews were made all the more offensive to the Christian peasantry because of the church’s teaching that the Jews were in exile because they killed Christ; they should have been poor, while they were often the creditors.  Thus, the Anglo-Saxon Christian commoner suspected Jews of defying both divine law and divine consequences.  The superstitious suspected the Jews of using diabolical sorcery.  Rather than develop a public bank, for example, both King and Parliament turned the Jews into scapegoats.

When Christians anywhere sought to bring about a “Christian empire” or “Christian nation,” especially while enriching themselves, the Jewish diaspora people, like Mordecai, handed them the lie.  Whether they refused to bow down and assimilate, or whether they might have preferred to but were prevented, Jews remained the foreigners who were useful to both the ruling powers and the populace.  They were often used as a pawn of the ruling powers against the populace, and were vulnerable to the whims of political intrigue and the authorities.  But how does this reflect back on Christians, however nominal or sincere?  By using the Jews against the commoners, royal authorities played the role of Haman in the Book of Esther.  By siding for the empires and against the Jews, imperial and nationalist Christians have played the role of Haman in the Book of Esther.  Had Christians not been in the habit of primarily reading their Old Testament in a typological fashion, looking mainly for ways that Jesus and/or the church were already “prefigured” in these stories,[33]rather than ethically and logically demanded by the narrative trajectory of these stories, perhaps they might have discerned the challenge to accept theological exile as an anti-imperial political theology.  Perhaps Christians would have sought to partner with the Jewish synagogue community to develop democratized, public institutions for the common good.  Much more can be said about all this elsewhere.

Is Christian Zionism Tenable Ethically or a Contradiction in Terms?

After surveying Christian theology and European history, we are in a better position to evaluate both anti-Semitism and Zionism. On the basis of respecting Romans 9 - 11, Christians ought to support and defend the presence of diaspora Jewish people in the U.S., as elsewhere, and oppose anti-Semitism.  On that basis, we must certainly condemn the ideology of Hamas, which opposes any political organization and expression of the Jewish people in the region.  Of course, we must also condemn the centuries-long anti-Semitic scapegoating that pressured Jews to leave Europe, where Jews were first forced by legal and economic pressure to become Europe’s bankers, and then made into political scapegoats for rising prices, disease, etc., often under the moniker of “Christ-killer.”  We must also condemn the U.S. refusal to admit European Jews when U.S leaders knew that Hitler was first taking them hostage, and then exterminating them.[34] 

Christian leaders also developed shorthands for Christian ethics that were misleading and inadequate.  Christians should have never collapsed ethical reflection and public consciousness down to “church and state,” which left unchallenged so-called “Christian empires” and “Christian kingdoms” and “Christian nations,” many of which turned on Jews.  Christians should have maintained the whole picture:  “church, states, and Israel,” as Oliver M.T. O’Donovan puts it using biblical terminology,[35] or more to the point in colloquial terms, “church, states, and the Jews, wherever Jews are.”

This talk of rejecting anti-Semitism might seem straightforward to say in the West, as if a secular Western “human rights” framework would give us the same “self-evident” result.  But I maintain that these conclusions are not “self-evident.”  They must at the very least be specifically rooted in the biblical and Christian tradition.  It was actually expressed in principle by Emperor Constantine in his Edict of Toleration in 313 CE.  And, this Christian tradition should have been taken a step further towards a principled religious pluralism in the public sphere.  All the “wars of religion” in Europe could have been avoided, therefore.  Atheists and secularists must be asked whether they find moral and philosophical foundation for universal human dignity and rights in their own beliefs.

Zionism, however, defined as the political ideology where the State of Israel is considered to be the proper homeland and destination for all Jews, supposedly to guarantee the survival and safety of the Jewish people, and not just a circumstantial expression of political organization, is ethically incompatible with the exile and pilgrimage posture called forth by the Letter to the Hebrews.  This observation is deeply relevant.  Are Jewish believers in Jesus who live in the modern State of Israel permitted to, or able to, affirm the ethical content of the Letter to the Hebrews on pilgrimage?  Of the Sermon on the Mount on loving neighbor and sharing land?  The ethical contradictions involved in holding a Zionist position would mean that one or the other ethical vision would have to win and the other lose.

Curiously but not coincidentally, the pilgrim posture of exile has more in common with Abraham and Sarah’s pilgrimage in the promised land.  This fact brings greater alignment between faith and ethics:  the descendants of Abraham are not merely to believe in the same God as Abraham, but also to live by the same ethical posture as Abraham, not least in the economic sharing of land in a brotherly-sisterly way, a connection that Irenaeus, as a representative of second century Christianity, made; more on that below.  During his sojourn, Abraham shared the land and its sustenance with his nephew Lot, while knowing God promised to give the land to Abraham’s descendants (Genesis 12:1 - 7); Abraham said, “Please let there be no strife between you and me, nor between my herdsmen and your herdsmen, for we are brothers” (Genesis 13:8 NASB1995).  Since Abraham was both older than Lot and also the focal point of God’s promise, Abraham’s use of the word brothers is generous and significant.  He arguably understood already that God’s blessing to him (Genesis 12:1 - 3) was a renewal of God’s creational blessing given to Adam and Eve (Genesis 1:26 - 28).  Therefore, since Abraham seems to have understood that God intended to renew the original creation prior to the fall, and sought his partnership to do so, Abraham related to Lot as a true brother.  He resisted the jealousy and conflict between the original brothers, Cain and Abel (Genesis 4), which happened because of the fall. 

Neither Abraham nor his immediate descendants behaved like Zionists making direct land claims.  Abraham’s son Isaac shared land and wells of water with his non-Hebrew neighbors (Genesis 26:17 - 25), and Isaac’s son Jacob shared the land with his brother Esau and even lived in the “booths” (Genesis 34:15 - 16) that became the expression of the Jewish day of Sukkot, when the Israelites reminded themselves that they once came through the wilderness, and are still pilgrims in exile (Leviticus 23:33 - 36; 25:23; 1 Chronicles 29:18).  To be sure, the Letter to the Hebrews draws upon the posture of pilgrimage lived out by Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, and Jacob to encourage all followers of Jesus (Hebrews 11:8 - 16) - not least those of Jewish background who could say with the author, “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets” (Hebrews 1:1) - to share in Christ a pilgrim posture of exile while waiting in hope. 

Zionism as defined above has profoundly negative implications besides.  On the one hand, among the nations, Zionism often can and does enable anti-Semitism elsewhere,[36] shown not least by the fact that after the Arab nations rejected the United Nations decision to partition the land between Palestine and the State of Israel, nearly one million Jews were forced to flee Arab nations on account of Arab anti-Zionism in the 1950s - 1960s.[37]  While this history raises urgent questions of Islamic conceptions of state, society, and the treatment of non-Muslims, equally urgent questions can be raised of people’s beliefs within ostensibly secular Western nation-states.  British Protestant Zionists who formulated the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and assisted in the creation of the modern State of Israel were profoundly anti-Semitic and wanted Jews to leave the United Kingdom.[38]  What happens when the majority of people in one country believe that you “really belong” somewhere else?

On the other hand, Zionism wrestles with the basic question, “Who is a Jew?”[39]  If Jewishness is a faith, and not simply a genetic ethnicity, then why could leading Zionists like Theodore Herzl be atheists?  What about, by comparison, Jewish believers in Jesus like Oswald Rufeisen, a Polish Jew who personally rescued hundreds of Jews from the Nazis, who then became a Catholic and then a priest, changed his name to Brother Daniel, and was denied Israeli citizenship under Israel’s Law of Return?[40]  Or the Jewish believers who opposed[41] and continue to oppose making genetic and non-religious Jewishness the basis of a state in the holy land?  Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro and the organization Torah Judaism, for instance, argues that Zionism is a betrayal of Judaism, that Zionism is a faulty attempt at adjusting Judaism to the Enlightenment nation-state project, facilitating the false perception that what Israel does is a direct reflection on Judaism and Jews.[42]  Or, what kind of Jewish faith is welcome?  Israeli haredi Jews, the ultra-Orthodox, oppose military service, sometimes do not work a tax-paying job, and have the highest birth rate, which is becoming a burden on the state; how long can their fellow Israelis exempt them?[43]  Or, Jewish Israelis who believe that their religious duty is to reoccupy the land of Israel often believe that secular Jews are “Hellenists.”[44]  How long will these fractures in Israeli society hold together?  Who is a Jew, indeed?

Moreover, in this vision, who is not a Jew?  Not being Jewish impacts Christians and Muslims as religious categories, and Palestinians and Arabs as ethnic categories.  Can or must they remain second-class citizens on some level?[45]  Such a vision certainly led to the Nakba, the death or displacement of eight hundred thousand Palestinians by Israeli troops in 1948-49,[46] and interferes with possible political solutions today.[47]  This, despite considerable shared ancestry and genetic inheritance between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians; and had Islam not arisen, Palestine might have remained in large part religiously Jewish and Christian.[48]

Protestant dispensationalism, then, is misleading.  Dispensationalism holds that God will “rapture” Christians or otherwise resume working with Jews, especially under the banner of the State of Israel, fighting for the holy land, on the faulty premise that God has two main covenants:  one covenant with Israel and one covenant with the church.  Dispensationalism supposes that, at the time of Christ, God paused the covenant with Israel in order to administer the covenant with the Church.  Such a view requires us to believe that the fulfillment of God’s promises to Israel involve geopolitical power over gentile nations.  This is why, in part, dispensationalists attribute to God the machinations of British imperial policy, European anti-Semitism, Western guilt over the Nazi atrocities, Western fear of Muslims, and the 1948 formation of the modern State of Israel. 

Contrary to the dispensationalists, then, we must not interpret the formal institution of the State of Israel in 1948 as an event caused by God.  In fact, I argue in the next chapter that it is the counterpart and mirror-image to the Catholic imperial and specifically Protestant nation-state projects of the centuries prior.  It is a particular political self-organization of some Jewish people and deserves respect in the same way that the political self-organization of any people deserves respect.  But it is not to be coordinated with the biblical, prophetic timeline, as if the books of Daniel and Revelation, for instance, can be interpreted this way. 

To take but one example: Dispensationalists expect the modern State of Israel to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem at some point.  They argue that Revelation 11 refers to the second coming of Jesus, which would make the so-called “third temple” in Jerusalem a prerequisite, the building of which would be a task required of the State of Israel.  But there are far better exegetical arguments which indicate that Revelation 11 describes the first coming of Jesus, not the second, and the second temple of Judaism, not the third.[49]  If so, then the State of Israel does not need to destroy the Muslim Al-Aqsa mosque, the Dome of the Rock, to build the so-called “third temple” in its place and supposedly usher in the Messiah and return from exile.  Yet, in the biblical story, the sanctuary only served the role of signpost to Jesus as the true place of God’ inhabitation; so, why would believers in Jesus encourage anyone to look away from Jesus and backwards to a signpost?

For some Christians, especially the majority of American evangelicals as of this writing, then, to pray for and encourage the modern Israeli government to build a third temple in Jerusalem is not only geopolitically dangerous and eschatologically wrong, but a pastoral and evangelistic mistake that points Israelis and others away from Jesus himself and the consistent witness of the New Testament that Jesus renders the temple sanctuary obsolete.  If these Christians uphold the theory that modern Israelis will, like pawns, bring about the doomed Battle of Armageddon and the return of Jesus, then all the worse.  Why would believers in Jesus point anyone away from Jesus?  Why would they tear the biblical texts to pieces to fashion contradictory and impossible readings of the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament that cannot sustain anyone’s faith, and undermines credibility about Christian public witness and intelligence?  From a Christian spiritual and ethical standpoint, it seems the height of insincerity and an expression of anti-Semitism to do this.  The following chapter will explore more reasons why this is true.

Footnotes

[1] Berman, Joshua. The Temple: Its Symbolism, Then and Now. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2010. 206.  Italics his.

[2] Ibid. 162.

[3] See Nagasawa, Mako A. Literary Analysis of the Pentateuch, available here: www.anastasiscenter.org/bible-torah.  These notes on the entire Pentateuch, from Genesis 1:1 to Deuteronomy 34:12, draws from the work of John H. Sailhamer, The Pentateuch as Narrative: A Biblical-Theological Commentary (1995) and The Meaning of the Pentateuch: Revelation, Composition and Interpretation (2009). 

[4] Alter, Robert. The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company. 2000.  Although Alter later produced a translation and commentary on the Book of Kings which was included in a larger work, his own The David Story blunts the critique the biblical Book of Kings levels at King Solomon for becoming a new type of Pharaoh in the midst of the united kingdom, which divided Israel into civil war and Northern Kingdom and Southern Kingdom, even as he built the first temple.  See Alter, Robert. Ancient Israel: The Former Prophets: Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings: A Translation with Commentary. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company. 2014.

[5] See Nagasawa, Mako A. Who Will Intercede? The Book of Samuel as Reversal of the Book of Genesis and Cautionary Tale About Politics, Institutions, and Control.  Available at https://www.anastasiscenter.org/bible-prophets-samuel. 

[6] On the meaning of Ezekiel’s vision of a new temple as a literary presentation of jubilee, see Bergsma, John. “The Restored Temple as ‘Built Jubilee’ in Ezekiel 40-48.” Proceedings of the Eastern Great Lakes and Midwestern Biblical Societies 24 (2004) 75-85 [appeared Winter 2005]. Available at Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/23842510/_The_Restored_Temple_as_Built_Jubilee_in_Ezekiel_40_48_Proceedings_of_the_Eastern_Great_Lakes_and_Midwestern_Biblical_Societies_24_2004_75_85_appeared_Winter_2005_

[7] Josephus. Antiquities 18:18 – 19.

[8] I understand that there is some discussion of Zechariah 11 - 14 which might be interesting on some level. In Zechariah 11, the union of the two staffs, or the second staff by itself, which Zechariah says represents the family ties between Judah and Israel, might represent the maintenance of the Sinai covenant and Davidic covenant, although not the covenants per se.  Breaking the staffs indicates delays in fulfillment, not complete abrogation.  Regardless, Christian tradition applied this passage from Zechariah 11 to Jesus in Matthew 27:9 - 10, seeing Judas’ use of thirty pieces of silver as a point of connection to, or fulfillment of prophecy regarding, Zechariah 11:11 - 12.  Exile and poor leadership might be what Zechariah envisions as the result of Jewish rejection of the Messiah (Zechariah 11:15 - 17).  In any case, Zechariah then anticipates that God will remember His promises as centered in and through the Davidic kingly line because of the Davidic, not Sinaitic, covenant in such a way that gradual:  first, the inhabitants of Jerusalem, then the people of Judah, then the people of other tribes; the house of David will recognize the pierced and wounded Messiah (Zechariah 12:10; 13:6).  Hence, though much about Zechariah remains mysterious, the book is firmly exilic in the sense that it prioritizes the Davidic covenant as the means by which God will restore Israel from exile as per the Sinai covenant’s promise.

[9] See the Healing Atonement Study Guide. The Anastasis Center for Christian Education and Ministry. https://www.anastasiscenter.org/study-guide-atonement-101.

[10] Rabbi Yehudah and Rabbi Yosei. Mishnah, Sanhedrin 20b. 8, 11, 12, 13.

[11] Maimonides. Sefer Hamitzvot.  Eliezer of Metz. Sefer Yereim 435.  Nachmanides. Commentary to Exodus 17:16.  Meir HaKohen, Hagahot Maimoniyot, Hilchot Melachim 5:5.

[12] Levenson, Jon D. The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 1995.

[13] Augustine of Hippo. City of God 18.46.  Augustine’s statement has been recently re-assessed for both its authenticity and motivation.  On whether Augustine’s authentic words have been accurately preserved, see Frederiksen, Paula. Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.  Frederiksen argues that this statement was not authentically Augustine’s.  On Augustine’s motivation being somewhat humanitarian, see Turner, David. “Augustine’s Jewish Problem, Revisited.” Times of Israel. April 18, 2014. https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/augustines-jewish-problem-revisited/.  Augustine also deployed Psalm 59:11 against contemporary Jews.  Thus, “Do not kill them; otherwise, my people will forget. By Your power, make them homeless wanderers and bring them down, Lord, our shield” (Holman Christian Standard Bible) was applied not just to King David’s enemies but to the Jewish diaspora after Christ.  See Lewis, Donald M. A Short History of Christian Zionism: From the Reformation to the Twenty-First Century. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. 2021. 31.

[14] Cohen, Jeremy. Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jews in Medieval Christianity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 1999. 23 - 94.

[15] Chazan, Robert. “The Trial and Condemnation of the Talmud.” Tikvah Center Working Paper 01/11, https://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/TikvahWorkingPapersArchive/WP1Chazan.pdf.

[16] Cohen, Jeremy. The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 1982. Chapter 10.

[17] Hilberg, Raoul. The Destruction of the European Jews, Volume 1. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Third edition 2003. 6 - 22.

[18] Augustine of Hippo. Contra Faustum 12.12 - 13.  Cohen, Jeremy. Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 1999. 28 - 29; 41.

[19] Augustine of Hippo. A Treatise Concerning the Correction of the Donatists. Translated by Rev. J R. King. Edited by Schaff, Philip. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. Series 1, Volume 4.

https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf104.v.vi.i.html.  Zagorin, Perez. How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2013. 24 - 33.

[20] Chang, Curtis. Engaging Unbelief: A Captivating Strategy from Augustine & Aquinas.  Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000. 91 - 93.

[21] Botticini, Maristella and Zvi Eckstein. The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70 - 1492. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. 125.

[22] Ibid. Chapter 7.

[23] Hays, Denys. Europe: The Emergence of an Idea. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Revised edition 1968.  Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York, NY: Vintage Books, Revised edition 2014. See also Kaplan, Robert D. “How Islam Created Europe.” The Atlantic. May 2016. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/how-islam-created-europe/476388/.

[24] Ellul, Jacques. The Subversion of Christianity. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. 1986. Chapter 5.

[25] Ebner, Julia. The Rage: The Vicious Circle of Islamist and Far Right Extremism.  London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd. 2018.  See interview by Sean Illing, “Reciprocal Rage: Why Islamist Extremists and the Far Right Need Each Other.” Vox, Dec 26, 2018.

[26] Runciman, Steven. “THE FIRST CRUSADERS’ JOURNEY ACROSS THE BALKAN PENINSULA.” Byzantion 19 (1949): 207–21. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44168654.

[27] Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1970. 69 - 70.

[28] Mentgen, Gerd. "Crusades.” Edited by Levy, Richard S. Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution (Vol.1). Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. 2005. 153.

[29] Dubno, Simon and Moshe Spiegel, History of the Jews: From the Roman Empire to the Early Medieval Period (Vol.2). Associated University Press. 1980. 677.

[30] Flannery, Edward H. The Anguish of the Jews: Twenty-Three Centuries of Antisemitism. Mahweh, NJ: Paulist Press. 1985. 93.

[31] Mentgen, Gerd. “Crusades.” Edited by Levy, Richard S. Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution (Vol.1). Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. 2005. 153.

[32] Reilly, Rebecca Colleen. 2018. “‘Do Not Kill Them, Lest My People Forget’: Changes in Attitudes Towards Jews in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century England”. Elements 14 (1). https://doi.org/10.6017/eurj.v14i1.10323. See also Aronow, Sam. “Jews in Medieval England (1070 - 1290).”  Sam Aronow.  March 19, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJdJfKyP8-E.

[33] Rabanus Maurus (c.780 - 856), a Benedictine monk of Frankish descent, who later became archbishop of Mainz in Eastern Francia, is the only writer who commented on the Book of Esther who is also cited by the patristic commentary site Catena Bible, www.catenabible.com.  Maurus takes the allegorical approach.  See Rabanus Maurus, Explanation on the Book of Esther.

[34] Baker, Nicholson. “Why I'm a Pacifist: The Dangerous Myth of the Good War.” Harper's Magazine. May 2011. https://harpers.org/archive/2011/05/why-im-a-pacifist/

[35] See, for example, O’Donovan, Oliver M.T. The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1996. 

[36] Shapiro, Rabbi Yaakov. “Has Zionism Hijacked Judaism?” International Council for Middle East Studies | shaya. February 9, 2017.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ-tRrKeAfQ

[37] “Fact Sheet: Jewish Refugees from Arab Countries.” Jewish Virtual Library. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-refugees-from-arab-countries

[38] Sizer, Stephen. Christian Zionism and the Roadmap to Armageddon. 2004. Isaac, Munther. “Palestinian Christian Response to Christian Zionism.” Christ at the Checkpoint Conference. 2012.  Uploaded February 18, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sD0FPD8-XoA. Hanegraaf, Hank. A “Gospel Response to Christian Zionism.” Christ at the Checkpoint Conference. March 16, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q51sL-2SOmo.  Getman, Thomas. “When and How Did Evangelicals Become Zionists?” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. March 4, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItWWZu2geSE.  Sizer, Stephen, “The Historical Roots of Christian Zionism, its Theological Basis and Political Agenda.” The Jerusalem Fund and Palestine Center. November 7, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPGlgz1zC-4.

[39] Shapiro, Rabbi Yaakov. “Has Zionism Hijacked Judaism?” Institute for Contemporary Middle East Studies | shaya. February 9, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ-tRrKeAfQ. Silverstein, Alan. “The Israeli conflict over ‘Who is a Jew?’ is resurfacing in 2023.” New Jersey Jewish News. June 8, 2023.  https://njjewishnews.timesofisrael.com/the-israeli-conflict-over-who-is-a-jew-is-resurfacing-in-2023/

[40] Schwaeber-Issan, Cookie.  “Can You Be a Jew and a Catholic Priest at the Same Time?” Times of Israel, March 7, 2022, https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/can-you-be-a-jew-and-a-catholic-priest-at-the-same-time/.

[41] Rabkin, Yakov M. A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism. Black Point, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishers. 2006. 136. Zohar, Zion: Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewry: From the Golden Age of Spain to Modern Times. New York, NY: New York University Press. 2005. 184. 

[42] Torah Judaism is one such organization. See Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro, “Has Zionism Hijacked Judaism.” International Law Institute | ICMES. Uploaded by Shaya, February 9, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ-tRrKeAfQ. See also Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro on The Deen Show, “Jewish Rabbi talks about the Ideology of Ben Shapiro,” Digital Mimbar, July 16, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKRSiqBWqNM.

[43] Gilad Malach, Director of the Ultra-Orthodox in Israel Program at the Israel Democracy Institute, says, “If 10% of Israelis live the way the ultra-Orthodox live, the state can handle that. But if it’s 25%, that’s a great economic and even social challenge. The state will collect less taxes, and the state needs that money to pay for health, infrastructure, security.”  JTA Staff. “How the haredi Orthodox are changing Israel.” Jewish Telegraphic Agency. March 10, 2021. https://www.jta.org/2021/03/10/israel/how-the-haredi-orthodox-are-changing-israel.

[44] Goldberg, Adam. “Among the Settlers.” The New Yorker. March 24, 2004. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/05/31/among-the-settlers.

[45] Pew Research Center, “Israel’s Religiously Divided Society.” Pew Research Center. March 8, 2016. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2016/03/08/israels-religiously-divided-society/.  Also Starr, Kelsey Jo and David Masci. “In Israel, Jews are united by homeland but divided into very different groups.” Pew Research Center. March 8, 2016. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/03/08/in-israel-jews-are-united-by-homeland-but-divided-into-very-different-groups/

[46] Pappe, Ilan. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Chicago, IL: Oneworld Productions. 2007.

[47] 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

[48] Glausiusz, Josie. “Blood Brothers: Palestinians and Jews Share Genetic Roots.” Haaretz. October 20, 2015. https://www.haaretz.com/science-and-health/2015-10-20/ty-article/palestinians-and-jews-share-genetic-roots/0000017f-dc0e-df9c-a17f-fe1e57730000/. Nebel, A., Filon, D., Weiss, D.A. et al. “High-resolution Y chromosome haplotypes of Israeli and Palestinian Arabs reveal geographic substructure and substantial overlap with haplotypes of Jews.” Human Genetics. 107, 630–641 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1007/s004390000426. Gibbons, Ann. “Jews and Arabs Share Recent Ancestry.” Science. October 30, 2000.https://www.science.org/content/article/jews-and-arabs-share-recent-ancestry.

[49] For direct commentary on Revelation 11, see Leithart, Peter J. Revelation 1 - 11. Edited by Allen, Michael and Scott R. Swain. The International Theological Commentary on the Holy Scripture of the Old and New Testaments. New York, NY: Bloomsbury T&T Clark. 2018. 421 - 435.  In a class lecture on Revelation in 2022 for the Northwest School of Theology, Orthodox theologian Father John Behr, a scholar on the Johannine writings and patristics, affirmed Leithart’s commentary and reading of Revelation 11.  The most thorough way to approach this question of a “third temple” and Revelation 11 in particular is by understanding the role of the sanctuary in the Sinai covenant.  See chapter 2, above, about God wanting a “temple people” more than a “people with a temple.”