Senior Vice President, OPENLANE INC
Identifying Israel - Christopher Seitz
The Identity of Israel: Jews, Christians, and the Bible Full title: Identifying Israel: Covenant, Calling on the Name, and the Oracles ...
About Christopher Seitz
Christopher Seitz, Senior Vice President at Openlane, has been active in biblical scholarship and theological lectures. In a 2021 lecture at Beeson Divinity School, Seitz discussed the book of Ecclesiastes, describing its central figure Koheleth as a "single brooding consciousness" and arguing that the book's joy refrains are not hedonistic but serve a sustained function across the text. He stated that the opening poem is "not about the futility of the created order" but rather bears witness to God's providential design, and he suggested translating the Hebrew word "hevel" as "ungraspable" rather than "vanity." In a 2020 webinar at Wycliffe College, Seitz addressed the future of Old Testament canonical interpretation, noting that "the final editors are as it were the first readers and the text carries forward on its own." He described the future of the field as "positive if diffuse in character." In a 2019 lecture, Seitz discussed the identity of Israel, emphasizing that "the Oracles of God entrusted to the Jews mark them out as distinctive bearers of His identity to the world" and that this identity is "permanently tied up with an encompassing all nations and peoples of creation." Earlier lectures from 2007, republished in 2012, explored the theological significance of the Old Testament's canonical order, with Seitz arguing that "the order of the books in the Bible is not merely historical but creates a nexus of interpretation."
Transcript (42 segments)
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Christopher Seitz0:03
I was struck by the photo you notice where it was taken right here. Did you see the text in the back? You could just see it right there. A text that will be guiding my thinking in this paper, and you'll hear it. So let me go ahead and just say it up front, and that is from Romans 3: 'What advantage has the Jew?' Well, a lot of things, Paul says, but chief among them: to them have been entrusted the Oracles of God.
Let me first confess: this topic for today is one I've not given a whole lot of thought to from the site of the Old Testament, Hebrew Bible, Jewish Scriptures, which I'm going to focus on for my reflections today. One knows, of course, that from the site of the New Testament, Paul in particular sought to offer both continuous views of our theme — the identity of Israel — as well as to reconfigure the plain sense of that phrase. So we could speak of 'the Israel of God' as we've just heard, or 'they are not all Israel who are descended from Israel,' or 'a person is a Jew who is one inwardly.' Now the fourfold gospel record does not adjust the basic Old Testament picture along similar lines: 'Go nowhere except to the house of Israel'; 'It's wrong to take food from children and give it to the dogs.' And this shows that Paul is far closer to what one calls the parting of the ways in an evaluation of Gentile inclusion as this would transpire, and inclusion in fulfillment of Israel's scriptures.
One cannot call the parting of the ways the same thing, and neither does Paul, but that is perhaps a topic for our next speaker. In addition, I should mention just in passing, we have the problematic of how to refer to Israel when in the Old Testament Israel herself will speak about how others — outsiders — refer to them as people. Jonah, before sailors en route to Tarshish, is a Hebrew; and the Egyptians speak of Israel as Hebrew people; and Moses is a Hebrew and an Israelite at one and the same time, in some ways also an Egyptian — but that is a topic for another colloquium.
The Prophet Zechariah speaks of Gentile nations taking hold of the hem of a Jew or Judean and saying, 'Let's go with you; we've heard that God is with you.' Judah, the southern kingdom, can be distinguished from the northern tribes Israel. But once the northern tribes are gone, the across-the-river satrapy of the Persian Empire is a Judah full of Israelites. Now these terminological differences are not weighty, but they do have to do primarily with perspective. And with this caveat in place, then there are some fairly obvious and simple ways to think about the identity of Israel.
Israel is the given name of Jacob, the son of Isaac and Rebecca. Jacob received the new name after a nightmarish wrestling match. So his children are quite literally the sons of Israel. Israel consists, then, of that lineage of people going back to the 12 sons, the 12 tribes of Jacob Israel. But also Abraham is the father of Isaac, the father of Jacob Israel, and the right of circumcision belongs to the covenant relationship instituted solemnly by God with Abraham and all his descendants. Nations and kings will be Abraham's descendants. His name means 'father of many,' so that by the act of circumcision, nations will become part of the covenant people. On this account, the literal sons and daughters of Jacob are to be potentially joined, via the solemn covenant promise of God, with those circumcised into the covenant people of God.
I think we need to pause and reflect on this fairly basic observation: the literal appearance of Jacob Israel and his 12 sons happens only after a prior solemn covenant institution with Abraham, the referent of which is peoples, nations, and kings, which are like the sands of the sea in number. One can be part of the people of God due to this covenant understanding, which is larger in form and reference than the strict 12-tribes reality bearing the name. At the same time, the term Israel or Israelite will come to mean those of the covenant, worshippers of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So built into what it means to be Israel, the covenant people of God, is from its inception nuanced by means of these covenant promises to Abraham, which precede the birth of Jacob, his renaming, and his 12 sons' progeny, as we know.
Paul alludes to this distinction in his own way in Romans 9, when coming at it from a different direction he points out that all the children of Abraham are not strictly speaking coterminous with Israel. And more forcefully, this means, quote, 'It is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise; they are reckoned as descendants.' That's Paul tracking this logic, though differently again, is the way Paul earlier in the letter distinguishes the faith and declared righteousness of Abraham with that of the Sinai covenant given to Moses generations afterwards.
Paul's specific concern in this distinction is the character of rectification — justification — but you'll note it likewise trades on a temporal framework whereby the righteousness of faith precedes the righteousness of Israel's subsequent Torah adherence, as his well-known conception from Romans puts it. Still, even the Torah adherence and righteousness are not inflexible and wooden when it comes to life within the people of God — Israel itself. Note, for example, that Israel comes out of Egypt with other people: the rabble, sometimes translated. There is a law for them, we learn, specific to their identity as sojourners alongside the covenant people. These injunctions are stipulated quite clearly in Leviticus 18 and 19: no idolatry, no food strangled, no meat with blood, and no fornication. Nowhere is it worked out in this context by some formal means by which the sojourner could or should more concretely join himself or herself to Torah covenant at Israel; rather, the text is content to let the matter turn on proper comportment due to their simple proximity to the one people Israel.
Fortunately, in this case, brought out along with them, the circumcision rights proper to covenant promises in Abraham and his descendants are not referred to here or even mentioned in Leviticus. The relationship between Genesis 17 on one side and Leviticus 18-19 is nowhere calibrated, and the texts are simply left to be put side by side. Now you may know that the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 17 invites comparison here, and the rulings that are laid down there are clearly indebted to the sojourner laws of Leviticus.
Gentiles who become Christians follow neither strictly nor selectively, nor are they circumcised. But all the same, the law given to the covenant people at Sinai has anticipated them. They are not the fortunate proximate fellow travelers trading on God's liberation of Israel from Egypt, but they have been brought near, their own kind of Exodus, by God's saving cross and the gospel, accomplishing fulfillment of the promises to Abraham. Baptism, then, is the right for becoming the people of God in Christ, as once circumcision served that role. Gentile Christians are not, on this reading, happenstance sojourners whose future in Exodus is unclear and never actually spelled out or developed. They are rather the long-targeted new covenant people, now sharing the self-same eternal destiny in Christ.
Paul sees their faith as an act of rectification akin to that of Abraham, as we know — appropriate really and figural for his day, and enacted now in the fullness of time by the work of God the Holy Spirit. Here again, the generosity of the one God of Israel in accommodating various means by which to be a part of the literal Israel in the true worship and ordered life of the one Lord finds other figural anticipations in the scriptures of Israel. I'm going to choose two more prominent examples.
Ruth is a Moabitess. She's not a literal Israelite, though she is a descendant of Abraham — how? By lineage through his nephew Lot. So we're back in that pre-Jacob-Israel register. Here, following the death in Moab of her Israelite husband, she insists on accompanying her mother-in-law into foreign territory whose laws and whose Lord are not her own. She makes it clear she knows that this is so, and quite self-consciously commits herself to a path that belongs to no naive universalism.
Naomi asks that the Lord, the named God of Israel — Hashem — grant her a new husband where she is in the land of Moab. But Ruth wants more than this. In the famous quote: 'Your people will be my people, your God will be my God; where you die, I will die, I will be buried there.' And then she lifts up the name of the Lord: 'May the Lord — Hashem — deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.' It's used at weddings, but I'm not missing the point here a little bit. Ruth calls on the name of the Lord. She is incorporated, via this calling on the name, into literal Israel. She is taken then in marriage by Boaz and famously gives birth to the grandfather of David. We know nothing more than that, but what the four-chapter book tells us is significant when we're reflecting, I think, on the identity of Israel.
Then there's that other comic four-chapter book: Jonah. Jonah is sent to prophesy in Nineveh in the name of and at the behest of the Lord God, the Lord God of Israel. And as we know, Jonah hides from that truth by fleeing his vocation and by absenting himself. When a storm on the sea arises and the sailors each call on their — we'd have to say here 'small-g god' — Elohim, gods. Each one has one. They deduce from their petitioning failure to calm the seas and by the absence of Jonah that another God — Elohim — is required. Jonah, as we know, prefers his self-absorption over compliance with their request to pray to the Lord, as the narrator tells us — that's really who's at work here to bring the seas to bay. So they throw him overboard as a remedy, and the seas calm.
The sailors now know something: they know that the Lord, the God of Israel, is the God of sea and dry land. And they don't just file this away as an important theological fact; but as the text says, like Ruth, they take the name of the Lord on their lips. The seas in tumult around them, quote, 'They cried out to Adonai Hashem: Please, do not let us die for taking this man's life. Do not hold us accountable for killing an innocent man, for you, Hashem, have done as you pleased.' A real conversion here. Then they took Jonah, threw him overboard, and the raging sea grew calm. At this, the men greatly feared the Lord — the narrator is telling us — and they offered a sacrifice and made vows on the ship to him.
One ought to laugh. They don't become Israelites, and unlike Ruth they don't give birth to the grandfather of David. But their righteousness conduct becomes a mirror, as it turns out, of Jonah's eventual own, once he's been belched forth from the transformative season in the fish. You can hear the parallel here. I'm going to read the text, though. Jonah of course should have been the first one to say it: 'When my life was ebbing away, I remembered you, O Hashem, and my prayer rose to you, to your holy temple. Those who cling to worthless idols turn away from God's love for them. But I, with shouts of grateful joy, will sacrifice to you; what I have vowed I will make good. I will say, salvation comes from Hashem.' Calling on the name of the Lord in some measure constitutes life within the covenant people, covenant life with Israel.
The constant refrain of the Psalms makes its contribution here as well: 'Let all the nations praise the Lord; yea, let all the peoples praise thee and hallow thy name.' Ruth and the sailors become these Lord-hallowers, and in so doing stand alongside and in some measure within the covenant life with Israel, much like the sojourners coming up out of Egypt as part and parcel of God's liberating salvation. Now, as we well know, at other places in the scriptures of Israel, the coming of the nations is anticipated, proclaimed proleptically, observed. But in these examples just reviewed, we are given concrete examples of an Israel which expands to include the sojourner, the Moabitess Ruth, and the sailors bound for Tarshish. This does not change the literal sons of Israel as a reality, but it belongs to the desires of Hashem, the Lord God of Israel, that all nations praise his name and become the righteous sons and daughters of Abraham and Sarah.
I want to shift the focus now to some different reflections of Paul on the nature of Israel. He has much to say on the topic and from different angles of vision, and I suspect these will be the topic for our coming speakers. The text I have in mind is found in Romans 3, and I have mentioned it. Romans 2, you'll remember, gives us Paul's thoughts concerning the identity of Israel constituted as law-governed Judaism of his present day. What does it mean to have the law and not do the law? What if Gentiles produce a righteousness apart from the law? How does circumcision effect covenant membership? There are children of promise as well as children of Jacob, and Israel for Paul consists of them also.
His declarations, as we remember them in this second chapter of Romans, having sought to level in some measure the field of distinction in order to command the imparted righteousness of Christ for Jew and Gentile both, he asks a rhetorical question: 'Well then, why Judaism at all?' If it's not to do with genealogical linkage to Israel or circumcision or law adherence, what is Judaism in God's purposes? The answer Paul gives: 'To them have been entrusted the Oracles of God.' It is their existence as the people to whom God has specially spoken and revealed his particular word and will that makes Israel what it is, corporate or individual.
Picking up from our last speaker, Paul has to hand many texts from these same Oracles entrusted to confirm his view. One that comes to mind is from the Psalter, which everywhere, as we can see when we read it, anticipates the nations' praise of the one God, Hashem, the maker of heaven and earth. But this hope and this promise has all the same a kind of irreducible foundation in God's special relationship to one people. The text I have in mind: 'He revealed his word to Jacob, his laws and decrees to Israel. He has not done this for any other nation; they do not know his laws. Hallelujah!' The nations come to the knowledge of God by taking firm hold of a Jew, by the hem of his robe, saying, 'Let us go with you, for we have heard God is with you.' This is how Zechariah envisions the point Paul is making in a different context where he pinpoints the special role given by God to his elect. To them have been entrusted the Oracles of God.
Israel has been given a clear dial tone. They may ignore it, abuse it, forget it, act like Jonah in beat disobedience to it. But as we see, by means of Jonah's disobedience and absence as much as in his obedient presence, he is prophetic all the same. Why? Because to him was given the Oracles of God, and he embodied them in his absence as much as in his obedient presence. Paul appears to be making this point in a different context and for a different reason, but I think based on the same logic: Jonah has been entrusted the Oracles of God, and that is so above and beyond his own individual willed comportment. It is this entrusting that conveys the Lord God of Israel and makes calling on his name a possibility. Ruth and the sailors witness and acknowledge this entrustment.
It could be possible to see this reality as rare and isolated, but I'd like to press a bit deeper here. We've noted the temporal sequencing by which the literal sons of Israel and the later Torah gifting are preceded in the canonical presentation by the covenant relationship with Abraham and his seed: those in future blessing outside of Israel, the nations and kings beyond number. But equally decisive is the Genesis presentation which precedes the call of Abraham and the attention given to it and the position that it occupies. The Oracles of God entrusted to the Jews mark them out as distinctive bearers of his identity to the world. And in those same Oracles, we find at the very start a conception of God's work in the world by no means limited to Israel. In some ways, this is the real marvel of the scriptures of Israel. Israel as the chief player — Israel has the dial tone and entrustment — but the Oracles they receive speak of them as part of something much bigger, indeed of creation itself.
Israel sings of this. They are the singer, and the song is what it's about: all people and all creation. 'The Lord is good to all; he has compassion on all he has made. All your works praise you; your faithful people extol you.' Why so? That all people may know of your mighty acts. The psalm that follows, Psalm 147, which I just read — 'He has revealed his will to Israel; he has not done so to other nations' — is immediately followed by 'Praise the Lord, heavens, angels, heavenly hosts, Sun and Moon, shining stars, heavens, kings of the earth and all nations, princes and all rulers on earth, young men, women, old men and children: let them all praise the name of the Lord. Hallelujah!' Again, it's interesting that the conjunction of these two Psalms — the identity of Israel is permanently tied up with an encompassing all nations and peoples of creation. The Oracles of God entrusted to them bear witness just to this.
Given this, it's hard not to conceive of the identity of Israel, our topic for today, as on the one hand porous due to the covenant promises made through Abraham to all his seed and examples like Ruth, and on the other hand linked in destiny to people in all creation, given the content of the Oracles of God entrusted to her. The groundwork set for this is found in these opening chapters of Genesis and the temporal context they presuppose. We will read on and discover that the Divine Name — Hashem, God's personal name, especially revealed to Israel — and to know the name, to lift up the name, to honor the name as the commandments puts it, is to be the people. And Ruth and Jonah exist within this framework as we've seen: they come to know the name by what could be called a proximity of faithfulness.
Now Exodus makes crystal clear that the name revealed to Moses — 'I am who I am,' the solemn name Hashem — is tied up with God's life with the people, the people of Israel through time. 'Then they will know that I am the Lord' is a twelve-fold refrain beginning in Exodus 3 that punctuates the drama with Pharaoh, culminating in the promised Exodus. Moses, as we know, is given the name in solemn disclosure, but the name is no abracadabra word. To know the name — the Lord in his name — is to have God establish his authority with the people who are given to witness that by his acts of deliverance and also his acts of judgment and forbearance. 'I will take you for my people, and I will be your God, and you will know that I am the Lord.' Yet by these very acts of deliverance, so too Pharaoh will come to know the Lord in judgment. And the priestly writer — I think his hand is visible here — speaks of generations who will come to know the Lord by this record of deliverance, and indeed all creation itself.
This more universal horizon of knowing or coming to know the name, based upon what distinctively God is doing with Israel and yet spreading out to all nations and creation, is the canvas on which the priestly writer in the Pentateuch does his painting. It represents his contribution to the narrative line of Exodus. In Exodus 9:16: 'But for this purpose I have let you live, so that my name may be known throughout all the earth.' Now in the book of Genesis, we typically track the hand of this priestly writer by his use of the word Elohim, the word for God in a generic sense, much as we use it today. And as such, this word Elohim is why we learn Hebrew and cognate languages. We know that this same cognate word in the languages and peoples of the world exists beyond Israel. The priestly writer knows this and in it sees a great creational significance.
The Oracles of God entrusted to the Jews are Oracles of the God called upon in some form by all peoples, even as they would need to come to know that singularly and more fully if they were to know the Lord as he is known in and by Israel. 'In the beginning, Elohim created the heavens and the earth, all that lives in them, and a humanity made in the image of Elohim.' So on one interpretation, the identity of Israel consists in being a unique entrusted bearer of Oracles of God in which God's revealed and personal name to her and his creational identity in all the world cannot be thought of independently and really only makes sense in intimate relationship to one another.
Elohim is introduced by Israel as the God who created the world and all that is in it and who made humanity in his image. The following account of Adam and Eve goes over some of the same ground but from a different angle of vision. And if you open the text and look at it closely, you'll note that it carefully sets alongside the generic Elohim of Genesis 1 the revealed name Adonai Hashem, using a kind of unique collocation: Hashem Elohim, the Lord God. What's striking in that account is that at 16 times, almost metronomically, the narrator insists that this is the God with whom the couple and the serpent have to do. And this information is shared with the reader in a repetitively reinforced way.
The name revealed to Moses and the people of Israel, which will be made known to Pharaoh and all the world through acts of judgment and mercy — the Oracles of God entrusted to the Jews — insists is the one and only Lord God. And so he is the one who is working in the world of the first couple and their descendants in Genesis. All this, the Oracles of God insists, is true in some primeval sense before God calls Abraham and as the Lord issues promises to him and all his offspring. One of the mysteries of the presentation of these first 11 chapters of the Bible — obviously significant because of their position, setting as it were the terms for all that follows — is that how the divine name may be said to be known and used by characters in its presentation is never explained.
In my view, this is consistent with the creational perspective of the priestly writer and also that assemblage of works latterly called wisdom literature in modern scholarship. It nowhere doubts the salvation-historical revelation of the name in concrete time and space to Moses and the patriarchs and matriarchs of Israel. 'The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,' so that the narrative conjunction as we have it now in Genesis between the wisdom-creational-priestly perspective and the salvation-historical Yahwist perspective is one of mutual reinforcement in the final form of the Pentateuch. These significantly placed 11 chapters prior to the call of Abraham exist now as a conjunct testimony — an Elohim-Hashem witness to the Oracles of God entrusted to the Jews. So deeply embedded in the conjoint witnesses are the creational and the specifically disclosed aspects of God that the canonical presentation can be content with a one-line summary: 'Now at that time, humanity called on the name of the Lord.'
It can do this without explaining how the name was known or why accounts of its direct disclosure are not given in mature form until Exodus. Equally, these are not just narrative statements for the reader who knows the story to come, clarifying that God is always the Lord and so worship of God from eternity must in fact be worship of the revealed Lord God of Israel. Abraham too is directly addressed with the words 'I am the Lord,' and the narrator does not restrain his own use of the Divine Name in the Genesis accounts. Abraham will say, 'O Hashem Lord God, how shall I know I possess it?'
The figure of Job is actually somewhat similar. If you read the account, you'll see that in reality in his frame of reference, which is like unto that of Noah, he calls the Lord God of Israel El Shaddai. Why is that? Because he's a pre-Israelite, a non-Israelite, a man from the East. But the narrator will tell us that that God, El Shaddai, is in fact the Lord God: 'The Lord gave, the Lord took away; blessed be the name of the Lord.' And we see a similar work at play also in another wisdom book, Ecclesiastes. The polarity is different. Ecclesiastes, Qohelet — Solomon, who knows the name of the Lord — tends to use 'Creator God': 'Remember your Creator'; 'Fear God and keep his commandments'; 'I have seen the business that God has given the sons of men to be busy with'; 'Guard your steps when you draw near to the house of God'; 'Man has no good thing under the sun but to eat, drink, enjoy himself during the days God gives him under the sun.'
This is the creational perspective of P, the priestly writer, and wisdom. We hear it also in the echoes in Ecclesiastes: 'To everything there is a season under heaven,' rhyming with 'While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, day and night shall not cease.' Or at the end of the book: 'The dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to the God who gave it' — a clear evocation of Genesis 2:7. The wisdom-priestly-Elohim perspective is not to be isolated as some later development or a non-Israelite universalism. Rather, it is married up with the disclosure of a specific Hashem, privileged revelation in the Oracles of God entrusted to the Jews.
Let me conclude then. Why have I rehearsed all of this? It seems to me the Oracles of God entrusted to the Jews are in some sense a primary identity marker for Israel. In these Oracles, the Lord Hashem specifically revealed to Israel is the God of all creation, all nations, through all time. In a sense, the Oracles are Israel. Israel cannot be extracted or differentiated from this relationship to oracular disclosure. It belongs to the unique testimony to Israel that the disclosed Hashem, the Lord, is from the beginning that God who has made all things in heaven and on earth. This privileged disclosure is unique in that while Israel is the entrusted recipient, the subject matter which puts her at the center from the beginning indicates that the center encloses every nation on earth. And there is no other testimony like unto it. It is, as Paul says, advantageous.
So one can ask, as we're doing today, 'Who is Israel?' And equally one can ask: Israel is who she is — that people whose Oracles identify her. She is that people, alone in all the world, entrusted by God to be the bearer of his name and presence, as much when present and obedient before him as when absent or refractory or even judged and punished before the eyes of all the world. These entrusted Oracles insist that this is no hindrance to God's making himself known through her. Through God's electing and preserving bond to the people he has chosen for himself, even in judgment he will love and never forsake.
The handing on of these Oracles to us, the Gentiles, the nations of the world, came of course at an enormous risk. Would the nations take the name of the Lord in vain? The guarding of the personal name Hashem by means of a placeholder already happening in the Hebrew Bible — Adonai — likely grew up within Israel, and the Oracles of God, just out of this concern to make sure the name of the Lord was not taken in vain. But in the same way, God would risk the proper hallowing of his name by sending Jonah to the Ninevites, so too the Oracles of God entrusted to the Jews would in time function to disclose the Lord to those outside the elect. The risk was taken.
And Paul warns, in those famous chapters of Romans 9 to 11, of a misunderstanding that this could entail. In this, he was reading the Oracles of God entrusted to the Jews with the grain of their own testimony. It is to these entrusted Oracles that he has recourse in making his final point at the end of Romans 11, his last word on the subject. The misunderstanding possible for the Gentiles — his last word leaves Israel before the mirror of her own Oracles. They have had the first, and so for him properly they had the advantageous last word as well. 'The deliverer will come from Zion; he will turn godlessness away from Jacob. This is my covenant with them, when I take away their sins. Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments! Who has known the mind of the Lord? Who has been his counselor? For from him and through him and for him are all things. To him, Hashem, be the glory forever!' And we might conclude then with this: the Oracles of God entrusted to the Jews concerning her identity and her beloved destiny in the Oracles of God entrusted to her. Thank you very much.
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Audience Member41:35
I want to sort of bracket the application of these ideas by Paul out of the Hebrew Bible, Old Testament, for a moment and think about the models that you brought in from the Hebrew Bible. It seems to me the two possible definitions or descriptions you gave of Israel's identity — one of them being porous, thinking about Abraham's descendants perhaps more broadly than simply the linear descendants, and then more broadly than that all people — and the later examples you gave were of Jonah's sailors, Jonah's co-travelers, and Ruth. I guess I want to problematize the idea here of who they are vis-à-vis Israel. The sailors with Jonah neither join any community nor observe Torah law; they simply make a statement and then they disappear. I'm not sure how to identify them as Israel by standards that seem to me prominent elsewhere in Tanakh. The model of Ruth, while she does join the community so to speak — at least a family — she's not paradigmatic in the Hebrew Bible for one who converts and joins the community, and she too does not observe Torah law. So I want to sort of problematize them as examples of what it means to be Israel by virtue of the absence of what I would have said are other aspects of being part of Israel, namely the idea of community and Torah observance. I think in some ways they're kind of outliers, and therefore they're missing some of the features that, at least bracketing the New Testament interpretation by Paul, were central to identification of Israel in the Hebrew Bible itself. I want to see if I can get a sense for how we account for those features being — in my mind, I would argue not peripheral — they're certainly important identifying, for example, God-fearers, and these sailors, but I'm not sure there is Israel in a paradigmatic sense.
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Christopher Seitz44:09
It's a good question. Even 'God-fearer' is not really an internal Hebrew Bible idea, so already the tidiness of what it might mean to be a part of the people of Israel — part of my point is it is untidy, and that in the very Oracles of God they entertain the untidiness. I'm not unhappy with them being outliers; I think it's a good term. They're unusual; they don't belong. The very fact that nothing is followed up about them says much about the sojourners — we don't know what their fate is. I just find it astonishing that the Oracles of God entrusted to the Jews are quite prepared to tolerate this kind of talk. I think that's my only modest point. One could imagine a very different kind of thing in which the sailors on board the ship basically say, 'We're doubling down on Marduk.' In other words, I just find it astonishing that they'd let this kind of thing happen. But your point is right: they're not — I suppose on the other side of it, I'm not sure that the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible is yet prepared to think as concretely about membership in the community as will later be the case. And why is that? I think that belongs to some of the untidiness that the material is prepared to accept. I find it rather intriguing. Now in the case of the sojourners, why do they even — they just say, 'Look, we're done; get out of here; you're piggybacking on our exodus.' But instead, there's some creative thinking about what kind of life in the midst would entail. But you're absolutely right: there's no finished product here; nobody talked.
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Audience Member46:16
Katherine Hamilton here at Wycliffe. Thank you in so many ways for that really scintillating discussion of Israel and the Bible. This is maybe a comment, maybe a question. Early on, you brought out the link between Leviticus and its legislation for sojourners and Acts. For me, it just suddenly opened up Acts in a really helpful way, because we often as Christians — Gentile Christians — tend to read it as the story from Jerusalem to Rome and the opening out of the Gospel into the Gentile world. But if this particular moment seems to suggest a vision in Acts of a people of God in Christ that is fundamentally Israel with the Gentiles inside it — and I think this reflects the influence of Bauckham and St. Andrews, Jacobite Christianity I suspect — the issue is that tragically at the end of Acts there is a parting of the ways, and therefore the foreign junctions. Paul — I don't think Paul's yet content to accept it on those terms, but there's a way in which he's beginning to use the light. What I love about this is we have these clichés that Paul went to the Gentiles and Peter to the people of Israel. Of course it's actually not true in Acts: he's preaching continually in the synagogue, and even when he tries to get out, they drag him back in. When he comes at the end of Acts, he seems to be concerned about his arrival and what the synagogue will say about him, and there's a hardening — he uses hardening texts — but it's hard to imagine Paul ever really giving up on this particular mission. The intriguing thing about the Acts text is that the Western text has already shifted the forum: it's changed 'meat strangled and no blood' to 'thou shalt commit no murder' and 'love thy neighbor as thyself.' I've written on this in other places. My hunch is that what's happened is reflective of the parting of the ways, and that the Western text of Acts bears witness to this. One of the things you will know is that if the initial sense of Leviticus and Bauckham's view holds — it's not my view, although I share it — the idea that the first chapters of Acts are witnessing to a kind of new Gentile thing that is a sort of updating of something with supersessionist character, this really seems to be totally undone. Cornelius is a God-fearer loved by the synagogue; this is hardly 'the Spirit came down and we decided something new and fun would happen.' That doesn't seem to me to be any of the instincts of Acts 17. They went back to Torah and said, 'What would be relevant here to a life in the midst of the people of Israel?'
Judy Paulson, I teach in pastoral theology here. I wonder if you could comment, Chris, on passages in the Gospels in which Jesus as a Jew is speaking to other Jews and referring to God's interaction and blessing of people outside of Israel. I wonder if that informs, in your mind, what Paul is talking about when he refers, for instance, to Naaman or the widow of Zarephath as people to whom God blessed in an extraordinary way. Jesus is speaking to other Jews and of course gets in trouble for that. How does that inform our reading of Paul?
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Christopher Seitz50:38
Right. And of course his recourse is to the Oracles of God entrusted to the Jews. So he holds up Elijah: there was a famine in the land, and God sent him to the non-Israelites. Part of the intriguing thing there is that Paul or Jesus is not sort of — he's actually reading this stuff out of the Oracles. It's not a kind of 'let me tell you something that I think would be useful, given the limitations of the Oracles of God entrusted to the Jews.' Rather, 'How can we actually —' it's like the critique of sacrifice in Hebrews: I would be hard-pressed to not see it as consistent with a lot of critique of sacrifice in the Psalms. But you see interestingly enough: 'A broken heart you will not despise,' and that kind of thing. 'I said I'd bring an offering, and you said no, I really want this' — but of course the psalm ends with 'and then when you're done, you will bring offerings.' These things exist in relationship to one another, but that's an Old Testament idea. I think equally when Jesus does this, he's basically mining a resource and using it to a particular purpose. I've always thought that 'food to the dogs' and all that is completely misunderstood. He basically says, 'Look, there's a covenant meal.' The woman says, 'Yeah, but could I have some scraps?' And Jesus says, 'Great is your faith. You have accepted the terms under which this is possible.' And then — so he doesn't dismantle. He doesn't say, 'Oh well, let's get rid of the idea of a table.' He says, 'Great is your faith for accepting it on the terms that it is, and may your scraps be a meal unto great bounty.' But I think often we hear these things as though they're being deconstructed, and I think they're just drawing on the riches of the Old Testament at that point.