Israel

They are the true ‘circumcision’ (Phil. 3:3; cf. Rom. 2:28–29; Eph. 2:11; Col. 2:11–13) and ‘the Israel of God’ (Gal. 6:16)… a broad spectrum of New Testament texts claim or assume that Gentiles as Gentiles are included in the group that they identify with the eschatologically restored Israel.

This passage argues that the New Testament’s most consequential theological move is the inclusive redefinition of Israel to encompass Gentile believers as full members of the eschatologically restored covenant people.

Frank S. Thielman, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

For Matthew, Jesus recapitulated the history of Israel, but at the points in Israel’s story where the nation failed to obey God, Jesus succeeded. This made Jesus the ideal candidate for fulfilling the role of the Servant in Isaiah’s four Servant Songs.

The passage argues that Matthew’s Christology is built on a typological parallelism in which Jesus re-enacts Israel’s defining tests and, unlike Israel, passes them, thereby becoming the obedient Servant-nation in one person.

Frank S. Thielman, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

If Paul’s gospel is true, then God’s promises to Israel must be false. To put it another way, if the prophesied restoration of Israel as Paul has described it… includes only a few Israelites, how can Paul’s gospel be compatible with God’s Word?

This passage identifies the central theological crisis of Romans 9–11: Paul’s predominantly Gentile gospel success forces him to confront directly whether the divine word to historical Israel has been annulled.

Frank S. Thielman, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

At least from the perspective of the prophets, however, Israel did not keep the terms of the covenant. Instead of separating itself from the nations as a witness to them of God’s character, Israel participated in the idolatry of the nations.

The passage argues that Israel’s covenantal vocation — to embody holiness as a contrast-society — was systematically violated, a failure the prophets and Paul alike treat as definitive for understanding Israel’s subsequent history.

Frank S. Thielman, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

He implies, by referring casually to ‘Israel according to the flesh’ (10:18, aut.), that the Corinthians are spiritual Israel (cf. Rom. 2:29; 9:6; Phil. 3:3). The table at which the Corinthians celebrate the Lord’s Supper is analogous to the altar—‘the Lord’s table’—of Israel’s temple.

Paul’s typological argument in 1 Corinthians transfers Israel’s desert narrative wholesale to the Corinthian community, constituting them as ‘spiritual Israel’ whose eucharistic practice recapitulates and must surpass the failures of their Israelite forebears.

Frank S. Thielman, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Jesus as the Convergence Point of the Two Stories… one that follows God’s saving purpose for his people and the other that follows Israel’s rejection of God’s purpose—intersect in Jesus of Nazareth, whom Luke has a special interest in portraying as Israel’s royal Messiah, Suffering Servant, and eschatological prophet.

Luke’s narrative theology, according to this passage, is structured around two divergent trajectories — divine saving purpose and Israel’s repeated rejection — that converge and are resolved in the person of Jesus.

Frank S. Thielman, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Second Isaiah took this one step further and declared that Yahweh was the only God. In his rewriting of Israelite history, the myth of… [Yahweh was all they had].

Armstrong argues that Babylonian exile was the decisive pressure that transformed Israel’s henotheism into strict monotheism, making the absence of Temple and shrine the paradoxical birthplace of a universalized God-concept.

Armstrong, Karen, A History of God, 1993thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

It was an anxious time for the people of Israel… In 722, his successor, King Sargon II, would conquer the northern Kingdom and deport the population: the ten northern tribes of Israel were forced to assimilate and disappeared from history.

Armstrong uses the Assyrian destruction of the northern kingdom as the historical crisis that sharpened prophetic consciousness and precipitated the theological transformation of Yahwism in Isaiah’s generation.

Armstrong, Karen, A History of God, 1993supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

In this climate of extreme insecurity, the Deuteronomist’s policies made a great impact. Far from obeying Yahweh’s commands, the last two kings of Israel had deliberately courted disaster.

Armstrong traces the Deuteronomistic reform under Josiah as Israel’s response to existential political crisis, reading the purge of syncretistic worship as a psychologically driven assertion of exclusive covenantal identity under threat.

Armstrong, Karen, A History of God, 1993supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Shabbetai had a mission to descend into hell before he could achieve the final redemption of Israel… he chose twelve disciples to be the judges of the tribes of Israel, which would soon reassemble.

Armstrong presents Sabbatean messianism as Israel’s collective projection of redemptive hope onto an individual — a psychological response to centuries of persecution that recapitulated the twelve-tribe mythology in an eschatological register.

Armstrong, Karen, A History of God, 1993supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Hosea was particularly disturbed by the fact that Israel was breaking the terms of the covenant by worshipping other gods, such as Baal. Like all of the new prophets, he was concerned with the inner meaning of religion.

Armstrong argues that Hosea’s denunciation of Israel’s covenant infidelity marks a pivotal interiorization of religious demand — the prophetic turn from cultic observance to inner ethical and erotic fidelity to Yahweh.

Armstrong, Karen, A History of God, 1993supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The yearning for the return to Zion… began as a defiantly secular movement, since the vicissitudes of history had convinced the Zionists that their religion and their God did not work.

Armstrong reads political Zionism as a secularized displacement of the traditional messianic longing for the land of Israel, born from the collapse of religious confidence under the pressure of European anti-Semitism.

Armstrong, Karen, A History of God, 1993supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The Yom Kippur war shattered the ‘illusion of Israeli invincibility and invulnerability’… Terrorism, economic crises, the Lebanon war, and the intifada of recent years have only added to this sense of precariousness.

Pargament invokes the post-1973 religious crisis in Israeli society as a case study in how collective military trauma destroys the implicit sacred canopy of national invulnerability, triggering a turn to alternative meaning-systems.

Pargament, Kenneth I, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The Bible shows that the people were not true to the covenant. They remembered it in times of war, when they needed Yahweh’s skilled military protection, but when times were easy they worshipped Baal, Anat and Asherah in the old way.

Armstrong characterizes Israel’s covenant observance as instrumentally contingent — devotion to Yahweh activated by crisis and abandoned in security — a pattern she treats as structurally formative for the entire subsequent history of the God-concept.

Armstrong, Karen, A History of God, 1993supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Jung speaks about the covenant that was developed between Yahweh and certain individuals, and how the Eighty-ninth Psalm pictured that covenant as broken.

Edinger reads Jung’s analysis of the Eighty-ninth Psalm as evidence that Israel’s broken covenant discloses not merely human failure but a wound in the God-image itself — Yahweh’s own unconscious reneging on his sworn word to David.

Edinger, Edward F., Transformation of the God-Image: An Elucidation of Jung’s Answer to Job, 1992supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Yahweh accused the other gods of failing to meet the social challenge of the day… Not only did the psalmist depict Yahweh condemning his fellow gods to death, but in doing so he had usurped the traditional prerogative of El, who, it would seem, still had his champions in Israel.

Armstrong argues that the Psalmic council-of-gods passage reveals a residual polytheistic substrate surviving in Israel alongside the emerging monotheistic claim, showing Yahweh’s supremacy as a contested theological achievement rather than a given.

Armstrong, Karen, A History of God, 1993supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

In their rejection of Jesus, Israel has acted like its forbears who also rejected the ministry of Isaiah. John and Matthew… Jesus was rejected as a specific fulfillment of the terms of Isaiah’s call to preach to a people whom God intended to judge through hardening them against himself.

The evangelists’ use of Isaiah 6 constructs Israel’s rejection of Jesus as a typological recapitulation of ancient prophetic rejection, framing divine hardening as a structural feature of Israel’s sacred history rather than mere contingency.

Frank S. Thielman, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

That the Jews will continue to exist as a nation. Jeremiah. That they will be wanderers without kings, etc. Hos. iii. Without prophets. Amos. Awaiting salvation and not finding it.

Pascal cites Israel’s prophetically foretold survival as a scattered, stateless nation awaiting a salvation that does not arrive as itself apologetic evidence for the divine authorship of Scripture.

Pascal, Blaise, Pensées, 1670supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Kook insisted that as long as the concept of serving God was defined as the service of a particular Being, separate from the ideals and duties of religion, it would not be ‘free from the immature outlook which is always focused in particular beings.’

Armstrong presents Kook’s mystical Zionism as a sophisticated theological synthesis in which the secular pioneers of Israel are re-read as unwitting instruments of the divine, their atheism a temporary kelipah concealing the redemptive sparks.

Armstrong, Karen, A History of God, 1993supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Luke gives the motif special emphasis, however, when he identifies the topic of Jesus’ discussion with Elijah and Moses as Jesus’ ‘departure [exodos], which he was about to bring to fulfillment at Jerusalem.’ Like Moses, Jesus led an exodus of God’s people.

Luke’s deliberate invocation of the Exodus typology at the Transfiguration casts Jesus as leading a new and definitive liberation of Israel, with the cross-resurrection event recapitulating and surpassing the foundational national salvation narrative.

Frank S. Thielman, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

When the Lord your God brings you into the land which he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give you, with great and goodly cities, which you did not build… then take heed lest you forget the Lord, who brought you out of the land of Egypt.

Campbell cites the Deuteronomic land-grant commandments to situate Israel’s holy-war ideology within his broader cross-cultural argument about sacred violence and the mythological sanctification of conquest.

Campbell, Joseph, Myths to Live By, 1972aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The social ideal of the prophets had been implicit in the cult of Yahweh since Sinai: the story of the Exodus had stressed that God was on the side of the weak and oppressed. The difference was that now Israelites themselves were castigated as oppressors.

Armstrong identifies the prophetic turn as Israel’s self-critical appropriation of the Exodus logic against itself — the liberating God becoming the judge of an Israel that has become its own Egypt.

Armstrong, Karen, A History of God, 1993aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The expulsion of the Sephardic Jews of Spain must be seen in the context of this larger European trend… today some Jews feel drawn to the spirituality that the Sephardic Jews evolved during the sixteenth century to help them to come to terms with their exile.

Armstrong contextualizes the Spanish expulsion within a Europe-wide pattern of anti-Jewish exclusion, using the Lurianic Kabbalism it generated as evidence that exile repeatedly becomes the generative matrix for Israel’s deepest spiritual creativity.

Armstrong, Karen, A History of God, 1993aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →