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Light to the Nations and Aliens and Strangers: an Overview of the People of God in the Old Testament

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Light to the Nations and Aliens and Strangers: an Overview of the People of God in the Old Testament Theological Study Conference 2017 1 David Green: Light to the Nations and Aliens and Strangers: An overview of the people of God in the Old Testament Light to the Nations and Aliens and Strangers: An overview of the people of God in the Old Testament David M. Green, Vice-Principal, London Seminary Two Preliminary Caveats Before addressing the subject of this paper, two preliminary matters must be dealt with relating to the interpretation of Old Testament texts and their application to contemporary Christian life. 1. Who are the people of God? The question of who the people of God are, in the Old Testament, is less straightforward than in the New. Apart from a few doubtful cases, like Simon “the sorcerer” in Acts 8:9ff, it is usually clear that those identified by the New Testament as the people of God are believers, regenerate by his Spirit. When it comes to Old Testament Israel, however, we may seek to draw lessons from individuals whom we have no real basis for regarding either as “regenerate” or “unregenerate” in the New Testament sense. At times in the discussion which follows, the “people of God” may refer to the people of Israel as a whole as they actually were, or as they were called to be under the terms of the Sinai covenant, or only to the godly remnant within a largely apostate Israel. This calls for a nuanced approach to making comparisons with the New Testament church and the experience of the New Testament believer, and in drawing lessons for Christians today. 2. Culture One aspect of the subject of this conference is the relationship between the culture of the people of God and the culture(s) of people around them. This relationship is also far from simple. At times, the people of God think and behave in similar, if not identical, ways to other men and women of their time and place; at other times, their beliefs and practices are radically different. Sometimes the similarities are benign, sometimes they are symptomatic of syncretism, assimilation and spiritual and moral decline. At times, we must determine whether the attitudes and actions in a given biblical text stem from theological convictions or cultural pre-determinants. There are some obvious examples of the cultural question in the Old Testament, polygamy and slavery being perhaps the best known. There are other aspects to the cultural question, however, that have only become apparent with the discovery of comparative Ancient Near Theological Study Conference 2017 2 David Green: Light to the Nations and Aliens and Strangers: An overview of the people of God in the Old Testament Eastern literature. Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, for example, it would have been natural to assume that the celebration of three annual festivals, according to Yhwh’s stipulations in Exod 23:14-19, etc, was unique to Israel. It is now known, however, that this pattern of festivals was observed in the city of Emar on the Upper Euphrates, in texts dating from the Late Bronze Age (1550-1200), contemporary with the period of Exodus – Judges: • Text “Emar 373” (13th C BC) describes a zukru (√“remember”) festival on the 15th day of the first month, the same as Passover. • Text “Emar 446” describes a “head of year” festival (cf. Heb. rō’š haššānāh, Jewish New Year) in the autumn.1 The simple conclusion to be drawn from this is that the uniqueness of Israel’s religion lies not in the celebration of three annual harvest festivals between spring and autumn, but rather in what they celebrated at those festivals, principally the events of the Exodus. We may go further and conclude that to some degree God accommodated the stipulations of the Torah to the cultural conditions of the time. In other things, by contrast, the Israelites were explicitly called to be strikingly and self-consciously different from the culture around them, e.g. When you come into the land which Yhwh your God is giving you, you shall not learn to follow the abominations of those nations. (Dt 18:9) The fact remains, however, that culturally speaking, Old Testament believers at times resemble their Ancient Near Eastern neighbours far more than they resemble modern, evangelical Christians and that we must not immediately assume that, in this, they are at fault. At times, their culture acts as a critique of ours rather than vice versa.2 We must also take care not to draw lessons for contemporary Christianity from the attitudes and practices of characters in the Old Testament without understanding the rationale behind them within the culture of their time. This second caveat also applies to some extent when considering New Testament texts. We may now proceed to the substance of the paper. Introduction The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between the Old Testament people of God to the people outside of their faith community, with a view to drawing some lessons for the Christian church today. In tackling this question, it is necessary to give some attention to 1 Richard S. Hess, Israelite Religions: An archaeological and biblical survey (Nottingham: IVP, Apollos, 2007), 112-122 on documents from Emar. 2 Contemporary Western society’s individualism and entitlement mentality, for example, would leave an Old Testament believer nonplussed. Theological Study Conference 2017 3 David Green: Light to the Nations and Aliens and Strangers: An overview of the people of God in the Old Testament methodology: how Christians legitimately derive lessons from the Old Testament. The fact that we find meaningful parallels or examples for our Christian experience and church life in Old Testament texts does not make those parallels necessarily legitimate. It would be possible, for example, to conclude from Joshua chapter 6 that the church’s mandate is to obliterate unbelievers from the face of the earth, or from Esther chapter 2 that Christian parents should encourage their daughters to enter beauty contests in order to gain advancement in the secular world. Such ideas may be “obviously” absurd (and offensive) but we need methodological reasons for dismissing them if we are to avoid drawing conclusions which are less obviously wrong but equally spurious. For example, a contrast might be drawn between Daniel’s courteous, tactful and sympathetic attitude to Babylonian officials (Daniel ch. 1) and Mordecai’s confrontational and inflammatory refusal to show proper respect to Haman (Esther ch. 3) which precipitated the edict to exterminate the Jews within the Persian empire. From this, we might draw the lesson that it is better to be nice, like Daniel, and not spiky like Mordecai towards unbelievers, especially those in authority over us. There are several problems with this, however. First, Daniel’s niceness did not prevent persecution (chs. 2, 4, 6). Secondly, Haman’s hatred is towards the Jewish people as a whole (Esther 3:8) and his dispute with Mordecai is merely the flashpoint for his anger. There is an underlying theology of enmity between Agag king of Amelek and king Saul (cf. 1 Sam 15), played out in their descendants Haman and Mordecai (Esther 3:1 and 2:5) which the writer of Esther would have expected his readers to recognize. This strongly suggests that the narrative is about something other than how we should behave towards unbelievers in power. Thirdly, there are times when it is right to confront, as Daniel confronts Belshazzar and Esther later confronts Haman. Therefore, although it is good to be considerate, tactful and sympathetic, we learn this from ethical teaching in Torah, wisdom literature (and passages such as the Sermon on the Mount), not from narratives. The Old Testament abounds in narrative, and unwarranted theological and practical conclusions are all too easily drawn from narratives, which are often, wrongly, regarded as simple to expound and easy to apply. Instead of regarding the Old Testament as a treasury of instructive examples, we need to approach it as an essentially theological corpus with a coherent, if complex, message. The Old Testament did not become Scripture when Jesus and the apostles spoke of it as such; it is the “God-breathed” Scripture which finds its fulfilment in Christ. For this reason, the approach in this paper is not to begin with examples from Old Testament narratives of Israelites interacting with peoples outside of Israel, but with the theology of Israel’s relationship to the nations. The Theology of Israel and the Nations For a theology of Israel’s relationship to other nations, we must begin with the descent of all humanity from Noah. Noah’s sons become the originators of all the nations of the known Theological Study Conference 2017 4 David Green: Light to the Nations and Aliens and Strangers: An overview of the people of God in the Old Testament world. Noah is represented as a new Adam, through whom God preserves human- and animal-kind from the de-creation of the Flood. After the Flood the concept of nations arises, in Genesis 10, where a list of 70 descendants of Noah comprises the known people-groups of the ancient near-eastern world, and their homelands. These are distinguished according to their lands, languages, families and nations (v. 5, 20, 31).3 The chapter ends with the summary statement that, These are the clans (mišpᵊḥōṯ) of Noah’s sons, according to their descendants (tôlᵊḏōṯ), in their nations, and from these the nations were divided on the earth after the flood. The Table of Nations demonstrates God’s blessing in the fruitfulness of humanity, that from Noah’s three sons, the whole earth was populated, Gen 9:19, in an echo of the original creation mandate of Gen 1:28.
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