Promised land?

Abstract

The conflict between the State of Israel and Hamas in Gaza calls into question the Deuteronomic command to ‘utterly destroy’ the existing nations in Palestine, in order to realize God’s promise of the land. It raises questions about how we understand Scripture as God’s word, about what constitute rights as regards occupation of land, and about how we understand cultural difference.

In the TeNaKh (i.e. the Hebrew Bible) there are two accounts of the occupation of Palestine. In Genesis, Abraham and his nephew Lot leave Sumeria and seek fresh pastures. We hear of Canaanites and Perizzites, of Melchizedek, the king of Salem, of Sodom and Gomorrah, of Pharaoh in Egypt, but otherwise the landscape seems empty. The only conflict is between Abraham and Lot, whose flocks are treading on each other’s toes. They have plenty of room, it seems, to spread out. The same is true of Jacob and Esau – there seems to be a vast area for the taking. The more dominant account follows on from Joshua, through 1 and 2 Samuel, most probably the result of Deuteronomic editing. Here, conflict and conquest are the themes, and, in 1 Samuel 15, and repeatedly in Deuteronomy, we have exhortations to genocide:

When the Lord your God brings you into the land that you are about to enter and occupy, and he clears away many nations before you – the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations mightier and more numerous than you – and when the Lord your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy [haharem] them. Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy. (Deut. 7.1–2; cf. 2.34, 3.6, 7.16, 9.3; Josh. 8.26, 10.20, 10.28, 11.21–22; 1 Sam. 15.1–21)

Both of these narratives are intimately bound up with God’s promise. In Genesis, God promises the whole land to Abram (as he then is):

On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, ‘To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites. (Gen. 15.18)

In Deuteronomy this is repeated emphatically. God says to Israel:

Resume your journey, and go into the hill country of the Amorites as well as into the neighbouring regions – the Arabah, the hill country, the Shephelah, the Negeb, and the sea coast – the land of the Canaanites and the Lebanon, as far as the great river, the river Euphrates. See, I have set the land before you; go in and take possession of the land that I swore to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give to them and to their descendants after them. (Deut. 1.7–8)

During the pro-Palestinian marches that accompanied the Israel–Gaza conflict in October–November 2023, chants of ‘Palestine will be free from the river to the sea’ were denounced as anti-Semitic. But the first article of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party reads: ‘The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable and is linked with the right to security and peace; therefore Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.’ The phrase originates in Deuteronomy, where ‘the river’ means the Euphrates (Deut. 11.24). The desire for ‘greater Israel’, which fed into the Likud party, includes not just the West Bank but Transjordan and Sinai. Palestinians are taking up the phrase of their Israeli neighbours (and adversaries).

The theme of promise is of immense significance. It is the foundation of Moltmann’s Theology of Hope and of his re-casting of eschatology in terms of hope and promise rather than of judgement. But the linking of promise to the expulsion of existing inhabitants, and to genocide, is extremely disturbing. Were the Deuteronomic prescriptions meant to be taken literally? The demand for Israel to distance itself from Canaanite practices was, Ton Veerkamp argues, about establishing a ‘contrast society’ that did not live by the rules of exploitation, but calling for genocide is an extreme way of doing that. ¹ It is true that the idea that there was indeed a conquest, favoured by Albright 60 to 70 years ago, is no longer a majority view. Most scholars either talk of ‘infiltration’ or adopt, or modify, the Mendenhall–Gottwald theory of a coming together of a small group of escaped slaves from Egypt, the horse-riding hapiru coming down from the north, and the peasantry of the Canaanite cities. Nevertheless, what sense are we to make of the linking of promise to genocide? To ask this is to raise the question of revelation, and of what it means to say that Scripture is ‘the word of God’.

Beginning from Karl Barth’s formula, based on an analogy with Chalcedon, that Scripture is ‘wholly the word of God and wholly human’, we can read the first half of the phrase to mean that in and through the Jewish and Christian Scriptures the Creator of all things is truly made known. But the second half of the phrase means that what we read is mediated by myriad human attempts to discern God’s will with all the myriad blindfolds that entails. In the present connection, the coupling of the promise of the land with the command to genocide looks like a classic attempt to justify wrongdoing and atrocity. If God commands you to do something, that will cannot be challenged – any atrocity can be condoned. But the God who commands genocide is only too clearly a human projection. The same applies to the idea that God intends to dispossess the original inhabitants of Palestine, or indeed anywhere, with all the murder, misery and injustice that entails.

There are two contexts within the TeNaKh within which the theme of promise has to be read. The first is prophecy: 93 per cent of the uses of the phrase ‘dabar YHWH’ (the word of the Lord) are to be found in the prophets. For the Jewish community, historically, it is Torah, the Pentateuch, which is the heart of God’s self-giving to history, but, following Abraham Heschel, I find that heart much more in the prophets. ² We have no access to the precise nature of their experience, but whatever it was, what emerges is a continuing critique of Israel’s/Judah’s behaviour and also, crucially, a re-thinking of election. Commenting on Second Isaiah, Rainer Albertz argues that the central message of salvation in these writings contains three radical exclusions: any increase in the political power of Israel; the military subjection of other nations; and Israel’s rule over the world. It is structurally different from the human political exercise of power but culminates in the liberation of the oppressed and the strengthening of the weak and those who have grown weary. ³ From the standpoint of whoever it was who wrote the Servant songs in Second Isaiah, Israel’s election is not in terms of becoming a superpower like any other but in terms of serving the peoples, ‘bearing the sin of many and making intercession for the transgressors’ (Isa. 53.12). This astonishing vision was seemingly taken up by Jesus, who speaks of himself as a servant (Mark 10.42–45), and later by Paul, who reads the divine manifestation in and through Jesus in these terms (Phil. 2.5–11). This is in absolute contrast to the chainsaw-waving admonition to wipe out your enemies.

The second context, however, is in Torah. In Leviticus 25.23 we read:

The land [ha’eretz] shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but migrant labourers [gerim] and tenants.

Of course, the author is talking about eretz Israel, but, as in the early chapters of Genesis, this is a prescription, and proscription, for the whole inhabited earth. Who has the right to occupy, or claim as theirs, a large part of the earth’s surface? Throughout recorded history, most war has revolved around this question and time and again theological justifications have been sought and found for conquest (e.g. see Henry V, Act 1 scene 1). Wherever, on earth, ‘original inhabitants’ can be spoken of with some certainty (in the Amazon, for example), they are threatened with dispossession – always by the better armed. But ‘[t]he earth [ha’eretz – here clearly what we call ‘planet earth’] is the Lord’s’ (Ps 24.1), a gift to all people.

This poses a conundrum, because the goods of diversity – diverse languages, cuisines, poetries, musics, cultures, regimes of cultivation – which I take to be endorsed by Pentecost, need settlement, and that means by a particular group. The farmer’s cry ‘Get off my land!’ is a protest against damage to work and stock, and can be extended to what we have called for the past 400 years ‘nations’ – or, for the past 200, ‘cultures’. These are not God-given, however. Almost all established cultures and nations are the result of violent conquest some time in the past, and ancient conquests (for example, the creation of ‘England’ by Angle, Saxon, Jute, Danish, Viking and Norman invasion) cannot be undone. Today, the order represented by the United Nations condemns violent imperialism, but the violence goes on, through bombs and rockets – in Ukraine, North East Africa, and many parts of the Middle East, including Palestine – but also through economic and cultural strategies.

For Christians – and, if Albertz is right, for Jews as well – violent imperialism is ruled out as incompatible with what Jesus calls God’s new order (‘the kingdom’), God’s ‘domination-free order’, as Walter Wink called it. Contrary to what a literal reading of Deuteronomy and its history suggests, we have to say an absolute ‘No’ to any genocide, anywhere, as well as to the historical norm of conquest by violence. At the same time, as in the story suggested by Genesis, humans have always migrated, usually driven by hunger, poverty or oppression, and these migrations change the societies into which they come. Humans do not live in museums, and all cultures bleed at the edges (a metaphor from tie-dyeing), which means that all cultures exist in process. Mutual assimilation, the sea change of cultures, is what follows. In response to the migrations of our own age, the task is to see that diversity is honoured, that no culture (especially a brash capitalist culture) becomes hegemonic, and that the earth is shared in peace, for the common good and for whatever fosters life. Unless we do that, climate change will kill us while we are still mimicking the conflicts of the Bronze and Iron Ages, but with far deadlier weapons. When Scripture is used counter to the aims of peace and justice that the prophets consistently called for, and which Jesus made central to his teaching, then, with the very dubious figure of Antonio (a class A anti-Semite), we can say that the devil is citing Scripture for his own purpose.