Israel and the Land

The story of human redemption actually begins with the promise of land to Abraham (Gen. 12:7; 15:7, 18-21; 17:8 etc) if one does not include the prophecies found in passages as Gen. 3:15 and other early Messianic prophecies. Out of 46 references in the entire sweep from Genesis to Judges, only 7 do not mention the land while 29 refer solely to the land (for example, the 'blessing of Abraham' means simply possession of the land in Gen. 28:4). The land thus becomes a prominent part of the entire OT Narrative. Once again, it is important to let the OT speak to us not in bits and pieces but as a narrative. We will look for the entire history that runs through the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) and follow the story through Joshua and Judges, to the time that territorial limits are established in the Kingdom of David, the traumatic loss of the land during the Babylonian exile, and the return from that exile.

The most common way to break down Abraham's promises is usually to divided them into three distinct steps. First, there is the posterity or descendants, second is the blessing, and third is the land. The first of these was fulfilled by the time of the great Exodus. The descendants of Abraham had become a great nation (The ultimate fulfillment of this promise is found in Galatians the 3^rd chapter as the offspring of Christ.) The second part of this blessing was fulfilled at Sinai when God entered a covenant relationship with His people at least in the OT period (realizing again that the ultimate fulfillment was to be “justification by faith,” or as the book of Galatians calls it “to be counted righteous” Galatians the 3^rd chapter). But, if we stay within the Pentateuch, the promise of the land was never fulfilled and that part of the promise is not fulfilled until the book of Joshua (Joshua 23:14). In fact if we read this as a narrative, the suspense of what might happen keeps us on the edge of our seat. Exodus is launched with God's intention to keep that promise (Exod. 2:24; 3:8, 17; 6: 2-8). During the course of the book of Exodus, Israel has been freed, organized, and mobilized. They are bound to God at Sinai and the reader might think that the occupation of the land is just a step away. Before we get to that part of the story we must grapple with a detailed description of the tabernacle and its furnishings, not once but twice. The lesson in this ought to be clear and that is to have YHWH in your presence is more important than the land. This concept is made very clear in the prayer of Moses found in Exodus 33:15-16. Stated another way, the people of Israel are not going anywhere without YHWH in their presence. Leviticus once again suspends the story as a number of detailed laws are given. In the last part of the book of Leviticus, the land comes back into focus since many of the laws found in Leviticus are framed from the perspective of life in the land after conquest. Indeed, the land is personified as it is described as “vomiting out” the present inhabitants because of their wicked ways and threating to do the same to the Israelites if they repeat the above behavior (Lev. 18:24-28; 20:22-24). Such expulsion is foreseen in Leviticus 26 but not without another concluding reassurance of the permanence of the promise to the patriarchs (Lev. 26:42-45). Numbers brings the story to a climax with the stories of the spies, the people's failure of nerve, the abortive first attempt at an invasion and the years of wandering the wilderness (Num. 13-14). The book of Deuteronomy begins and ends in Moab. One wonders by this time if Israel can ever take the promise land. In Deuteronomy 1-11, we are treated to a lengthy recapitulation of the story so far and then exhorted to continue to be obedient to the faith. Then comes the major part of the book devoted to the law (chapters 12-26). In this we find most of the already stated old laws along with some new ones. As in the end of the book of Leviticus, the land itself will be both the arena and the agent of God's blessing to Israel but all of this requires the obedience of God's people (chapters 28-30, known as the law of blessing and cursing).

The book of Joshua starts with the words the reader has begun to wonder if he would ever hear; “get ready to cross the Jordon River into the the land (Josh. 1:2).” The remainder of the book has the land as the central theme but we know one thing for sure and that is now all of God's promises have been fulfilled and Israel has the land (Joshua 23:14). Since Israel now has the land, as we read through the rest of the book, it makes us wonder if they can keep the land. Now the land promise becomes a land struggle. By the time we reach 1 and 2 Samuel, the struggle to keep the land looks to be lost but Samuel the last and final great judge of Israel achieves a victory that holds the Philistines at bay during his rule (1 Samuel 7). Then Israel's first King who was appointed for the very reason of leading the people of Israel to victory against the Philistines (1 Sam. 8:20), witnesses at the point of his own death the Philistines making their biggest inroads yet and almost cutting the land in half (1 Sam. 31). What ever happened to the promised secured boundaries of the land (Gen. 15:18-19; Exod. 23:31; Num. 34:1-12)? Only with the sustained victories of King David and his long rule does Israel finally live in peace and the secure boundaries embracing the territory that were promised actually become fulfilled (2 Sam. 8: 10).

This does not end the story of the Land in the OT. The accumulated burden of oppression and injustice in the nation which Samuel had forewarned about (1 Sam. 8:10-18) came true during the reign of Solomon and became entrenched state policy under the reign of Solomon's son Rehoboam, splitting the kingdom in two in the process (1 Kgs 12). In the centuries after Solomon the land becomes the center of a struggle between the forces of dispossession, greed, exploitation, and land grabbing against the protest of the prophets. Nothing highlights the story more than Ahab and Jezebel's shocking land grab and their treatment of Naboth in the Ninth century B.C. (Kgs. 21). By the 8^th century, Amos shocked the northern kingdom of Israel with a threat that the early prophets had not used. That is, the Lord will eject the people from the land and send them into exile (Amos 5:1-6; 6:7; 7:10-17). In the year of 721 B.C. these threats were fulfilled when the Assyrians carried the Northern Kingdom into exile and to this day they have not returned. The Southern prophets of the next century took up the same threat concerning Judah. The Lord could and would destroy even Jerusalem and the Temple (Jer. 7:1-15) and as we know by the year 587 B.C., these words were fulfilled when Judah was carried away into exile by Babylon.

In these events, the warnings of the law and the prophets (Lev. 26; Deut. 28) came true. Ezekiel who lived in Babylon during the first generation of exiles expresses what it was like. “Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off” (Ezek. 37:11). But Ezekiel also sees hope in his story of the Valley of Dry Bones. Like those dry bones, Israel will come back to life (Ezek. 37: 1-14).

The Land as a Divine Gift

As we have seen from the short story above, the land was a divine gift from God. Stated another way, Israel had a land to live in because, quite simply, the Lord had given it to them. Now it is time to look at other implications of this story, since the land underlies much of OT thinking.

The theological implications of the land speak volumes. In the first place, it was a declaration of Israel's complete dependency on God. From the very first, Abraham was called on to leave his native land and go to a country that, in the event, was unspecified until he got there. Deut. 26:5 emphasizes this idea strongly. “A wandering Aramean was my father declares the Israelite farmer” probably referring to Jacob. The patriarchal narratives emphasize the alien, sojourning state of these ancestors of Israel. Indeed, it is continued to be an abiding thread in Israel's self-consciousness that they had begun and continued their journey as aliens and strangers.¹ Israel could therefore make no natural, autochthonous, claim to their land. They were not “sons of the soil.” The land they possessed they owed solely to God's election and promise to Abraham as did their very existence as a nation. Since they owed everything they had to YHWH, how much more did they owe everything else to the same source. Israel could not boast of numerical superiority (Deut. 7:7-8). They could not boast of their wealth as being self made (Deut. 8:17-18). They certainly could not boast of moral superiority (Deut. 9:5). When Israel understood the belief in the givenness of the land then they had the correct perspective about their relationship with God. YHWH could not be regarded as the gods of other nations since the destiny of Israel was tied directly to the land.

In the second place, the land gift was a declaration of the Lord's dependability. Every harvest, Israel was reminded of this fact. God provided the land and they were to work the land and return the first fruit of the crops back to God each harvest as a way of worshiping God and saying thanks for the gift. The Lord's dependability knows know limits: “His steadfast love endures forever “(Psalms 136). Just listen to the instructions of YHWH to the farmer bringing the first fruits of his harvest.

Then you shall declare before the Lord your God: 'My father was a wandering Aramean, and he went down to Egypt with a few people and lived there and became a great nation, powerful and numerous. But the Egyptians ill-treated us and made us suffer, putting us to hard labor. Then we cried out to YHWH, the God of our fathers, and the Lord heard our voice and saw our misery, toil and oppression. So the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great terror and with miraculous signs and wonders. He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey; and now I bring the first fruits of the soil to you, O Lord, have given me.

(Deut. 26:5-10)

Thus, the land then becomes monumental, tangible proof of God's dependability. Each time the Israelite farmer offered his first fruits, he was reminded of the entire history of YHWH and Israel. Morally speaking then, this made the Lord a God worthy of obedience. The Lord's response to human behavior would be consistent and dependable and not based on a arbitrary whim. The land by its very existence was a sign to Israel that the Lord was a God who keeps His promises.

In the third place, the land was proof of the relationship between YHWH and Israel. Israel knew they were the people of YHWH because He gave them the land. Another way this relationship was expressed was by the use of the term inheritance to describe the land. The Hebrew word is nahala from its root nhl. Its speaks of anything that is a rightful share, or entitlement; something legal and properly possessed as one's own. Inclusive in the use of this term is a relationship of sonship between God and Israel. Just as the gift of the land was God's act and owed nothing to Israel's greatness or merits, so with Israel's sonship, Israel belong to the Lord, not because they had chosen Him but because He brought them to birth (Deut. 32:6, 18).

What is clear is that it was not by Israel's choice that they are Yahweh's son nor does the status and privilege involved derive in any sense from Israel's own action or merits...Israel is the firstborn son of Yahweh for no other reason than that Yahweh brought them into existence as a nation, just as they are the people of Yahweh for no other reason than He 'set His love upon' them and chose them for Himself ² (Deut. 7:6-7).

In the fourth place, it was this land gift that generated property rights in Israel. If we noticed from the quote above (Deut. 26:5-10), the farmer speaks of the land being given to “me” not us. The Israelite not only thought in terms of God giving the land to the nation as a group but also to God giving the land to the individual. Kings owned the land in the adjoining states and those Kings allowed the farmer to work the land for them. Such an idea was foreign to Israel. The inheritance/entitlement language was used to speak of small portions of land given to each household. The smaller entitlements were held to be a gift from God to the family. This is the principle behind Numbers 26 and 34, and Joshua 13-19, which describe the division of the land. The Lord's gift of Land to His people was to be enjoyed by all people through secure property holdings enforced by YHWH. Property rights then were not based on some commercial deal, natural law, or the law of force, but Property rights were divine and a gift from God which no human may infringe. Once again, we go back to the story and Ahab and Naboth and notice Naboth's reply to Ahab; “The Lord forbid that I should give you the inheritance of my fathers" (I Kgs. 21:3). The Lord did forbid it. The land was not Naboth's to give, or sell. Naboth was only holding the land in trust from the Lord for use of the entire family.

Whose land was it anyway?

First, it should be noticed that the land was a grant under covenant. It is insufficient simply to say that the land was a 'gift to Israel' without taking into consideration the context of the gift within a covenant relationship with reciprocal commitments. The land was a symbol of the Lord's faithfulness but it was also a sign of Israel's covenantal obligations to the Lord. Harry Orlinsky emphasizes this point (although I do not like his use of the term 'contract' for covenant).

In accordance with the covenant between God and each of the patriarchs and with the people of Israel, which both parties to the contract vowed to fulfill, God gave Israel the land of Canaan. This is not a gift, 'something that is given voluntarily and without compensation, a present'....The Hebrew Bible regarded the covenant as...an altogether legal and binding exchange of obligations and rewards for each of the two contracting parties. If God became Israel's Deity and no other people's, and if He gave to Israel, and to no other people the land of Canaan, Israel in turn had to accept and worship God alone and not other deities, powerful and attractive as so many of the deities flourishing at the time appeared. This solemn agreement on the part of God and Israel was no gift, with no strings attached—no more on the part of God than on the part of the patriarchs of Israel; on the contrary, it was a normal give and take covenant and common to every kind of contract into which two parties voluntarily enter.³

Furthermore, Orlinsky argues that the verb natan, normally translated 'to give' often has a more technical meaning such as 'assign', 'deed,' 'transfer', 'convey'. The land therefore was part of a constituent grant that formed part of the total package of their relationship. Henceforth, Israel's enjoyment of the covenanted gift demanded their reciprocal obligations to the covenant giver. The land was still YHWH's land. His divine ownership of the land is hinted at in one of the earliest pieces of Israelite poetry, the Song of Moses in Exodus 15. It celebrates the miracle of the exodus and looks forward to the entry into the land which is described (addressing God) as 'your holy dwelling' (v.13),'the mountain of your inheritance' (v.17) and 'the place, O Lord, you made for your dwelling' (17). In other words, the land of Canaan, into which the Lord was about to bring Israel, belong to YHWH (not the gods of the nations resident there). Another early poem refers to “His land and His people” (Deut. 32:43), again expressing the Lord's ownership of the Land.

The clearest statement of divine ownership however, comes in Leviticus 25:23. There the Lord asserts, 'the land is Mine and you are but aliens and my tenants'. The description of the Israelite's relationship to God in respect of the land is interesting. Here the Lord is using a model that the Israelites recognized. The Lord is casting Himself in the role of the landowner and the Israelites as His dependent tenants. As long as their relationship was maintained and His protection afforded, they were secure. But if they rebelled against His authority and if His protection was withdrawn, they would have to face the consequences. Better stated, in Leviticus 25:23, the Lord is simply saying: you better be careful what you do in My Land. This Divine ownership is the principle behind Leviticus 25. If the Lord owns the land, then no Israelite has the right to treat his own land as if he 'owned' it in the sense of being able to do with it what he liked. Nor could he lay claim to the land of any other Israelite. As described in the story of Ahab and Naboth, even a King could not transfer ownership of property. Thus, Israel never owned the land, it always belong to God (and still does).

So now we have the story of the land. Israel did rebel against God and sadly, they lost the land (Jer. 11: 1-13 and many other passages that tell the same story).

by Lane Rogers 05/04/08 06:02:59 AM