SALVATION GEOGRAPHY

INHERITING THE LAND--IN THE MIDDLE EAST, AND AROUND THE WORLD

Toward a Theology of Land
by
Marlin Jeschke

Land is an important subject in the Bible, specifically the land of Israel. According to the book God's Design (1986, 1994) by Elmer A. Martens (MBBS, Fresno) the Old Testament contains about 4500 references to land. And yet many biblical scholars have given little attention to this subject. The Interpreters Dictionary of the Bible (1962) has no article on ³Land,² but the Anchor Bible Dictionary (1992) has a superb article on it written by Waldemar Janzen of CMBC. A good book is Walter Brueggemann, The Land (1977), though it fails to address the current Middle East problem.

Land is an important subject for us because we are creatures of space as well as of time. And salvation history has consequences for salvation geography in that salvation history proposes to teach us human beings how to live with each other on the geographical surface of this planet. We do well, therefore, to look at the biblical story to see what it teaches us about a theology of land. In doing this we must read the whole story, not just, for example, excerpting the success of king David in defeating the Philistines and engaging in expansionist empire-building wars against Moab, Ammon, Edom, and Syria. We must also recognize the consequences of Israel's move into kingship and a nation-state form of existence, which was the exile.

My basic reading of the whole biblical story persuades me that from the time of Abraham until today God is trying to lead humanity into a new way of possessing territory, a way other than seizing it and holding it by violence, by conquest and force, a pattern we see too often all through human history‹in ancient biblical narratives, in the European seizure of land from the Natives in North America, and in Saddam Hussein's attempted annexation of Kuwait, to note just three examples.

Let me sketch my understanding of the biblical theology of land in the following points:

1. God's intent is for all human beings to have a home where they can dwell in peace and well-being and security. That is what Eden signifies, although the Eden story also indicates that God¹s intent is frustrated by human sin.

2. In the promise of the land to Abraham God bestows it as a gift, which indicates a decisive break at the very beginning of salvation history with the prevailing worldly pattern of acquisition of territory by violence and force.

3. Abraham and Isaac and to some extent Jacob dwell in the land in peaceful coexistence with Gentile neighbors. In Jewish thought Abraham is a model of righteous life. Rabbinic thought held that Abraham observed the law of God even though the law was not given until the time Moses. It is sometimes proposed that Abraham was promised the land for his descendants but did not really inherit it himself, that the actual possession was realized only by his descendants. And this interpretation often sees that realization only in the Hebrew conquest and Davidic kingdom. To some extent it is true that Abraham did not fully inherit the land, although he lived there more securely and peacefully than many of his descendants in the periods of the tribal confederacy or monarchy. Perfect possession of the land is something that the whole biblical story sees as fulfilled only in the eschaton, because it is possible only when salvation has also embraced the rest of the world.

4. Pentateuchal discussion of the land emphasizes that God remains the owner of the land. Israel is never given absolute freedom to do with the land as it wills the way modern capitalism might think. The people of Israel are told they are always only sojourners with God.

5. Pentateuchal discussion of the land contains many laws concerning the treatment of non-Hebrew aliens and sojourners. These are people with rights. Frequent injunctions about how they should be treated indicates that the Bible expected there would always be aliens and sojourners in the land, never that the Jews could entertain thoughts of ethnic cleansing to make their land 100 percent pure Jewish. Indeed, we should not be surprised if the higher ethical life of God¹s people under Torah, which was the sanctification of the land, attracted ³immigrants.²

6. There are also many laws concerning stewardship or custody of the land and of ethical life within the land in general. These laws are not just about giving the land Sabbath rest, and offering first fruits, but about ethical human relations in general, about compassion toward widows and orphans and poor, about not bribing judges, about not moving field boundary markers, about not shedding innocent blood, etc.

7. Israel is warned that if they do not obey the laws of life in the land they will be judged, and judgment will be their expulsion from the land in the way that previous inhabitants of the land were expelled because of their desecration of the land. When many of Israel were finally deported in 597 and 586 B.C.E. it was not a simply arbitrary act of divine indignation but a consequence of Israel's unholiness itself. It is a law of history that violence practically always produces refugees or war prisoners or ethnic cleansings or ³population transfers.² Population displacement anywhere and everywhere is too often the direct and natural result of the desecration of some land by violence.

8. Old Testament discussion about the holiness of the land indicates quite clearly that there are two basic meanings of holiness as applied to the land. In one sense it is holy by virtue of being the locus of events of salvation history. In that sense it carries a kind of permanent holiness, the kind recognized by pilgrimage. In another sense the land is holy only by virtue of the sanctified life of the people who live in it. This second kind of holiness is obviously conditional. It does not reside in the flora and fauna or in the rocks and streams of the land, but in the ethical quality of the life of the people who dwell there. This explains why people are asked to sanctify the land--or are condemned for desecrating it.

9. A careful reading of the Old Testament discussion of land also suggests that the Scripture envisages no fixed boundaries. True, there is occasional mention of the boundaries of Dan and Beer Sheba, sometimes of Egypt and the Euphrates River. But other clues suggest that the promise of the land to Abraham envisaged a process of other clues suggest that the promise of the land to Abraham envisaged a process of expansion. Abraham was promised descendants like the ³stars of heaven² and like the ³dust of the earth.² In any fulfillment of that promise hundreds of millions of those descendants could not squeeze into even the area between Egypt and the Euphrates. Some would need to live as far away as Egypt or Greece or present-day Turkey or Iraq. Or they could almost as well live in central Europe or the Americas and still cherish Jerusalem as a holy place, even though not living there. On the view just sketched, the holy land would still have its centers, like Jerusalem, but no boundaries because its extent would be wherever human beings sanctify the land in which they dwell.

God's intention of no fixed boundaries to the holy land was frustrated by the adventures of Israel into monarchy, because the monarchy meant a nation state with fixed boundaries that eclipsed the vision of an expanding sphere of salvation and unfortunately also produced a ³pollution² of the land, as we see in Solomon's slave labor, Ahab's confiscation of land, a perverted justice system, and the creation in general of a rich aristocracy and profligate life.

10. There is a decidedly forward movement in the achievement of God's purposes in the exile or deportation of Israel. Too often the collapse of the nation and deportation of many of its people is considered a disaster or tragedy. In point of fact it leads to a fuller realization of God's intention for Israel to be a light to the nations. The Diaspora results in the establishment of Judaism¹s profoundly successful synagogue form of life that preserved that community for 2500 years. The Diaspora also generated many converts to Israel's faith. And it contributed to the development of the theology of universal salvation we see in Isaiah. Diaspora life is one that a small minority of Jews today call the true form of Israel's existence in the present age rather than the establishment of a state of Israel. The Apostle Paul takes Israel's pattern of life in the dispersion as the pattern for the church, as we see in the Acts of the Apostles. It is a form of human existence that is an alternative to the nation state form of human existence, and therefore a foretaste and forerunner of the eschatological universal reign of God.

11. The biblical vision of the land is captured in that beautiful passage found in Isaiah 2 and repeated in Micah 4 that speaks about the nations coming up to mountain of the house of the Lord to learn God's law, which results in the end of war and the establishment of righteousness and peace. This passage also envisions every one privileged to sit ³under his vine and under his fig tree.²

12. It is sometimes held that Jesus did not speak much about the land. W. D. Davies in his book The Gospel and the Land (1974) says that Jesus ³spiritualized² Jewish love and devotion to the land. I believe we can and must say more than this.

(a) At the time of Jesus the Jewish people lived in the land and occupied it, and therefore Jesus like other Jews of his time simply assumed and never questioned Jewish appreciation for and possession of the land.

(b) Jesus cherished the holy places, as is indicated by his pilgrimage to Jerusalem and by his so-called ³cleansing² of the temple, which was really an unfortunately temporary reform, but which shows how Jesus thought temple life and worship should be run.

(c) Jesus addressed three pressing issues of his day, issues that exercised the Jewish community: the nature of Jewish halakhic life, that is, obedience to God's Torah; how to deal with the Roman occupation; and the extension of salvation to the Gentiles.

On this last point, Jesus seems to say at times that his ministry is only to the ³lost sheep of the house of Israel,² though he does point out at times that in the messianic age Gentiles ³will come from the east and the west and sit with Abraham in the kingdom,² while the biological descendants of Abraham are ³cast out.² It is in the cleansing of the temple that Jesus makes the momentous statement that ³this house [should] be called a house of prayer for all peoples,² citing Isaiah. At the time of Jesus Gentiles were excluded from all courts of the temple except the outermost one called the Court of the Gentiles.

Joachim Jeremias in his 1958 book Jesus Promise to the Nations claims that Jesus considered his mission a two-stage task: first, to spiritually restore Israel so that they would be qualified and prepared for and worthy of an ingathering of the Gentiles and, second, to effect that incorporation of Gentiles into God's people. I find the argument of Jeremias a persuasive reading, because his line of thought helps to explain the ³great commission² after a public ministry in which Jesus restricts his ministry to the house of Israel. The apostolic community sees in the resurrection the dawn of the messianic age (note Peter's Pentecost sermon), and that advent of the messianic age means the historic time has come for the extension of salvation to the Gentiles--and with it, hopefully, the process of the sanctification of the whole earth.

The theology of land sketched here does not prohibit or even discourage any Jew so inclined to seek to live in the land of Israel, provided he or she goes about it in the way that God has ordained in Holy Scripture. But the biblical theology of land does rule out the notion that the land of Israel is some idiosyncratic divine project in which otherwise basic laws of justice are suspended to grant Israel special dispensation to commit what modern society would call war crimes: (1) expropriation of land and property, (2) subjection to servitude of people in occupied territory, (3) expulsion of populations, ³population transfer,² and (4) execution of inhabitants (Deir Yassin). Ancient--and modern--Israel's calling is to be a bearer of salvation history, and that involves being a model of salvation geography.

Marlin Jeschke, March 13, 2003 For CMC Wed. noon men's luncheon

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