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Zionists and the Bible
ALFRED GUILLAUME
I wish to make it plain at the outset that my remarks are directed to one
aspect of Zionist claims-the claim to fulfil scripture by the establishment of a
Jewish state in Palestine-and must not be interpreted in any other way or be
taken to prejudice the claim of the Jews to be allowed to make a home in Palestine.
To a superficial reader it well might seem that a divine
promise to give a land to a particular people made some four thousand years ago
and often repeated constituted that people owners of that land by divine right.
Now if this is the Jewish title to Palestine it must be carefully scrutinized.
Accordingly I propose to examine a few texts which are familiar to all
practicing Jews, and which have profoundly influenced some Christian bodies, particularly in America.
The points which are of importance are:
(1) To whom were the promises made?
(2) What was the extent of the land which was promised? And
(3) Was the promise irrevocable or was it subject to any conditions?
(1) TO WHOM WERE THE PROMISES MADE?
The first explicit promise of Palestine to the descendants
of Abraham was at Shechem (now Nablus) in Genesis xii, 7: 'Unto thy seed will I
give this land.' Ch. xiii, 15, when Abraham is standing on a hill near Bethel,
has the words: 'all the land which thou seest to thee will I give it and to thy
seed forever'. xv, 18 is more explicit: 'Unto thy seed have I given this land,
from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates'. The promises
are repeated to Isaac; and to Jacob in xxviii, 12: 'the land where-on thou
liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed, and thy seed shall be as the
dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east,
and to the north, and to the south; and in thee and in thy seed shall all the
families of the earth be blessed'. When Abraham made a covenant with God through
circumcision (xvii, 8) all the land of Canaan was promised to him as 'an
everlasting possession.' Other passages might be quoted, but these are representative,
and others add nothing that is relevant here.
Now it is generally supposed that these promises were made
to the Jews, and to the Jews alone. But that is not what the Bible says. The
word 'to thy seed' inevitably include Arabs, both Muslims and Christians, who
can claim descent from Abraham through his son Ishmael. (Here we are not
concerned with the Muslim tradition that Abraham was once at Meccah and left
Ishmael there). Ishmael was the reputed father of a large number of Arab tribes
3 and Genesis records that Abraham became the father of many north Arabian
tribes through his concubine Keturah. It cannot be argued that the words of
Genesis xxi, 10-12, necessarily cancel the promises made to Abraham's seed as a
whole: '(Sarah) said to Abraham, Cast out this bond-woman and her son: for the
son of this bondwoman shall not be heir with my son Isaac. And the thing was
very grievous in Abraham's sight on account of his son. And God said unto
Abraham, Let it not be grievous in thy sight because of the lad, and because of
thy bondwoman: in all that Sarah saith unto thee, hearken unto her voice: for in
Isaac shall seed be called unto thee. And also of the son of the bondwoman will
I make a nation, because he is thy seed'. It is true that henceforth among the
descendants of Isaac 'the seed of Abraham' was taken to mean the Israelites; but
from the beginning it was not so, and the descendants of Ishmael had every right
to call and consider themselves of the seed of Abraham. .
Moreover, when the covenant of circumcision was made with
Abraham (Genesis xvii) and the land of Canaan was promised as 'an everlasting
possession', it was Ishmael who was circumcised: Isaac had not then been born.
From this brief study of the divine promise to the descendants
of Abraham we see that the first promise necessarily included all the
descendants of Ishmael; but that afterwards in the time of Isaac and Jacob the
promise was narrowed to their descendants, though not in such a way as to
exclude explicitly their Arab brethren; and it is well known that many Arabs
accompanied Moses and Joshua into Palestine when the country was partially
occupied; and not a little of Moses' success was due to the kindness and
hospitality of Jethro the Midianite, who was of course an Arab and Moses'
father-in-law.
(2) EXTENT OF THE PROMISED LAND
The second question as to what was the extent of 'The
Promised Land' is a little difficult to determine (3). The passages quoted under
(1) begin with a vague reference to 'this land' from the starting point of
Shechem (Nablus), and go on to include all the area from 'the river of Egypt' to
the Euphrates; the third passage speaks of Abraham's descendants spreading out
in all four directions. Here, again, it is important to note that the promise of
dominion from Nile to Euphrates was made before the birth of Ishmael and before
the birth of Isaac, so that this territory was not to be necessarily and
exclusively Israelite; and save for the
short period when Solomon's authority was recognized in this area (I Kings iv,
21) it has always been in the possession of the Arabs.
Looking again at Genesis xiii, 15, it is clear that Transjordania
was included in the promise to Abraham, because it would be plainly visible from
the hill at Bethel; but this promise again predates the birth of Ishmael and
Isaac, and so cannot be held to constitute an exclusively Israelite claim to the
territory on the other side of the Jordan.
However, in the Book of Deuteronomy Moses told the people
that God had commanded them to go in and occupy the country from the
Mediterranean in the west to the Euphrates in the east, and from the Negeb in
the south to the Lebanon in the north. These instructions the Israelites did
not, or could not, carry out. They
could not occupy the coast land which the Philistines held, and they never
possessed the ports or the hinterland of Phoenicia. Some centuries later in
the reign of David, they did gain possession of Damascus, and David entered into
a treaty of friendship with Hiram, king of Tyre; so that when Solomon held a
great service of dedication when the temple building was completed deputies came
from as far north as the region of llama and from the south as far as the modern
El-'Arish. But before Solomon's reign had ended much of David's empire had
returned to its former possessors. Everyone is aware that the process of
attrition went on until the kingdom of Judea was confined to a few hundred
square miles of land round Jerusalem, and even this was lost to the Babylonians
in 597 B.C.
(3) WAS THE PROMISE IRREVOCABLE?
It will have been observed that two of the passages quoted
under (1) use the words 'for ever' and 'everlasting' of what is to be a future
Israelite occupation of Palestine. The same word stands for both the English
renderings in the Hebrew original; and 'everlasting' is not the proper meaning.
The word ('olam) means a long time',
'antiquity', 'futurity', and we read of 'days of old', 'waste places of old',
'gates of old', 'from of old', and similar expressions, all of which employ this
word rendered above 'for ever', or 'everlasting'. Again, a psalmist says: 'I
will sing for ever', an expression which the most literal interpreter of Holy
Scripture can hardly suppose to be the literal meaning!
Thus, summing up the evidence so far adduced, one is forced
to the conclusion that the land of Palestine was not originally promised to the
Jews exclusively, and that the first promise was indefinite ('this land') and
was subsequently enlarged to include Transjordan, Syria, the Lebanon, and the
nomad's land as far as the Euphrates. Lastly we see that there never was an
unconditional promise of an everlasting possession; though a long and indefinite
period was intended.
We are now led to a stage of history and prophecy which
bear more directly on current misunderstandings of Hebrew prediction. Had we no
prophetic messages to guide us it would be apparent that these promises of
possession of the land of Canaan were not unconditional: the covenant relation
between Israel and God demanded loyalty from the people, and individual and
corporate righteousness. Were the people to fail in these respects a terrible
doom awaited them. The following words spoken by Moses in the 28th ch. of
Deuteronomy apply in parts so easily to the sufferings of Jewry in the past few
years that many have seen in them a prophecy of our own times:
"It shall come to pass if thou wilt not hearken unto
the voice of the Lord thy God to observe to do all his commandments and his
statutes which I command thee this day; that all these curses shall come upon
thee and shall overtake thee... And the Lord shall scatter you among the
peoples, from the one end of the earth; and there thou shalt serve other gods,
which thou hast not known, thou nor thy fathers, even wood and stone. And among
these nations shalt thou find no ease, and there shall be no rest for the sole
of thy foot; but the Lord shall give thee there a trembling heart and failing of
eyes, and pining of soul; and thy life shall hang in doubt before thee...
Here it is clear that the divine promises to the patriarchs
have been annulled by the national apostasy; and when the Assyrian captivity
removed the population of Samaria, and the Babylonian captivity the people of
Judah, the prophets saw in the disasters a vindication of the divine justice on
a disobedient and gainsaying people.
But they taught their people that a remnant would return,
and would restore the temple and the religious life of the community; and they
looked forward to a time when the earth would be filled with the knowledge of
the Lord. It is often forgotten that these men were inspired poets who mingled
very practical matters like the Return from the Babylonian Exile with sublime
pictures of the desert blossoming as the rose, the lion lying down with the
lamb, men beating their swords into pruning hooks, and forsaking and forswearing
war for ever. They also prophesied of the setting up of the kingdom of David.
Unhappily, the practical was fulfilled and the ideal remained
an ideal. Owing to the fact that the things that religious men yearn for were
not realized when the Jews returned to Palestine there has been a tendency in
the past to interpret not only the eschatological passages in the prophets but
also the practical and political prophecies, of some time in the future; and as
all prophecies in the Old Testament necessarily and inevitably center round the
Jewish people and their relation to God, the Golden Age is inseparable from the
Holy City inhabited by holy Israelites. It would seem to be the hope of some
that if the Jews could be returned to Palestine and form a state the Golden Age
would, in some mysterious way, appear on earth.
But such views are a distortion of the Old Testament
prophecies which predicted a return from Babylon and from all the lands whither
the Jews had been exiled. And these prophecies were fulfilled. The Jews did
return to Judea, they did rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, and they did rebuild
the temple; and after fluctuating fortunes they did secure a brief period of
political independence and expansion under the Maccabbees. Thus the prophecies
of the Return have been fulfilled, and they cannot be fulfilled again. Within
the canonical literature of the Old Testament there is no prophecy of a second
return after the return from the Babylonian Exile; because (a) after the Exile
all the Jews who wished to do so had returned to the Holy Land, though a great
many more preferred to remain where they were and formed the Diaspora which
afterwards became the backbone of the Christian Church; and (b) the last of the
prophets died centuries before the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70.
It would be possible to criticize the claim that Scripture
prophesies Jewish supremacy in Palestine from the point of view of the Higher
Criticism of the Old Testament; but this has been intentionally ignored; and the
Bible has been left to speak for itself.
Again, it would be possible to use the New Testament
argument that the Church is now the Israel of God; but this seems inadvisable.
This short study is in no sense a polemic; but a brief examination of what the
Old Testament says on matters in which its authority has been evoked.
(1) Reprinted from "Zionism and the Bible" by the same author (Bcirut,1954).
(2) British orientalist (1888-1965); formerly Professor of Arabic, School of Oriental and
African Studies, and Head of the Department of the Near and Middle East university of London.
(3) See Beatty, pp. 5-9, on the ancient history of Palestine.
