John Parr, an Anglican priest with years of academic and personal experience in the Middle East, explores this challenging topic through the lens of various Bible passages including Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan.
Introduction
The current conflict between Hamas, Israel, and now Hezbollah, regularly fills our news screens. While we intercede for peace in our church prayers, the Psalms and Old Testament readings often seem to endorse Israel’s return to possess the land and God's triumph over Israel's enemies. This raises the uncomfortable question:
- Does Scripture validate Israel's current military actions?
- How do we reconcile Jesus' teaching to love our neighbours and pray for those who persecute us with the ongoing conflict in the Middle East?
In this article John probes some foundational ideas:
- How do we understand the Biblical promise of land?
- How has Zionism shaped our theology and politics?
- Should we connect prophetic scripture about the end times to modern geopolitical realities?
How do we read the Bible with today’s Middle East in mind?
An obvious place to start is the Hebrew Scriptures, with their foundation story of God’s promise to Abraham of a land. This promise land was conquered, settled and ruled by his descendants and restored and resettled after exile by those who regarded it as theirs by right. But this is not the only starting place.
Christian hopes for the return of Jews to their homeland were mooted in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Puritans in Europe reading Biblical texts literally. They exported their views across the Atlantic when they sailed for the colonies. Puritan hopes, nurtured particularly by evangelicals in the USA and elsewhere, were carried on the rising tide of European anti-Semitism that culminated in the genocide of 6 million Jews in the Nazi holocaust during the Second World War. Were these Bible-based hopes fulfilled in the establishment of a Jewish homeland in the state of Israel in 1948? Not everyone thinks so. For Palestinians living in Jewish ancestral lands for centuries, the state of Israel is ‘Nakba’, a catastrophe that led to the immediate expulsion of 750,000 of them from their homes and the bloodshed that continues to this day. Evangelical Palestinian Christians, reading the same Hebrew Scriptures as Christians elsewhere in the world, refuse to see what flows into and out of 1948 as anything to do with Biblical prophecy.
Which brings us to a third starting point. The Bible can’t be read with blank-canvas minds. Like all readers, Jews and Christians bring theological beliefs and practical interests to their interpretations. Many evangelicals are happy to read their ‘Old Testament’ alongside Jews who treasure its God-given hopes, but not alongside Palestinian Christians, whose rejection of these overlapping interpretations is largely ignored by the global church. Scriptures that generate such contested meanings inevitably raise questions for all readers: where do you stand in the search for Biblical truth?
How do we read the Scriptures?
The Hebrew Scriptures tell the foundation story of God’s covenant people as a single story whose power is undeniable. It promises freedom, safety and security in a hostile world, and a future in which all God’s dispersed people will be gathered into their homeland and ruled once more by one of the descendants of their greatest king, David, as the epicentre of God’s reign over the nations. The cycles of conquest, exile and restoration must have seemed irresistible, until stronger empires fragmented their nation and stole their sustaining vision. This had happened by the time the Greek empire gave way to Roman rule in 63 BC.
The lands ruled by David shrank into the Roman province of Judea, centred on Jerusalem. The rest of the Promised Land was ruled by Herod’s sons as Rome’s puppet kings. What did it then mean to be God’s holy people, heirs of God’s promise of land, liberation and restoration?
An expert in the law of Moses wanted to know what Jesus thought of his people’s predicament (Luke 10:25-37). ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’ He effectively asked, ‘What does Israel’s call to be holy mean today?’ There were multiple ways this was understood by Jews at the time. The Temple-centred Sadducees had compromised with Roman rule to maintain their control over the Temple. The Pharisees were using the law of Moses to create a holiness zone so that they could live in a world ruled by foreigners. Sectarian Jews associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls rejected compromise for an alternative community in the desert, away from Jerusalem. Some Jews advocated violence to cleanse their ancestral lands of foreign rule. Meanwhile John the Baptist drew crowds to the river Jordan and refused to grant racial privilege a place in God’s future (Luke 3:8) – an approach that attracted Jesus.
‘How do you read the Scriptures?’, Jesus asked the lawyer: how not what do you read? (many English translations of Luke 10:26 miss this). The lawyer chose the right key – love for God and neighbour – but wanted clarity: ‘who is my neighbour?’ Jesus’ reply is better titled ‘the parable of the true Israelite’. At the time ‘Israel’ comprised priests descended from Aaron, Levites descended from Aaron’s ancestor Levi, and Israelites descended from the other sons of Jacob. So, the lawyer was expecting the third passer-by to be an Israelite. Instead, it was a hated Samaritan, living in Israel’s ancestral lands. This foreigner showed how to be a true Israelite: holiness meant being the neighbour, showing the mercy that abolished all boundaries between Jews and foreigners.
When he wants to unlock the meaning of Hebrew Scriptures, Jesus uses a key cut in the shape of love for God, neighbour and even enemies (Luke 6:27,35). Elsewhere he prioritises justice, mercy and faith (Matthew 23:23). By redefining the true holiness of Israel away from loyalty to a promised land or sacred city, he holds out an astonishing alternative to the fragmenting options of his day. His version of Israel’s foundation story allows foreigners to belong to Israel. Jesus avoids recycling scriptural patterns of exile, return and resettlement, by insisting that holy Israel is founded on Scriptures that open people up to God and each other. Moses and the prophets are fulfilled by using them to build community not division, across fragmented Israel and beyond.
What are the Hebrew Scriptures actually saying?
How might Jesus’ re-framing of Hebrew Scriptures speak into the troubled situations in Israel-Palestine in our own day? Not by offering straight lines between his day and ours, but by highlighting Scriptural strands that the single foundation story approach obscures. Here are some examples:
How did Abraham’s descendants come to occupy the promised land?
In Deuteronomy and Joshua, they conquered it by wiping out Canaan’s existing residents, before seizing their land and property. But in Judges 1:21-36, we learn that not all Canaan’s inhabitants were driven out. Some became forced labour. Some Hebrew tribes co-existed with Canaanites. Some Hebrew Scriptures are more positive than others about co-existence (e.g. Leviticus 25 and the story of Ruth). Some texts group foreigners with other vulnerable people who deserve protection (e.g. Deuteronomy 10:18-19).
Whose city is Jerusalem?
Isaiah 2:2-4 envisages God’s instruction for all nations flowing from its holy mountain. Isaiah 42:6 expects many foreigners to belong to God’s post-exilic people, because God’s servant Israel is a ‘light to the nations’. Isaiah 56:3-7 sees the restored post-exilic Temple as a ‘house of prayer for all peoples’ (endorsed by Jesus in Mark 11:17), with ‘foreigners who join themselves to the Lord’ serving as priests. Zechariah 8:20-23 locates Jerusalem at the focus of international pilgrimage. This restoration of people, land and Temple is part of the larger hope for a peaceable kingdom (Isaiah 11:1ff) and a new creation (Isaiah 65:17ff).
How do we hear these competing Biblical voices?
Are they really telling a single foundation story? Or should we see the Hebrew Bible’s legal, historical and prophetic writings as a patchwork that was stitched together in different circumstances over centuries, providing not literal descriptions but impressionistic images of God’s purposes for Israel and the Promised Land? There are certainly threads that hold the material together: promised land as part of God’s universal gift in creation; God’s faithfulness to his promises; justice in God’s call to care for the vulnerable; the need for safety and security in land that feels like home; return and restoration as part of a God-given and all-embracing hope. Jesus’ how to read picks up some of these threads without weaving them into a single Biblical story of promised land, exile, liberation and national restoration.
What might readers and preachers make of all this?
We return to our third starting point: the Bible can’t be read with blank-canvas minds. Everyone whose faith relies on the authority of the Bible, especially teachers and preachers, should be aware of the influence of their theological and political commitments on how they read the Bible. What are we supporting if we try to draw straight lines between the Bible and the current state of Israel? Palestinians (including Christians) see recent events in Gaza and the West Bank as inflicting the dehumanisation and trauma suffered by Jews in the Holocaust on Palestinians, allowing violence to spiral dangerously out of control. But what if the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures are read less as a single story that draws straight lines between ‘then’ and ‘now’, and more as a call to live in the ways of justice, compassion and empathy?
Biblical hopes of return after exile emerged from the anger and anxiety generated by traumatic loss, and the longing for safety and security. These are universal human experiences and hopes. So, when we read Biblical passages about promised land, exile and restoration, we might ask questions like these:
- Who or what do they remind us of in today’s world?
- How would we feel if their experiences become ours?
- What should we do with these feelings as followers of one who has ‘borne our infirmities and carried our diseases’ (Isaiah 53)?
Many Christians today are prepared to learn from the Bible’s minority voices about gender and sexuality. Suppose we listen for other minority biblical voices by asking:
- When in the Bible is promised land meant for sharing rather than fighting over?
- When is Israel more than Abraham’s blood line?
- When are foreigners made welcome, not hated, in God’s covenant people?
Christians often read the New Testament as a single story of hope, seeing God’s purposes fulfilled in the glorious coming of Jesus on the clouds of heaven. Many evangelical Christians draw straight lines between this and the return of Jews to their ancestral lands. Suppose we searched for other Biblical images of Jesus’ return, by asking:
- When does Jesus the Son of man not come on the clouds of heaven?
- Who does Jesus identify with in these other images of his coming?
- What might Jesus’ coming mean for everyone who regards the Middle East as home?
The judgement-day image of the coming of Jesus in Matthew 25:31-46, showing solidarity with the lowest and the least, was vividly illustrated in 2023’s nativity scene in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bethlehem. The baby Jesus was laid in rubble to identify with the people of Gaza. This image amplified the voices of Palestinian Christians, who are often ignored and silenced by the world-wide Church when they follow Jesus’ advice about how to read the Bible by highlighting its strands of justice, peace-making and community-building. Reading alongside minorities calls for courage to stand up to majorities. This is also the courage of standing with Jesus, who dares to see the face of a true Israelite in the foreigner who acts as neighbour to a wounded Jewish traveller.
Praying for the peace of Jerusalem
This prayer is based on words of Jesus from Luke 13:34 and Luke 19:41-42:
Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
how often have I desired to gather your children together
as a hen gathers her brood under her wings?
Pray for the peace of Jerusalem,
home to Israelis and Palestinians,
Jews, Muslims and Christians.
If only you would recognise on this day
the things that make for peace.
Let them be hidden from your eyes no longer.
Amen