The Chosen People

I was recently having a conversation with someone when they brought up the "Chosen People". I haven't thought of this in years but I remember it being a little confusing when I was a child in a Baptist Church. At the time it seemed odd that my Sunday School teacher couldn't see a problem with this idea as it applied to Jewish people. Being very young, I didn't really know what being Jewish meant but I recognized that it involved something that we were not. In other words, while I wasn't quite sure what it meant to be Jewish, I knew were not. This seemed a problem to me as by then I understood from my Bible lessons that Jesus had been Jewish and the Bible is literally full of references to the fact that the Jews were the chosen people. I asked questions of course, but the answers I got didn't seem right. How could someone accept that the Jews were God's chosen people without at the same time understanding that everyone else was necessarily not chosen? Being raised in Alabama I didn't even know a Jewish person at the time but I was very curious about what it meant to be Jewish.

I soon recognized there were many things in the Christian faith that are contradictory and began the long process of recognizing that I am not a Christian. I am still asked that question occasionally by someone proselytizing for the faith but am quite comfortable now telling them that I am not a Christian because it is not an accidental thing. I have taken the time to research in some detail many different religious faiths and doctrines and am quite content with the fact that I am not a Christian. As a matter of fact, I tend to believe that anyone who is a Christian is either slightly brainwashed or not very curious intellectually. I don't mean that as in insult but have yet to meet anyone that I believe has done an honest appraisal of the facts and researched the history of the period time period that saw the birth of Christianity yet still believes in the inerrancy of the Bible. In any case, when the subject of "Chosen People" came up I had something of an epiphany.

Having spent a lot of time studying the Bible and the historical context in which it was written in the last 10 years I had more or less left off thinking about my earlier problem having to do with one group being God's chosen people. When it came up this time, it suddenly dawned on me that there is a point of confusion here that goes a long way towards understanding why anti-semitism still flourishes in the world today. It is a problem rooted in the same incongruity I noted as a small child when I first heard the term mentioned. To understand this you have to first understand what the Bible meant to the people who wrote it originally. Reading the writings of Josephus, who was a Jewish leader in Judea during the time Jesus supposedly lived, I understood what the Bible meant to him. His writings were largely an effort to explain the Bible and Jewish faith to a Roman Emperor who was unfamiliar with Jewish history. It becomes clear reading Josephus that the Jews see the Old Testament as a history of the 12 tribes of Israel. It contains rules to live by, instruction of how to eat, what to eat, and how to live in society. What it does not do according to Josephus, is claim that their God is the one and only God. I found this surprising as that is very much a part of how Christians view the Old Testament. It is an integral part of the Christian belief system and one that Christians believe they got directly from the Bible itself.

If anyone seriously questions this interpretation of who God was to the Jews at the time of Jesus all one has to do is refer to the Ten Commandments themselves. God approached Moses on Mount Sinai saying, "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery." Notice there is no claim saying "I am the one and only God", instead we have him introducing himself as "the Lord your God." This is followed by the very first commandment, "Thou shalt have no other Gods before me." Why would it be necessary to instruct his people to have no other Gods if he is the only one? The answer is that neither God nor Moses supposed that there was only one God. Neither did Josephus. Both his writings and the writings of the Old Testament are full of examples wherein the chosen people were punished for worshipping other Gods. Christians suppose that all other Gods are false Gods; that they somehow don't exist in reality. The men who wrote the Old Testament and indeed the Jews who were worshipping God at the time Jesus is supposed to have lived held no such belief.

The key to understanding their sense of who and what God was comes from their history. Abraham is understood to be the father of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. All three major religions trace their lineage back to this one man through the religious writings of each. Abraham himself originally came from Sumeria; specifically a city-state in Sumeria called Ur. According to this tradition, Abraham came from royalty within Ur. When he came to the area of Judea he came with a great deal of money and what was probably a small and fierce armed contingent. The important part to remember is that he brought his belief system with him. In Sumeria, each city-state had its own God. These Gods were widely divergent in how they expected to be worshipped but were seen as the protectors of their people. When one city-state defeated the other, it was believed this was because their God was superior to the other. It was more complicated than that on some levels but it was necessary to have a strong God and to be in good standing with that God to achieve military or political success.

The God of the Jewish tribes that descended from Abraham was a local God in Judea. Yahweh was his name. Not surprisingly, Abraham took a local God as his protector when he moved into Judea. This God was quite literally a fire and thunder God from Mount Sinai. For centuries, the success or failure of Abraham's tribe was understood to be directly related to their relationship with Yahweh. When Yahweh was happy with the way his people acted and worshipped, things were good in Judea. When Yahweh was unhappy, bad things happened. Bad things with a capital B. There is good reason to believe Yahweh's description of himself as a jealous and angry God. Along with the belief in local fire and thunder Gods Abraham also brought creationist stories that relate directly back to Sumerian beliefs; the flood story being one example. This historical chain of evidence explains much of what is written in the Old Testament including the "Chosen People" story.

All of this makes perfect sense but it doesn't fit into the Christian interpretation of who God is. According to Christians, there is only one God and he is the same God Moses talked to on Mount Sinai. Obviously, this is a view that has evolved over time. What is less obvious until you look closely is why the story evolved the way it did. Perhaps the roots of this evolution are contained within the historical context that existed in Judea when Christianity was born. The Romans were occupying Judea along with most the known word at the time that Jesus supposedly lived. Jesus, who if he lived, was obviously and literally a Jew got into trouble with the Romans for stirring up trouble in the Temple. There was only one crime in Roman Judea that was punishable by crucifixion and that crime was insurrection. This is easy to understand when you realize that small groups of Roman soldiers were occupying hostile territory in much of the known world at that time. The one thing that Roman's were terribly afraid of was insurrection as bloody uprisings by the locals threatened both Roman government and the lives of the Roman soldiers themselves. As it happens, there was several such insurrections in Judea during that period so the Romans were not too concerned with being overly zealous about enforcing the law against insurrection. If Jesus indeed is a historical figure and was crucified in Judea it was unquestionably for what the Romans perceived as insurrection.

By 70 AD the Romans were fed up with Jewish insurrections and began cracking down by outlawing Jewish worship. I believe this is when Christianity began to distance itself from its Jewish origins; as a means of continuing the people's ability to worship as they saw fit. it was also the beginning of the evolution of the belief that there was only one God. This belief was further fed when the Roman's saw within Christianity a means of uniting diverse ethnic groups into one system that would be controlled by a Roman leader. Christianity, then became a tool that Roman leaders utilized for their own purposes, both political and military. Christianity spread to much of the civilized world at the time, with its inherent belief in one God that contradicted the earlier Jewish understanding that there were many Gods.

It is at this juncture in history that the Jewish people's belief that they were God's chosen people clashed with Christian beliefs that they worshipped the same God. Jews across the world have historically clung to their own belief system as well as a belief that they should retain ethnic purity and separatism. Through the years since, Judaic principles of separatism and favoritism of their people with God have not been taken lightly by Christians. I believe this is largely because of a basic disagreement in how the two groups view God. There is little to be offended about if one group believes that their own personal God loves them more than anyone else. However, if there is only one God it doesn't quite seem fair that he has a favorite ethnic group. Hence, the periodic anti-semitic ravings of Christian and Islamic leaders. Children on the playground often fall into similar arguments about who the teacher likes best. Luckily, they don't have access to ovens to put those in who claim to be the teacher's favorites.