Jews, therefore, were concerned with their lineal descendants – parents mattered. Jews tended to marry Jews and Jewish identity was maintained by dietary laws and by various practices, including the removal of the foreskin from the penis of baby boys (circumcision). Jewish identity has always been a key feature in maintaining the existence of the people of Israel, and these outward signs were seen as acknowledgement of this dependence.
The Hebrew Scriptures record the story of the people of Israel who were, at this early stage, merely a group of families descended from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The extended family prospered but, eventually, they faced starvation and famine in Palestine where the rains are often uncertain. After years of drought, they were forced to flee to the land of Egypt which, because of the river Nile, had always been an area of prosperity; the adventures and events which gave rise to this Exodus are related in detail. God’s hand is always seen as working through history; at the time, isolated and seemingly unrelated events occur but behind these events is God’s guiding hand. Christians sometimes refer to ‘salvation history’: God acting through history to bring God’s purposes about. An anonymous poem called ‘The Loom of Time’ expresses this well:
Man’s life is laid in the loom of time
To a pattern he does not see,
While the weavers work and the shuttles fly
Till the dawn of eternity.
Some shuttles are filled with silver threads
And some with threads of gold,
While often but the darker hues
Are all that they may hold.
But the weaver watches with a skilful eye
Each shuttle fly to and fro,
And sees the pattern so deftly wrought
As the loom moves sure and slow.
God surely planned the pattern:
Each thread, the dark and fair,
Is chosen by His master skill
And placed in the web with care.
He only knows its beauty,
And guides the shuttles which hold
The threads so unattractive,
As well as the threads of gold.
Not till each loom is silent,
And the shuttles cease to fly,
Shall God reveal the pattern
And explain the reason why
The dark threads were as needful
In the weaver’s skilful hand
As the threads of gold and silver
For the pattern which He planned.
History is not a mere series of events; still less is it simply based on decisions made by human beings. For Jews, God’s hand lies behind the whole of human history and it was God who took the fledgling people of Israel into Egypt. Once there, the group of families settled and grew prosperous, only to find with the emergence of a new ruler that they were seen as immigrants and resented. Their numbers increased, but they were made into slaves and their lot was a miserable and unhappy one. Still the Scriptures record God as being with them and that they maintained their faith, hoping against all expectation for deliverance. This eventually comes with the extraordinary story of Moses, a Jew but raised as an Egyptian. God is recorded as taking this outsider and using him as an instrument to lead the people of Israel back to the land promised to their forefather Abraham.
This is another theme constantly recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures – that God does not favour and choose the strong and powerful but often works through those who are seen as weak and who are outsiders to power structures. God does not depend on human strength and ingenuity nor does God value people on the same basis as human beings. Moses was an unlikely outsider and had to stand against the might of the Egyptian ruler, the Pharaoh, but with God on his side was able to free the people of Israel. They fled from oppression in Egypt and, in later times, persecuted Christians remembered God’s hand working to save the people of Israel. Christians were to come to see themselves as ‘the new Israel’ and, therefore, stories of deliverance and salvation in the Hebrew Scriptures became related to Christian concerns.
Figure 2: This painting by Nicolas Poussin, The Adoration of the Golden Calf (1634), is an imaginative re-creation of the god in the image of a golden calf created by the people of Israel when they felt abandoned in the Sinai desert (Exodus 32:1–4).
Although the people of Israel successfully left Egypt, protected by the direct action of God, their lack of faith is not disguised in the Scriptures. They wandered for many years in the harsh environment of the Sinai desert and many felt initially that it would have been better to remain as slaves. God appeared to have become an absent God. Having lived in Egypt, they were used to the Egyptian gods that were visible, so they made an idol – a golden calf. This seemed much more real and immediate than the remote God who appeared to have deserted them and left them to be wandering nomads. In other words, they lost faith; they did not realise that God’s timescale was not theirs. The Hebrew Scriptures are frank in recognising the continuing disobedience of the people of Israel, but always God remains faithful. So it proved in this story, and after many years of hardship and wandering in the desert, as their numbers increased still further, they were eventually led back to the place they considered home, the land they believed to have been promised them by God through God’s promise to Abraham.
It was on the way out of Egypt that God is recorded as giving the people of Israel the Ten Commandments which are the cornerstone of Jewish law, although this law is amplified by many other commands given by God over the centuries. They eventually arrived back in Palestine, only to find it peacefully settled with strong and powerful cities, and their presence was resented and opposed; the locals certainly did not recognise any rights of this strange and alien people. However, the people of Israel had been through great hardship and they maintained their unity, moulding themselves into a formidable fighting force and conquering, in a series of wars, much of the land that was to become Israel.
The new land of Israel was divided between twelve tribes, representing the twelve sons of Jacob. They were surrounded by neighbours who wished to destroy them and the identity of the people of Israel was under constant threat. Only in loyalty to God, they believed, could their identity be safeguarded, and the Hebrew stories contain myriad accounts of men and women and the whole nation being preserved by God in times of crisis when all hope seems to be at an end. Indeed, the preservation of hope and trust when all the evidence runs in the opposite direction is another feature of the Hebrew Scriptures.
There is no single piece of territory that can be described as ancient Israel – the borders were
