Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: Israel and Revelation

Titel: Israel and Revelation

Stichwort: Israel: Spannung zwischen Auserwählung und Menschheit; Zwiespältigkeit der Landname

Kurzinhalt: Kanaa: Übersetzung eines transzendenten Zieles in die Geschichte; universalistische Tendenz bei den Propheten;

Textausschnitt: In Galatians 3:7-9, St. Paul could interpret his apostolate among the nations outside Israel as the fulfillment of Yahweh's promise to Abraham; and contemporary with St. Paul, Philo Judaeus interpreted the prayer of the Jewish High Priest as the representative prayer for mankind to God. The ability or inability of the various branches of the Jewish community to cope with the problem of its own representative character has affected the course of history to our time, as will be seen presently. For the moment it must be observed that Genesis, as a survey of the past from which emerges the Israelite historical present, fulfills two important tasks. On the one hand, it separates the sacred line of the godly carriers of meaning from the rest of mankind. That is the line of Adam, Seth, Noah, Shem, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the twelve ancestors of the tribes of Israel. On the other hand, it must pay some attention to the mankind from which the sacred line has separated. That task is discharged in Genesis 10, in form of a survey of the nations that have descended from Noah after the Flood and peopled the earth.
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It was this establishment of a kingdom which inevitably produced the conflict between the Israel that was a peculiar people under the kingship of God, and the Israel that had a king like the other nations. Whether the kingship was pragmatically successful, through assimilation to the prevalent style of governmental organization, foreign politics, and cultural relations with the neighbors, as it was under Solomon and the Omride dynasty in the Northern Kingdom; or whether it was unsuccessful, and ultimately brought disaster on Israel through hopeless resistance against stronger empires, the Prophets were always right in their opposition. For Israel had reversed the Exodus and re-entered the Sheol of civilizations. Hence, the pattern of recession and repentant return still runs through Samuel and Kings but no longer with the ease of Judges, for it is increasingly overshadowed by the awareness that the Kingdom on principle is a recession, while the carriership of meaning, running parallel with it, is being transferred to the Prophets. Moreover, the literary organization of the great historical work can no longer cope successfully with the problem of crisis. To be sure,
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The retrospective interpretation from the rabbinical position makes it clear that the disturbing factor in the Israelite historical form had been the ambiguity of Canaan, that is, the translation of a transcendent aim into a historical fait accompli. With the conquest of Canaan, Israelite history, according to its own original conception, had come to its end; and the aftermath could only be the repetitious, indefinite ripple of defection and repentance that filled the pages of Judges. From this rippling rhythm the historical form was regained, not by the Kingdom, but through the elaboration of the universalist potentialities of Yahwism by the Prophets. The separation of the sacred line from the rest of mankind an enterprise that had run into the impasse of a nation among others would have ended ignominiously with the political catastrophy, unless the Yahwism of the Prophets had made possible the genesis of a community under God that no longer had to reside in Canaan at all cost. Still, the new Jewish community, which succeeded to the Hebrews of the Patriarchal Age and the Israel of the Confederacy and the Kingdom, had to travel a hard way until it could rejoin the mankind from which it had separated, so that the divine promise to Abraham would be fulfilled. And not the whole of the community was successful in ascending to this further level of meaning. For,
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The representative separation of the sacred line through divine choice petered out into a communal separatism, which induced the intellectuals of the Roman Empire to attribute to the community an odium generis humani. What had begun as the carriership of truth for mankind, ended with a charge of hatred of mankind. As the other and, indeed, successful branch, emerged the Jewish movement that could divest itself not only of the territorial aspirations for a Canaan, but also of the ethnic heritage of Judaism. It became able, as a consequence, to absorb Hellenistic culture, as well as the proselytizing movement and the apocalyptic fervor, and to merge it with the Law and the Prophets. With the emergence of the Jewish movement that is called Christianity, Jews and Greeks, Syrians and Egyptians, Romans and Africans could fuse in one mankind under God. In Christianity the separation bore its fruit when the sacred line rejoined mankind.