This is not about a race or ethnic group. People still argue today what the term “Jew” should mean, and I’m not addressing that. If I were to discuss the term “American” it would hardly mean a race or ethnic identity, and the same might be said of a great many other nation-states today. I am addressing Judea as a term referring to a national political identity, or a particular political agenda. Today, while the center of gravity is located in a place we know as Israel, that’s also not precisely equivalent to the term Judea. Judea is active among residents of several states today, but hardly includes all those who claim to be Jews.
We can trace the history of this nation with relative ease. It began as a portion of the Twelve Tribes of biblical Israel. At some point, ten of those tribes broke away from the others. The northern portion became known as the Kingdom of Israel, and the southern was the Kingdom of Judah. That Israel disappeared in history, captured and exiled, scattered across the ancient Assyrian Empire. We have no way of knowing how many of them reunited with their people in Judah, but surely there were some. So we are left with a couple of augmented tribes in the Kingdom of Judah. According to their own prophets, their sins were only slightly lesser than those of the northerners. Thus, they were also exiled, but allowed to retain their national unity, after a fashion, in the land we call Babylon. Another empire rose to challenge Babylon and this one we usually identify as the Medo-Persians, who had this oddball religion which demanded every nation return to their ancestral lands and rebuild the temples to their gods and pray for the emperor.
None of this is particularly new to anyone with a little Bible education. What may not be obvious is what shifted within the culture of the people during this time. When they first invaded Canaan Land, the local tribes practiced a collection of pagan religions which are universally condemned as utterly depraved. One of the tamer rituals was parents tossing their first-born into the arms of an idol built over a blazing furnace. Oddly, though, some elements and key terms were familiar to Hebrew tribal religion. Keep in mind, the notion of there being only One True God was just too foreign, too revolutionary for these people. Their religious and national identity was fairly new, comprised a great many familiar elements, but with many new things, including this crazy idea of there being only one God, and the others all frauds and demons. It just never did take root in their minds.
Part of this was the simple fact the majority of any given population can never be fully mystical, can never have a fully raised living spirit, so they were suffering from a vast load of superstition. That would be a quasi-mystical emotional fear of things unknown. True mystics would know better, because a live spirit would enable a greater clarity on the spiritual level. Dead spirits cannot grasp spiritual truth, and the intellect surely can’t grasp it. So in the midst of this horde of superstitious, yet skeptical and cynical nation were a tiny minority who had the real insight. It was they who harassed the majority about the constant tendency to compromise and incorporate a little local Baal and Ashtarte cultic worship along with their ritual worship of Jehovah.
It remains possible to grasp some measure of mystical truth without a living spirit, but it would mean wanting to know these things, embracing mysticism as the true nature of things intellectually. You can surely gain an academic understanding of how mysticism works, so it’s not as if you just can’t swallow that without a living spirit. But idolatry was too easy, because it was reflexive with a superstitious people who tended to ignorance, in the sense of a very low grade mysticism education.
When they came into their own, and the former empires off in every direction declined all together at once, their king gave them a unity and prosperity which brought a much higher level of education, at least at the higher strata of society, by virtue of an acquaintance with other nations. The third monarch, named Solomon, suffered massive pride in his wisdom and ability to understand the nature of things intellectually. With that pride came a crushing level of taxation. When his son took his place on the throne, he was all the same arrogance but none of the wisdom, so he lost control of the northern tribes. The northerners had long been a different people, anyway, and quickly absorbed all sorts of idolatry, even while clinging to the official religious terminology. Fearing the Temple next to the southern palace of Judah would weaken their separate throne in the north, the rulers of Israel tried to supplant the official religion. It failed, and in the end, the royal household adopted the religion of the neighboring Phoenicians. When the Assyrians came and took them away, that was the end of Israel.
Judah remained, and just barely escaped the same fate by a miracle. Assyria went home, then fell apart. But Judah had been deeply infected with this grand human intellectual culture, and became less faithful. Their spiritual fortunes waxed and waned with kings of varying faithfulness. Essentially, the ruling families got too smart for their own good, turning more to humanly wise statecraft and neglecting the simplistic trust in their God. They, too, were taken away, to Babylon. While there, they drank deeply of the ancient literature and religions of the Mesopotamian Valley. At the heart of that ancient culture was the notion man could do it. That is, going back to the ancient Tower of Babel, they were certain if they just applied themselves, it would be the work of God. So they became fairly rigid about the Law, losing much of the mystical flexibility. Then the absorbed the Persian obsession with material wealth as the mark of divine favor. They eventually sent a tiny remnant home, while the majority stayed and pretended the land there was actually more blessed because the cream of the nation’s religious experts were still gathered there ferreting out the last quantum of understanding of their Law in the synagogue system.
So the Returnees were deeply infected with this twisted, broken mysticism, and in the process of rebuilding the ancient capital, developed yet another twist on their ancient religion. They were told a Messiah was coming, but rejected the mystical meaning, and insisted that meant a political ruler who would bring them a Persian grade of prosperity. Then, when the Greeks overran the Persian Empire, with the lofty Hellenistic man-centered philosophical traditions, the Judeans were completely sucked in by it. The thrill of Western rational logic was just too seductive. Meanwhile, that notion of the Messiah was so far removed from the actual mystical promises, they really didn’t have a clue. Rome took over from the Greeks.
So when the Messiah showed up and bluntly pointed out their mistakes, they killed Him. Then, in their impatience with God for taking too long to grant them the promised political deliverance, they got involved in revolts and Rome crushed them. Now, when Babylon took them out, they did at least learn to quit being superstitious and didn’t mix with idolatry any more. But it came at the price of losing their mystical edge, as they substituted a very naked impersonal legalism for the original personal faithfulness and love for God. But when Rome took them down, they only became hardened in their preference for Western rationalism. They no longer understood much of their ancient religious heritage because they were utterly lacking in the intellectual basis which gave birth to that religion.
But the idea of Judea never died, even though the land of Judah was taken away. This idea had become a very grand political aspiration to reclaim that land, but even more, to reclaim the former glory under their first few monarchs. They ruled the world, as it were, and gloated in it. The Messiah who sought to take them back to the Spirit Realm was rejected as their eternal enemy for daring to suggest this very worldly dream was not what God promised. So they fled the slaughter at the hands of the Roman legions in Judea, all the while nursing a grudge at the whole world for daring to reject Judea the Nation as the center of all mankind. No, not in the sense of wanting all mankind to convert, though that might be nice. No, it was that all mankind who were not Judean should be their willing slaves. Further, this vision assumed all the world must joyfully bring their wealth and lay it at the feet of the Judean nation.
You can’t call it “racism” despite how close it comes to it. It’s not about race. Indeed, it’s quite likely the folks who regard themselves today as Judea have almost no Hebrew DNA at all. Nor are they particularly observant of even their Hellenized brand of religion. No, it’s pretty much been stripped down to this political aspiration to rule the world as superior beings. So when you hear a political rabbi saying “thou shalt not kill” means only Jews should not kill Jews (whatever “Jew” means), you understand the chutzpah. When the modern nation-state of Israel acts with such incredible arrogance toward the rest of the world, you realize this is really nothing new. In their minds, God promised the rules which apply to the rest of the world would not apply to Judea.
God is not through judging them yet. That’s because they keep coming back and poking their fingers in His eyes again, and again, and again. Just guessing, I would say during the next year or so, things will start coming apart of Modern Israel. But at some point, you can be sure whatever was meant by John in Revelation with the term “Anti-Christ,” it’s something which will arise from whatever Judea has become.
