The Great Swap

Re: Naked Bible 102: What does “All Israel will be saved” Mean?

Church folks who ignore the Second Temple literature, particularly how it interprets the OT, will build a theology that is utterly rootless and alien to the New Testament. Thus, we end up with all kinds of competing nonsensical theories about what passages like Romans 11:25-27 mean:

For I do not want you to be ignorant of this mystery, brothers and sisters, so that you may not be conceited: A partial hardening has happened to Israel until the full number of the Gentiles has come in. And so all Israel will be saved, as it is written: “The Deliverer will come out of Zion; he will remove ungodliness from Jacob. And this is my covenant with them, when I take away their sins.” (NET)

Paul quotes from Isaiah and Jeremiah here. Heiser takes from a couple of outside sources a list of four common views of this passage and the meaning of “all Israel”. The problem is that Heiser’s explanation takes too many liberties interpreting this source material. You can read those sources and get a different idea than what Heiser offers in his summary. But we don’t need to examine the counterfeits, just make sure we understand the approach taken in Second Temple literature based on the Old Testament.

(Heiser quotes from another source no longer easy to find — Jason Staples in the Journal of Biblical Literature — but I’ll share the copy I chased down with anyone who asks for it.)

There is a distinct link between Paul’s mention of the “fullness of the Gentiles” and “all Israel”. You cannot get one without understanding the other. Part of the problem is the general lack of precision in the term “Israel” among theologians and church leadership.

Even in the common vernacular of today people have noticed an intentional ambiguity with the word “Jew”. Is it a religion or an ethnic identity? Worse, neither of those is consistent with the meaning in the New Testament. The NT use of that term refers to a national identity. It’s a contraction of Judean — someone who is a citizen of the Judean Kingdom under the Roman Empire. They may or may not be faithful to the Covenant, but they are subject to Judean government jurisdiction. This no longer exists, so the ambiguity in the modern usage does not apply here.

Thus, whatever Paul means here in Romans 11 by “Israel”, it’s not the same as ethnic Jews or religious Jews. We have a hint in Paul’s declaration in Galatians 3 that “children of Abraham” refers to those who carry on Abraham’s faith, not those who simply carry his DNA.

What can we learn by working with Second Temple literature? The name “Israel” can be used to indicate several different things, which is typical of the Hebrew language in general. It depends on the context.

1. The Patriarch, Jacob — his name was changed to Israel
2. The nation of his descendants (“Children of Israel”)
3. All Twelve Tribes
4. The Northern 10 Tribes and sometimes their territory
5. In some places it refers to the Southern Tribes, usually after they returned from Exile

The word “Jew” is regarded as a term originating outside the nation. It’s not a name they chose, but they might use the term in the presence of outsiders to accommodate them. It’s a specifically exilic term; it arose as a reference to them as captives of Babylon, even after they returned. In Hebrew and Aramaic, it’s a plural: Yehudim. 2 Kings 25:25 or Jeremiah 34:9 seems to be the earliest, but it’s used throughout Ezra, Nehemiah and Esther. You also see it in Daniel and Zechariah, both after the Exile began. (Keep in mind that the Exile occurred in three waves — 605, 597 and 586 BC — so Jeremiah mentions them after at least the first wave.)

Heiser notes that Josephus is very precise about the meaning and usage of the term and quotes him using the Greek form Ioudaioi, referring to both the people and the territory. As to the people, it refers to everyone descended from the Returnees. Modern usage of the term “Jew” arises more from the Fourth Century and later. Frankly, we should view the word “Jew” in English translations of the Bible as bad scholarship. It’s better to translate it as “Judean”.

The term “all Israel” shows up 153 times in the Bible, but only once in the New Testament — where Paul uses it in Romans 11:26. It specifically refers to the collective Twelve Tribes in both the Old Testament and in Second Temple literature. Not just the people, but specifically to the tribal structure of the nation. The concept of the term fades from meaning between the Divided Kingdom and the Exile. The precision of meaning shows up in the Qumran Community and in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

So, Paul is not thinking in Romans 11 about ethnic Jews. There was already a proper term for that. No, he refers to “the totality of God’s covenant people” as Heiser puts it. It’s a theological construct. As I’ve noted elsewhere, it’s Israel-the-mission, a people who serve a specific purpose as noted in the Unseen Realm thesis. Heiser takes us back in the Roman letter to 9:6-8, which includes a quote from Genesis 21:12.

It is not as though the word of God had failed. For not all those who are descended from Israel are truly Israel, nor are all the children Abraham’s true descendants; rather “through Isaac will your descendants be counted.” This means it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God; rather, the children of promise are counted as descendants. (NET)

This is consistent with Galatians 3:7-9, 25-29. Paul bluntly states that “Children of Abraham” includes Gentiles. Anyone with that fundamental loyalty to Jehovah, the OT is loaded with Gentiles who qualify: Rahab, Naaman, etc. The same answer carries over into the NT. Acts quite deliberately points out that the same Holy Spirit fell on Gentiles the same way.

Jeremiah 30:3 refers specifically to “Israel and Judah” who will return some day. God refers to “My People” against the warnings in Hosea 1:9 that the Northern Tribes were “not My People” (lo-ammi). Later Hosea says that those who were formerly “not My People” (Gentiles) will be called “My People”, and Paul quotes this in Romans 9:22-26. Paul is swapping the Lost Ten Tribes for Gentiles.

This is how “all Israel” will be saved.