Modern Jews are Not the Biblical Jews – James Jordan

The following are excerpts of “The Future of Israel Re-examined” by James B. Jordan:

Who Were the Jews

Most Christians think of the Jews as a race of people descended from Abraham. In this section of this essay I want to call this assumption into question, by looking at the history of Israel in the Old Testament. When God called Abraham and made him a priest to the gentile nations, He commanded him to use the sign of circumcision to mark out the Hewbrews from the other nations. Abraham’s household at this time included at least 318 fighting men (Gen. 14:14), as well as their wives and children, possibly many more servants. All of these men were circumcised. We see these servants mentioned in the book of Genesis several times (Gen.26:19ff.; 32:16), and when Jacob went down to sojourn in Egypt, so many people went with him that he had to be given the whole land of Goshen to dwell in. Genesis 46 provides a list of only 70 actual blood descendants of Abraham who went into Egypt.

Thus, from the very beginning, the Israelites were defined by covenant, not by blood and race.
The same was true for each of the tribes within Israel. A Levite was not necessarily a blood descendant of Levi, but more likely was a descendant of one of the patriarchs’ servants who was a part of Levi’s company. Only a small percentage of Levites would actually have been descendants of Levi.

These several thousand people became over two million by the time of the Exodus 215 years later. Only a small percentage of the people who came out of Egypt had any racial connection with Abraham. Moreover, added to the company of Israel at this time was a vast mixed multitude, many of whom became circumcised members of the nation, and therefore members of individual tribes as well.

There was another admixture of converts in the time of David and Solomon. Think of Uriah the Hittite, for example. Then again, the book of Esther tells us that during and after the Exile many more gentiles became Jews(Esth. 8:17).

What this means is that very few Jews at the time of Christ had any of Abraham’s blood in them. They were a nation formed by covenant, not a race formed by blood. To be sure, Jesus Himself was a true blood descendant of Abraham, and His genealogy is important for theological reasons, but few other Jews could trace their genealogy to Abraham. What I seek to establish by this survey is this: With the passing away of the Old Covenant, there is no longer any such thing as a Jew in the Biblical sense, unless by “True Jews” we mean Christians. There is no covenant, and therefore there is no nation, no “race.”

What, then, are modern Jews? Modern Jews are people who choose to think of themselves as descendants of Israel. Most modern Jews are not semites, but are descended form Eastern European tribes that converted to Judaism in the middle ages. Arthur Koestler’s ‘The Thirteenth Tribe’ provides much information about this. Modern Jews do not worship the God of the Old Testament. They are either secular humanists, or else Talmudists, and the Talmud has no more relation to the Old Testament than does the Quran or the Book of Mormon. Like the Quran and the Book of Mormon, the Talmud and Mishnah are designed to add to and reinterpret the Old Testament in such a way as to obliterate completely the revelation of God through Jesus Christ (compare Luke 24:27). The “God” of Judaism is as much a fiction as the “God” of Islam and the “God” of Mormonism.

It is entirely possible that there is not one drop of Abraham’s blood in any modern Jew. Of the tiny percentage of Israel that had any of Abraham’s blood in the first century, it is possible that all such either became Christians or were slain in the Jewish War of A.D. 70. No one can know for sure about something like this, and it does not matter in the slightest.

Modern Jews are a separate nation of people with a self-identity, spread out among many other nations. The closest analogy to them are the Gypsies. The only difference between Modern Jews and Gypsies is that the Modern Jews claim to have a relation to the Biblical Jews, a claim I maintain is false.

An analogy may help. Mormons think of themselves as Christians, and call themselves Christians, but they are not Christians. They are counter-feit Christians. Just so, Modern Jews think of themselves as Jews, but they are not Jews. They are counterfeits of Biblical Jews. I say this not to disparage them, but to be accurate. In fact, I shall argue later in this paper that this business of treating Jews as special is directly related to the persecution the Jews have so frequently experienced.

The Problem of “Anti-Semitism”

Before turning to Romans 11 and its meaning in the context of New Testament prophecy, I want to set down my thoughts on the problem of “anti-semitism.” First, very few Modern Jews are semites, and very few semites are Jews, so the term “anti-semitism” is a very misleading term. In English, however, “anti-semite” means “anti-Modern-Jew,” and so I shall use it that way here.

When times get tough in a society, people seek for someone to blame. They might blame themselves and say “God is punishing us for our own sins,” but since people are wicked, they don’t say that. Instead, they look for someone to blame, saying, “Everything was fine until these people came along. They are different, and therefore they are criminals, and therefore they are to blame for these distresses and catastrophes.”

In times of distress, people turn against outsiders and strangers. In Romania today, Gypsies are being treated this way. Throughout history, both Jews and Gypsies have often been made the scapegoats for society’s problems. This is because they are different. They have their own laws and customs. They don’t mingle with other people well. They seem obnoxious because their customs are strange. People suspect them of bizarre practices, like incest, stealing babies, poisoning wells, and the like. People want to feel superior to other people.

[E]nvy plays a large part in scapegoating. Those who are rich are admired and imitated by society, but when they fall, everyone rushes in to gloat. Job experienced this, and you need only read the newspaper to see how “rich and famous” people are treated when the fall. Historically, the Jews have been a disciplined and provident people, which means they have often had wealth, which means that they have been the object of envy, though usually not of admiration.

Now, let us bring in the catastrophe. The mob wants someone to blame. They blame the strangers, the Jews. They blame those they want to feel superior to, the Jews. They blame those they envy, the Jews. When times got tough in Germany after World War One, the mob found it easy to go after Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Catholics, and Godly evangelicals — all the people who were “different.”

Now, this is bad enough, but now enters another factor. Unlike Gypsies, the Jews claim to be the continuing racial expression of God’s chosen people. This kind of claim is naturally offensive to other people. It only makes matters worse when the Church adds her voice to this claim.

In short, I am arguing that by giving Modern Jews a privileged place in history and prophecy, the Church has reinforced rather than undermined the foundation of anti-semitism and persecution. If the Church had strongly maintained that the claim of the Jews was mythical, and that Jews were no different from any other exceptional group in society, the persecutions against the Jews might have been milder. The Jews would have been treated like Gypsies. They would still have been persecuted, but perhaps not as severely.

Of course, the only real and lasting solution to the problem of persecution is for the Church to do her work of remaking people into kind and charitable human beings. But until we have a Christian world, there will be persecutions. I believe that the futurist view of Romans 11, whether espoused by premillennialists or postmillennialists, distorts society’s understanding of the Jews, and sets them up for persecution when times get tough.