B. Abraham and the Covenant
The history proper of the three great
monotheistic communities of Jews,
Christians and Muslims begins with
God’s Covenant with Abram (later
called Abraham)- The Covenant and Its Terms
a. Abraham was unique because,
unlike many of his ancestors,
Abraham worshiped only one God
(Yahweh).
b. Abraham was a nomad (<Heb.,
“wanderer”), that is, the head or
sheik of a group of people without
a homeland. There were two
things to which nomads aspired:
(1) ownership of land, and (2) a
large number of kin to ensure sur-
vival of their tribe.
c. There are two divine promises
made to Abraham that are
repeated throughout the Biblical
book of Genesis.
i. “I will make you a great nation
...” (Gen. 12:2). Abram was
past 75 years of age and had
no descendants, yet God
promised him an heir.
ii.“I give this land to your descen-
dants”(Gen 12:7). This
promise to the still nomadic
Abram and his descendants
was of a land, here defined to
embrace all the territory from
the River of Egypt to the Great
River, the river Euphrates
(Gen. 15:18).
d. Abram was required to leave
Harran and have all the males of
his household (kin, foreigners and
newborns on the eighth day) cir-
cumcised. This acted as a trans-
formation of their state. Abram’s
name is changed to Abraham and
Sarai’s to Sarah.
THEHOLYLAND
The Bible does not define the
Promised Land very precisely nor
very consistently: the Israelites
apparently took what they could get
and hold. The matter of definition
became more urgent for the later
rabbis, however, when there were
Jews living both inside and outside
the Land of Israel. The former had to
observe the Mosaic Law to its fullest
extent, and notably the laws regard-
ing agricultural tithes and the like,
while the latter need not and,
indeed, could not do so. The rabbis
attempted, then, to be rather precise
about the boundaries, not of a
Jewish state, which no longer exist-
ed, but of Eretz Israel, the Bible’s
“Land of Promise.” With the passage
of time, such boundary marking
became increasingly moot as fewer
and fewer Jews lived within even the
most generous definition of the
Promised Land, and few, even of
that number, had any connection
with agriculture.
The issue of divinely-sanctioned
boundaries in Palestine was resur-
rected only in the 20thcentury when
the “Promised Land” assumed the
new and secular form of a “Jewish
homeland.” Was, in fact, this newly
instituted Jewish homeland, now
formally self-declared as a/the
“Jewish state,” the same as the
“Promised Land?” Was Israel the
fulfillment of the sacred promise
made to Abraham? None of the
highly secular founding fathers of
the State of Israel seem to have
thought so, but some Jews came
eventually to believe that such was
the case and that the State of
Israel had a right, a divine right, to
all the land covenanted to Abraham
“and his descendants.” Maps once
more began to be redrawn and the
Bible’s opaque geographical tem-
plate laid upon them.