The themes of God's promise of the land to Abram in Gen 12, and the journey towards its fulfilment that makes up the rest of the narratives in the Pentateuch, loom so large, it is easy to dismiss the earlier chapters as unimportant for our consideration of the land. This would be a serious mistake.
Gen 1-2 defines the nature of the human relationship to the land. The so-called "creation account" of Gen 1 does not take us all the way back to the very beginning of creation; it only takes us as far as the point when "the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep" (v2).1 The two assertions point to a situation where form and order did not exist, of the impossibility of discernment, management, and productivity; one that is absolutely unfit for human habitation. By v25, however, the land was prepared, abounding with all the provisions for life. Then did God create the human pair. Told from a different perspective, the so-called "second creation account" in Gen 2 recounts essentially the same thing. Together they make the point that the land is, first and foremost, the place of divine largesse and authentic communion. There,
1. God blessed them and commanded them to be fruitful,
2. God appointed them to the viceregency of ruling over all the creatures,
3. God spoke to them and entrusted them with his confidence that they would listen to him, especially in his warning of the danger of consuming the fruits from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; the land was to be the place of transparent and honest fellowship with God,
4. God heard the first pangs of the human heart and, without needing to be asked, ministered to it; He recognized that it was not good for the man to be alone and needed someone who was "bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh,"
The land was, therefore, the place God had prepared by the works of his own hands for humans to be all that he was meant to be and could be all that he could be.
Nonetheless, Gen 1-11 also makes another central theological point about the land and that is the possibility of exile from the land, of loss, disorientation, and alienation. Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden, the way back guarded by the cherubim and a flaming sword (Gen 3:24). Cain was banished from arable land, and made a restless wanderer the rest of his life, exposed, vulnerable, and fearful (Gen 4:12, 15). If the flood could only be viewed as a permanent exile from the land in a figurative sense, the scattering at Babel would be its concrete counterpart. Exile and loss, whether personal, as in Adam, Eve, and Cain, or global/communal as in the flood and Babel, is Scripture's first clear milestone towards a theology of the land. That it should be raised so clearly before the theme of promise only makes the theme of promise and its fulfilment all the more amazing.
Beyond the Pentateuch, the Old Testament is essentially a narrative of Israel's dramatic journey between these two poles of landedness and loss— of promise of the land and the anticipation that comes with it, of fulfilment and the demands for accountability, but also of temptation and her obstinate ways that courted divine displeasure and finally the swift descent into exile, loss and shame.
If exile was the Old Testament's last word on the land, we would not now be reflecting on the subject. Just as Israel's presence in the land was the result of a divinve promise, so was her future beyond exile. The grace of God that brought Abraham out of a dead end and gave him a new beginning, the grace of God now promised Israel a return to the land and a new beginning. Return to the land she did, and there the Old Testament story ends on the theme of waiting for a new beginning.
The theme of "promise" pervades everthing that Gen 12-50 has to say about the land. The so-called "promised land" is first mentioned in Gen 12:7, "The Lord appeared to Abram and said, "To your offspring I will give this land." So he built an altar there to the Lord, who had appeared to him." The promise of the land, however, was already inherent in the earlier command to leave Ur, ""Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you" (12:1). Embedded in this promise are three crucial theological facts.
1. The land was a gift of pure grace, not a right that Abraham, or his descendants, could claim as theirs. The land could, therefore, be claimed only by faith, exercised in obedience. As a result, the loss of the land was always a possibility lining the horizons of Israel's existence. Obedience was, in the Pentateuch, the fundamental correlate to the promise of the land. The idea of "Israel's right" to the land because it was promised, so prevalent in modern preaching, is alien to Scriptures.
The idea of "Israel's right" to the land because it was promised
is alien to Scriptures.
2. While the land played a central place in Israel's drama of faith, of her fellowship and communion with God, the land was not essential to it. From the beginning, the Pentateuch underlines the fact that fellowship and communion with God is possible and available anywhere and anytime. The popular sentiments one hears often from Chrisitians today that God is closer to them when at certain shrines, or in Israel, may be personally affirming but it is a claim that finds no basis in Scriptures. While the "sense" of God's presence in Israel may be "personally felt," it is not an objective fact that can be affirmed in the teachings of the Bible.
3. While promised, the land was not given immediately to Abraham for his possession; only "in the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure" (Gen 15:16). There was to be no injustice in the manner of ancient Israel's possession of the land; possession of the land was not to be a matter of land grab. Israel's time to possess the land was to coincide with the time of divine judgment upon the Amorites in the land. Brute dispossession of the native people without due moral process is not the pattern of biblical teaching about the land. This also implies another theological fact, one that will be made explicit in Deuteronomy, and that is, the gift of land from God is not unique to Israel. God gave land also to the Edomites ("descendants of Esau, Deut 2:5) and to the Moabites and Ammonites (the "descendants of Lot," Deut 2:9, 19); each time, as Israel passed them on their way to their Promised Land, they were commanded not to harass them or provoke them to war for "I have given it as a possession" to their forefathers. Canaan was "given" to the Amorites, and it would be removed from them—or rather, they would be removed from it—but only when "their sin has reached its full measure."
Notice that Abram's journey towards the promise of land began as a simple matter of obedience to God's command, invitation, to walk with Him on a journey in which the only certainty was His guiding presence; "Leave . . . and to to the land I will show you" (Gen 12:1). The call is startling for its directness, forthrightness, and simplicity. Abram could only choose to obey or disobey. To obey meant leaving behind everything that was familiar. It meant walking into an unknown future whose boundaries were defined only by Yahweh's presence. It meant giving up a comfortable life in an affluent city to become something he has never been.
When we look retrospectively from the concrete promise of the land in Gen 12:4, we are able to say that implicit in the call of v1 was the promise of land. Abram, however, could not have read such a thing for himself. He had no way to read the trajectory of the call that we are able to plot with the advantage of hindsight. For Abram the command to leave and to go represents "the radical demand of God that the way of faith requires leaving a land and accepting landlessness as a posture of faith."2 This is the strange paradox of faith that would be repeated again and again through the rest of Scriptures, but nowhere stated as pointedly and poignantly as by Jesus in speaking of his own death, "I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. The man who loves his life will lose it, while the man who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life" (Jn 12:24-25). The distance between where we are and the door-handle that opens the promised future of God is always the breadth of our extended arms plus one step. Most of us remain stagnant because we refuse to take that step for it requires us to let go of where we are.
The focus in the narratives after Abram shifts dramatically to the question of progeny, the birth of a son for barren Sarah, and of birth-right, and the theme of the land recedes into the background, and we see only occasional flashes of it only as a reminder that it is not forgetten. So Isaac was commanded not to go down to Egypt but to stay in the land with the assurance that Yahweh would provide for him because the land was promised to him and his descendants (Gen 26:2-6). Jacob, once he had swindled the birthright from his brother Esau, was sent away by his fearful parents to Paddan Aram, who blessed him on his departure, "May God Almighty bless you . . . May he give you and your descendants the blessing given to Abraham, so that you may take possession of the land where you now live as an alien, the land God gave to Abraham" (28:3-4). In his encounter with Yahweh at Bethel, Yahweh affirmed to Jacob that "I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring. I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you" (28:13-15), which is repeated in 35:9-12.
Three oblique but equally important glimpses of the anticipation of promise fulfilment close the book of Genesis. First is Jacob's last words to his son Joseph, "I am about to die, but God will be with you and take you back to the land of your fathers" (48:21). Then there is the oath he extracted from Joseph that he should be buried in the land of his father, "I am about to die; bury me in the tomb I dug for myself in the land of Canaan" (50:5) and finally, Joseph's own conviction that God will return them to the land He has promised in his instructions to his brothers, "I am about to die. But God will surely come to your aid and take you up out of this land to the land he promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. God will surely come to your aid, and then you must carry my bones up from this place" (50:24-25).
Low Chai Hok
©Alberith, 2015