Zionism is an awkward word, sometimes a boast, usually a slander. Its common meaning is obvious enough, having to do with Jews returning to the Holy Land or, in the minds of many, the Jewish dispossession of Arabs.
But the truth is, there are many shades of Zionism, some more religious, some racist, and others more nationalistic, while yet another is outright socialist and agnostic. Zionism can be messianic, or it may be progressive. Zionism can also be non-Jewish, it can even be Muslim.
STRATIGRAPHY
As a term of political nomenclature, Zionism was coined in the 1880s. But that doesn’t tell us much beyond the obvious link to the name Zion, which today refers to a nondescript hill on ancient Jerusalem’s southwestern flank. Zion in this respect is a geographical feature that does not provide much motivation on its own merits. To really grasp Zionism’s power and to understand its breadth, we must carefully excavate the 3000 years of historical strata that lie beneath this term.
Let’s do some archaeology.
THE HOLY HILL
In the Hebrew Bible, Zion refers to a different hill, first the fortress-hill of the holy city’s original settlement, then to the sanctity of the Temple Mount at the summit, the place where the Dome of the Rock sits most conspicuously now. By Jesus’ time, the name lent itself also to the hill and fortress that marked Herod’s reign. Often, it could also mean the whole city of Jerusalem, not a big place by modern standards, and all of it hilly.
In short, Zion was shorthand for the geography most sacred to God and most important to eternity.
This makes Zion the tangible locus of transcendent Jewish, Christian and Muslim spiritual desires.
In that way, it is inseparable from the ultimate promises of world peace and welfare, divine judgment and salvation, and the revelation of all hidden things.
Nothing to fight over there….
ADVENTURES NOBLE AND CRUEL
An encyclopaedia of references could not completely assay Zion’s influence on the course of history. It is no exaggeration to say it shaped the world we live in, formed our sense of what is possible in life, and motivated some of the noblest and most cruel of human ventures.
We can’t cite the entire encyclopaedia here, but it is enough to refer to an obvious, early example. This is perhaps the most eloquent and progenitive of all the Zion literature and a powerful summary of what it means—Isaiah’s vision of universal peace.
You know it:
And it shall be at the end of the days, that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be firmly established at the top of the mountains, and it shall be raised above the hills, and all the nations shall stream to it. And many peoples shall go, and they shall say, “Come, let us go up to the Lord’s mount, to the house of the God of Jacob, and let Him teach us of His ways, and we will go in His paths,” for out of Zion shall the Torah come forth, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. And he shall judge between the nations and reprove many peoples, and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift the sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.
That is Zion’s call. It is so profound as to induce the world’s first atheist state, a most unlikely pilgrim to Zion, to cast Isaiah’s vision in bronze as a gift to the wider world.
Sculpted in 1959 and gifted to the United Nations by the USSR, the statue depicts a magnificently angular nový Sovětský man heroically pounding away at a massive sword with the hammer of Communism, its unabashed title: “Let Us Beat Swords Into Ploughshares.”
RETURN TO ZION
It’s a good match. There is indeed an implicit Zionism in the Marxist dream of history’s end. Yet, the Soviets were happy enough to let Zion’s magic work from afar. For Jews, Christians and Muslims, however, there has always been an earthy element to it, Zion as a place that is inextricable from its promise.
Here, Zion beckons as a location that calls us home. This aspect too, has biblical prophetic origins, this time from Jeremiah.
His message often echoes Isaiah, but he emphatically embeds the dream of humanity’s salvation in a promise of Jewish repatriation.
Repatriation, because the Jews were recently exiled into Babylonian slavery. Jeremiah thus weaves the words “return” and even “rebuild” into his Isaiah-like vision of universal redemption:
I will bring them from the land of the north and gather them from the ends of the earth. Among them will be the blind and the lame, expectant mothers and women in labor; a great throng will return. They will come with weeping; they will pray as I bring them back…Hear the word of the Lord, you nations; proclaim it in distant coastlands: “He who scattered Israel will gather them and will watch over his flock like a shepherd.”
RETURN TO VIRTUE
Jeremiah repeats this promise of return and resettlement again and again. He says, however, that it is contingent.
For the exiles to return to the land, God says, they must first “return to Me.”
What that means is unambiguous: cleansing their “evil heart” and fulfilling the promise of Abraham to be a people in whom “all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
Jeremiah also slams religiosity and attachment to the physical artefacts and physical space of the Temple, saying that this is no better than any other primitive idolatry.
This three-way balance (return, repentance to inner virtue, and blessing to the nations of the world) is constant in Jeremiah: “If you return, O Israel, declares the LORD, to me you should return. If you remove your detestable things from my presence, and do not waver, and if you swear, ‘As the LORD lives,’ in truth, in justice, and in righteousness, then nations shall bless themselves in him, and in him shall they glory.”
Whatever benefit the returning is to give to Jews, it means somehow to benefit non-Jewish peoples in the process.
It’s worth noting that the words “repent” and “return” are the same in Jeremiah’s language. This gives his work a poetic power that literally makes it impossible to conceive of one kind of return without the other.
A HIGH CALLING
Like Isaiah, Jeremiah evokes an image of all nations finding happiness through Zion’s blessed legacy.
His is not a geopolitical plan—it is a vision of universal salvation.
But for that to happen, Israel did need to return to the land.
This is where it becomes difficult for people who take offence at the possibility of Jews having a unique calling or a special status.
But if you are a believer, it is hard to get around. God required it in his plan and its wisdom is beyond judgment. Still, some confessing Christians prefer not to think about God involved in history in this way. Of course, for unbelievers, there is the easier option of rejecting the idea altogether.
Even so—with or without God—we must contend with history itself.
FAIT ACCOMPLI
Considering the fact of Jewish return to Zion (in antiquity or today) we can ask if there is a destiny requiring it. Many say no because either they do not believe in any kind of divine presence in history or because they do not think there is any destiny not of human intention. (This is a problem: even if there is nothing more than physics at work, human intention has little effect on ultimate fate—but that’s another discussion.)
Be that as it may, I think we have to say (if you are a believer) that the return of Jews to Zion comes from God or (if you are not) that it comes from the flowing narrative of history, which dictated this outcome. Long-lived historical narratives have God-like power. We might bristle at the suggestion, for example, that Israel’s modern-day rebirth is a fulfilment of prophecy. But by whatever mechanism, the prophecy in actual fact came true, and its consequences are real.
We should understand, then, that the centuries-long ripening of even self-fulfilling prophecies is indeed God-like: it is bigger than a single life or a lifetime and is awe-inspiring in its own right. There is no practical difference between fate and fait accompli.
For believers, the historical necessity of a promised return to Zion is unavoidable:
- It is explicit in the biblical prophets and a return from Babylon did occur.
- This was essential to bringing the revelation of Jesus and then later of Muhammad, who also built on this history.
- There would be neither Jesus or Muhammad without Jewish Zionism and no Christianity and no Islam.
For Muslims and Christians this is a point worth considering when grappling with the history of modern-day Israel too. Is God still involved in history or did he take a century off?
SECTS OF JUDAISM
OK. Christianity and Islam are sects of Judaism—they are a continuation of the Hebrew narrative which begins in earnest with Abraham, then struggles through the years of exile in Babylon and finally returns to Zion to bless the would be Christians and Muslims. (Muhammad surely owes Islam’s existence to those first Zionists.)
So then, what of Christians and Muslims and Zion?
Let’s start with the earliest Christians, the community in Antioch. These believers in Jesus did not distinguish themselves from their Jewish roots. Not even Antioch’s Gentile converts imagined that they were anything but part of a Jewish movement. Dreaming of Mount Zion as the connecting point to the eternal New Jerusalem was a given for them—Jesus would come back there one day.
Zion was a touchstone, a symbol and the geographical nexus of an expected eschatological event.
It was also the location, temporally and eternally, of the previous eschatological event, namely the death and resurrection of Christ.
Jesus too was a Zionist, returning to Jerusalem so that the promise of Isaiah could come true. He could not skip this step but no one understood or supported his decision to return to Zion. “From that time forth Jesus began to show unto his disciples, that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the Elders, and of the High Priests, and Scribes, and be slain, and be raised again the third day.”
Now, this Zionism of Jesus held no geopolitical ambitions at all—Palestine was occupied and his non-political responses to this infuriated those on both sides of the issue.
ANTIOCH
So, Jerusalem was critical to him, and yet the distinguishing message of Jesus as a Jew in his time was that God’s kingdom was not of this world and that it was a kingdom not exclusive to Jews.
His Zionism fulfils the real prophetic vision of Zion and remains the transcendent standard.
Now, to step back a bit, let’s clarify what I mean by saying that the early Christians did not distinguishing themselves from the Jews.
Early converts to the faith were themselves Jews and the first non-Jewish converts saw themselves as joining the Jewish tradition. Even a hundred years later, numerous first-hand reports tell us of the free association between synagogue worship and the followers of Jesus in Antioch (where the believers in Jesus first coined the term “Christian”).
This is all on my mind as I am in Antioch right now. It’s been flattened by the 2023 earthquake. I am staying over the site of a prominent Roman bath where the Apostle Paul likely had an occasional schvitz. Still today Antioch celebrates its Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities, fondly mixing the Star of David with the Crescent and the Cross on its literature. (For now, the last Jewish residents left following the earthquake, which demolished much of the Old City.)
ROOTS AND BRANCHES
Of course, Paul worked with Jewish and Gentile believers here. These words of Paul’s written to the most Gentile, un-Jewish and remote believers in Rome, tell us a lot about the status of the Chosen People in the Christian age:
God did not reject his people, whom he foreknew…because of their transgression, salvation has come to the Gentiles to make Israel envious. But if their transgression means riches for the world, and their loss means riches for the Gentiles, how much greater riches will their full inclusion bring! For if their rejection brought reconciliation to the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead?…and you, though a wild olive shoot, have been grafted in among the others and now share in the nourishing sap from the olive root, do not consider yourself to be superior to those other branches. If you do, consider this: You do not support the root, but the root supports you.
So, for early Christian Gentiles, the Kingdom of God was not exclusive to Jews, but neither was it exclusive of them.
Their faith was a continuation and a fulfilment of the Jewish custodial legacy, but did not abrogate the Jewish calling.
Here, Paul assumes there is a God’s eye view, a perspective of God working in history through the Jews and of this history being incomplete. He meets the notion of Gentile converts replacing the Jews with that stern admonition: “do not consider yourself to be superior to those other branches…you do not support the root, but the root supports you.”
CHRISTENDOM
In Byzantine times that caution would be forgotten. By then, Gentile Christians viewed themselves not as grafted-in Jews but as outright substitutes (despite Paul). Moreover, after Constantine, the Roman Empire saw itself as Christ’s kingdom coming. The Church and the State were one.
Christians thus repeated the errors of their Jewish predecessors. Their mandate was a transcendent identity—profoundly different from the world system of power and violence. Now they slipped back into the status quo of warring geopolitics, proclaiming their empire the advent of the kingdom of heaven.
What was Zion to those Christians?
Under Constantine, the Roman province of Syria Palaestina became Terra Sancta, the Holy Land. Christendom’s imperial capital was Constantinople, but Jerusalem was the spiritual centre.
Constantine and his mother mapped and restored holy sites from Galilee to Sinai with the greatest devotion, tearing down the temple of Jupiter on the Temple Mount and building the Church of the Holy Sepulchre over the place of Christ’s burial and resurrection. All awaited the descent of New Jerusalem to complete the last step in finalizing Christ’s rule on Earth.
But before that could happen, they expected the Antichrist to appear.
Indeed, this seemed to be happening when Iranian armies allied themselves with Christ-rejecting Jews to conquer Terra Sancta in the 600s.
The Iranians burned and looted the Holy Land’s churches, carrying the remnants of the True Cross back to their lair in Persia.
As it happens, the Persians appointed a charismatic Jewish leader to spearhead the battle to wrest Jerusalem from Christendom. The leader was Nehemiah ben Hushiel ben Ephraim ben Joseph—a name that laid claim to the messianic throne of David if ever there was one. He was no figurehead. Nehemiah brought an armed force of 20,000 Jewish troops and successfully secured Jerusalem in 614 CE.
A POLITICAL MESSIAH AND THE TEMPLE MOUNT
Victorious, Nehemiah donned royal robes and took his place as the successor of David, from whom he was genuinely descended (something the Maccabees and Herod could not claim).
At last, it seemed the Jews had a legitimate candidate for King Messiah.
Hence, Nehemiah immediately began work to rebuild the Temple and took steps to restore the priesthood and regular sacrifice for the first time in half a millennium. Elsewhere, as Christian fortunes collapsed across the empire, the Jewish population of Antioch rose up and assassinated the patriarch.
The Christian emperor presiding at this time of tribulation was Heraclius. With Jerusalem lost and the Persians at the gates of Constantinople, he was hailed as the expected Last Emperor who would pave the way for Christ’s return. Endorsed thus as Christ’s champion, the masses flocked to his armies, emboldened by a new coin minted from the precious metals stripped in sacrifice from the city’s cathedrals. Its inscription: God Save the Romans (aka Christians).
After that, the tide turned. Heraclius beat the Persians back to their Iranian homeland. At the broken Persian court, he secured the holy artifacts they’d taken from Jerusalem and marched with them back to Terra Sancta.
He finally re-entered Jerusalem triumphantly in 629 on Newroz Day, ceremoniously reconsecrating his rule on the Temple Mount—Holy Zion.
They chose Newroz Day because the Magi celebrated eternal redemption on this day through ceremonial gifts to the King of Kings—a title that Heraclius now chose for himself as the deputy of the eternal King of Kings, Jesus Christ. Heraclius was the first Roman emperor to assume this title, and he did so on this day in Jerusalem for purely eschatological reasons.
The Christian emperor was a Zionist.
600s
Note that this was the 600s, a century most often remembered today because it was when Islam appears on the world stage. It’s the century of Muhammad, Mecca and the Holy Quran.
Not coincidentally, Islam emerges just after the events surrounding the Jewish/Persian revival in Jerusalem and Heraclius’ miraculous reconquest.
In truth, it is this eschatologically fevered environment that shapes Islamic beliefs and practices. No one can understand the Middle East without grasping this fact.
Consider the dates:
610 – Heraclius was crowned emperor.
610 – Muhammad was called to prophethood.
614 – Jewish army takes Jerusalem; Temple services restored.
619 – 20,000 Jews slaughtered outside Jerusalem’s Golden Gate; a year remembered by Islam as the “Year of Disaster” or “Year of Sorrow” as though Arab believers not yet clear what the difference was between Jews and Muslims.
620 – Traditional date of Muhammad’s miraculous “night journey” to Jerusalem; Muhammad meets Jesus there and is instructed how Muslims should pray.
622 – Heraclius mints “God Help” coins.
622 – The Hegira from Mecca to Medina—start of Islamic calendar.
629 – Heraclius restores the True Cross to Jerusalem, is ordained as “King of Kings.”
637 – Muslim armies conquer Jerusalem and begin worship on the Temple Mount with Jewish priests as instructors.
We would be utterly obtuse not to recognise the correlation between Islam’s rise and these Jewish and Christian events. Islam is a function of Jewish and Christian apocalypticism.
NO INSULT
This is no insult. Islam never claimed to be a new religion, it evolved from others, and Muhammad avows as much. The Holy Quran presents Abraham as the starting point, Jesus the middle, and Muhammad the final seal of Judeo-Christian religion.
The entire tradition of Moses, the burning bush, and the giving of the Law takes place in Muhammad’s backyard, the desert territory inland of the Red Sea, including the Ḥijāz region of modern Saudi Arabia, the southern deserts of Jordan, Egyptian Sinai, and Israel’s Negev.
Biblical YHWH (Jehovah), the core concept that became Abrahamic monotheism, was first contemplated in these deserts by civilization’s discontents, tent-dwelling traders like Abraham, who were despised by their urbanised Egyptian neighbours as uncivilised primitives.
In other words, they were the Bedouin of northwestern Arabia, Muhammad’s kin and actual ancestors.
No surprise then that Muhammad claims to be a direct descendant of Ishmael, Abraham’s first-born son, who came to live in these deserts.
But Ishmael, the son of Abraham, appears exclusively in the Hebrew Bible, and no other ancient source.
Likewise with the Quran’s other important figures: along with Abraham there is Adam, Moses, Jacob, Saul, David, Solomon (and the Queen of Sheba), Elijah, Ezekial, Zechariah, Gabriel, Job, Jonah, Lot (and his wife), and more, including the children of Israel themselves.
This continuity between Israel’s religion and Muhammad’s is beyond dispute. Not only do Muslims believe that Muhammad is descended from Abraham, but as often as not, Islam is called “the religion of Abraham” in the Quran. In sum, Jews and Muslims share a starting point and a trajectory. Arab monotheism did not suddenly sprout from the sandy soil here in the seventh century.
THE FAR MOSQUE
That’s a topic in itself. Narrowing the focus again to Zion, we recall a critical moment in Muhammad’s biography; it is called the Isra, the prophet’s visit to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, to Zion.
It happened over the course of a single night, when the Prophet was translated into heaven (the Mi’raj), received instructions on ṣalāt (the form and number of daily prayers), and spoke with Abraham, Moses, and Jesus (needless to say, three Jews).
It’s a miraculous event, facilitated by the angel Gabriel who took Muhammad from the Foundation Stone, the heart of Solomon’s Temple, to the true foundation in heaven. From that specific spot, the Foundation Stone on the Temple Mount, Muhammad bridged heaven and Earth.
No wonder, then, that Jerusalem’s most recognizable feature—the Dome of the Rock—was built over this same stone.
The builder was Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, arguably the caliph who established Islam’s first true empire. He certainly was the first Muslim ruler to mint coins and establish taxes uniformly across the Islamic realm. Because of a lack of physical evidence for Islam prior to his rule, we may never know to what extent he shaped Islam as we know it today.
We certainly can get a good idea of his importance, however, from the simple fact that the first written examples of the Quran and references to Muhammad are his.
They are not on paper. Instead, the oldest written lines of the Quran elaborately adorn the walls of the Dome of the Rock. To repeat: far and away the earliest versions of the Quran’s text appear here.
Why did he and the early Muslims give Zion—the Temple Mount—such priority and the honour of first preserving the Muslim creed in writing?
MUSJEWS
It’s not just Muhammad’s Night Journey, for that story post-dates the building, as if the choice of Zion required Muhammad’s journey so as to certify the Muslim connection to the Jewish mount and Muhammad’s link with the Jewish prophets he met there.
There had to be some mechanism by which Arabs inherit the Jewish tradition, faith and holy place—Zion.
Indeed, early Muslim traditions describe how after the Dome of the Rock was built, the Arabs called in Jewish priests to purify the site and teach the Muslim community the biblical way to conduct services.
Dating from the late 600s and preserved in later anthologies, these accounts specify rituals relating to Jewish practices, including the type of clothing required for those conducting services, the days assigned for special requirements, the way they used incense, and more.
Thus, the Islamic record unabashedly shows the Muslim intention to revive worship as per the Temple of Solomon.
There is no reason for this to be controversial: why wouldn’t Muslims want to do that, given the Quran’s premise that Islam is the purified continuation and indeed restoration of the religion of Abraham, Moses, David, and Solomon? Jewish messianists tried to do the same thing a few decades earlier. Should these Arab followers of the prophets want anything less?
We can see it in the names Muslims use for this place. In Hebrew, the Temple is Bayt ha-Mikdash, meaning “the Holy House.” Likewise, esteemed ninth-century Muslim chronicler al-Tabari calls Jerusalem madīnat Bayt al-Maqdis, meaning “city of the Temple” with the term temple here being an exact Arabicized form of the Hebrew.
The Encyclopaedia of Islam concurs that in the first centuries of the faith, Muslims mostly used that Hebrew name: “the older writers call it commonly Bait al-Makdis which really meant the Temple (of Solomon).”
PARADISE
Its real importance isn’t just to do with the past, however. The Dome of the Rock is all about Paradise and especially the Paradise to come.
“Muslim eschatologists often asserted that Jerusalem was the site of the future earthly paradise, a Jewish notion that was taken up in Islam,” summarises Utrecht University’s Christian Robert Lange in his survey of Islamic eschatology.
Certainly, early Muslim writers wrote effusively about Jerusalem’s heavenly connections. Here is a sampling of their assertions about Jerusalem: It is the closest place on Earth to heaven, the closest to Allah’s throne, the place where heaven and Earth meet. A tree of the Garden of Eden (the Tree of Life) is said to support the foundation itself and the rock is the entrance gate—there is nowhere closer to Paradise than this. Praying in Jerusalem is like praying in heaven. The rock is a Rock of Paradise, the centre of global geography. On Judgment Day, the angel Israfil will blow his trumpet standing on this rock to call humankind to its fate.
Moreover, everything about the Dome of the Rock’s architecture references Paradise, from the ubiquitous Tree of Life in the ceramics, to the Dome’s inscriptions, which preach the coming Day of Judgment and resurrection.
Writing in the Islamic Quarterly, Carolanne Mekeel-Matteson observed that while Christian architecture in Jerusalem commemorates eschatological events that have been fulfilled—that is, the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ—in the Dome of the Rock, Muslims refer to events awaiting fulfilment in the End Time:
“In the first great structure of Islam, the commemoration is eschatological and thus points to the future…” It is about “the Resurrection, Judgment, and final rule of God upon earth.”
A MI’RAJ
But what about Mecca and Medina? Aren’t they more important?
I’m sure they are to some, but Jews and Muslims aren’t fighting over Mecca and Medina.
Also, it isn’t correct to think of the holy Islamic cities as a hierarchy, the three sacred places of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem stand together, with Jerusalem representing things to come.
The Quran says that in bridging Earth and heaven, the Mi’raj connects Mecca with Jerusalem, such that they are inextricable from one another: “Exalted is He who took His Servant by night from al-Masjid al-Haram [Mecca] to al-Masjid al-Aqsa, [Jerusalem] whose surroundings We have blessed.”
AL AQSA
This al-Aqsa is familiar to anyone who follows news of the conflict in the Middle East.
Iran and its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, routinely use this term to refer to the sacred mount. To think of the al-Aqsa mosque building alone as “al-Aqsa” is incorrect. The intention of the builder was a continuum of sacred space that included the Dome of the Rock and the whole mount. The mosque is named after the place, not the place after the mosque.
Certainly before the building was built, at the time of Jerusalem’s conquest by Muhammad’s followers, and for centuries thereafter, al-Aqsa always meant the whole Temple Mount.
Writing in the Routledge Handbook on Jerusalem (highly recommended) Muslim scholar Suleiman Ali Mourad cites preeminent early Islamic historian al-Tabari (d. 923). Al-Tabari described the entry of caliph ‘Umar to the Temple Mount saying that he “entered the mosque.” Of course, there was not yet any such building; ‘Umar was the caliph who conquered Jerusalem, taking it from Christendom.
Al-Tabari’s language is persistent: the caliph came to “the gate of the mosque” and “the gate was opened for him.” Quoting professor Mourad, “Again, there was no such thing as a mosque there when ‘Umar purportedly visited the Temple Mount. So, what did he enter and what gate was opened for him? The only logical explanation is that the gate was the entryway to the Temple Mount area, and the mosque signifies the entire Haram. Therefore, when early Muslim scholars spoke of the Aqsa Mosque, they often meant the entire Temple Mount as a sacred religious space.”
In other words, Zion.
MIMESIS
My point here is this: Just as Muhammad was bringing Arabs into the biblical tradition of prophets and dreams of last things, the Christians and Jews of the era set a poor precedent by treating the revelation with which they were entrusted as a matter of earthly power and politics focused on Zion.
With Christians and Jews fighting over the Temple Mount in the 600s, no wonder then that the Arabs who called themselves al-muʼminūn (the believers) promptly mounted a campaign, liberated Zion for God and built the Dome of the Rock.
To review: the first political Zionist entity was Roman Christendom, which held Jerusalem from Constantine’s time until that single Jewish reconquest during the reign of Heraclius. This fighting between Jews and Christians in turn inspired the new Arab believers to political Zionism, seeing themselves as Abraham’s most worthy and faithful children. It’s worth noting that at the time of ‘Umar’s conquest, the new believers did not yet call themselves Muslims, they called themselves simply “believers”.
This is a picture of three children, two fighting over a ball, making the third child want it too. It is this mimetic dynamic that still rocks the world today.
RINSE AND REPEAT
Naturally, the loss of Jerusalem to these Arabians was regarded by Christians as one of the woes of the End Times. From that point, the Byzantine Christians entered a semi-permanent state of waiting for divine intervention. Setbacks and losses at the hands of heretics who denied the divinity of Jesus can only mean one thing: it’s the last phase of history, antichrist prowls the earth, and Jesus will come soon. Always in the back of the mind is this idea that just before that, God will summon his earthly armies to help in a great battle over Jerusalem.
On the cusp of the new millennium, this kind of thinking became irresistible to Christians everywhere.
Even if no one knew quite what reaching the year 1000 meant, signs were rampant. The freshly converted Muslim Turks swept into Byzantine Christian Asia Minor from the Antichrist’s prophetic realm of Gog and Magog from the mid-900s. Their dizzying and decisive defeat of the Christian forces in 1071 led European and Middle Eastern Christians to the absolute conviction that Jesus’ return to Jerusalem and the fulfilment of his Kingdom was right around the corner. [See our book for citations and more detail.]
Soon after, on November 27, 1095, Pope Urban II called European Christians to a holy war. His expressed motivation was entirely religious and the goal was the conquest of Jerusalem. It was to be pilgrimage as battle.
THE FIRST CRUSADE
Of course, there were practical aspects too; in this project the pope found a way to bring peace to Europe through a common enemy: Islam. But mundane political considerations were not the heart of the matter. Pope Urban was a sincerely God-fearing man who grew up in a troubling environment of inter-Christian violence.
That the Antichrist invasion coincided with healing Christian divisions made sense to him. There was a logic to it: the days of tribulation were coming to an end, and the last battle would bring peace, first to Europe and then to the world.
He found a willing audience. The Europeans were well aware of Islam by this point, and they were acutely conscious of the Millennium. The calendar became a scale upon which history was weighed; each century felt heavier than the last, a phenomenon that is still with us.
Scholar of apocalypticism Norman Cohn adroitly summarised their anxiety: “The coming of Antichrist was even more tensely awaited. Generation after generation lived in constant expectation of the all-destroying demon whose reign was indeed to be lawless chaos… but was also to be the prelude to the longed-for consummation, the Second Coming and the Kingdom of the Saints.”
All this is reflected in Urban’s speech. Leading Crusaders remembered it in their diaries as a summons to fight the last battle and, of course, Zion was the heart of it:
“Jerusalem is the navel of the world,” Urban declared to the assembly. “This royal city… is now held captive by His enemies, and is in subjection to those who do not know God… Therefore, she seeks and desires to be liberated and does not cease to implore you to come to her aid.”
Pope Urban was a Zionist.
NOT AN ORDINARY CONFLICT
“Accordingly, undertake this journey for the remission of your sins, with the assurance of the imperishable glory of the kingdom of heaven,” Urban declaimed. His audience was ecstatic. They cried out, “God wills it! God wills it!”
Then the pope, “with eyes uplifted to heaven,” gave thanks to God and, lowering his hand to silence the ecstatic crowd, said, “Whoever, therefore, shall determine upon this holy pilgrimage… shall wear the sign of the cross of the Lord on his forehead, or on his breast.” The reason, Urban said, was that they were by this act fulfilling “the precept of the Lord, as He commands in the Gospel, ‘He that doth not take his cross and follow after me, is not worthy of me.'”
Venerable historian of the Crusades Steven Runciman summed up the Christian mindset: Medieval man was convinced that the Second Coming was at hand. He must repent while yet there was time and must go out to do good. The Church taught that sin could be expiated by pilgrimage and prophecies declared that the Holy Land must be recovered for the faith before Christ could come again… The distinction between Jerusalem and the New Jerusalem was not very clearly defined.
Of Pope Urban’s commission, he writes that many “believed that he was promising to lead them out of their present miseries to the land flowing with milk and honey of which the scriptures spoke. It would be hard; there were the legions of Antichrist to be overcome. But the goal was Jerusalem the golden.”
THE ASPECT OF TERROR
Achieving that immortal goal made ordinary life cheap. Cohn described acts of Crusader brutality as devotional: “In the eyes of the crusading pauperes the smiting of the Moslems and the Jews was to be the first act in that final battle which… was to culminate in the smiting of the Prince of Evil himself.”
I’ll spare you the gory details of the three-year campaign and jump ahead to the final battle. On July 15, 1099, the Crusaders breached the walls of Jerusalem. Mad with millenarian zeal, they hacked down every Muslim they encountered—man, woman, and child—and then, driving all the Jews into the synagogue, they burned it. Hardly a single Jew or Muslim was left alive in the city.
Eyewitness Crusader Raymond of Aguilers writes of Jerusalem’s capture by the army of God and of the wonders of beheading and burning alive the infidels.
The actions of these holy warriors 925 years ago appear identical to those of today’s Middle Eastern zealots:
But now that our men had possession of the walls and towers, wonderful sights were to be seen. Some of our men (and this was more merciful) cut off the heads of their enemies; others shot them with arrows, so that they fell from the towers; others tortured them longer by casting them into the flames. Piles of heads, hands, and feet were to be seen in the streets of the city.
But these were small matters compared to what happened at the Temple of Solomon, a place where religious services are ordinarily chanted. What happened there? If I tell the truth, it will exceed your powers of belief. So let it suffice to say this much, at least, that in the Temple and porch of Solomon, men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins. Indeed, it was a just and splendid judgment of God that this place should be filled with the blood of the unbelievers, since it had suffered so long from their blasphemies.
SOLOMON THE SECOND
Of course, Muslims retook the city soon (in less than a century). Meanwhile the Ottoman Turks consolidated their position toward establishing their leader as the Caliph and successor of Muhammad.
In the 1400s they took the Christian capital of Constantinople and converted the mother church of Hagia Sophia into a mosque.
Selim the Grim then unified the holy cities—Constantinople, Mecca, and Jerusalem for the first time.
The sacred relics and signia of Muhammad and his companions came to the new seat of Islamic authority, Topkapı Palace, where they remain to this day, awaiting a new Caliph (the last one was deposed just after the First World War).
Muslims viewed this as especially important. Selim’s son, Süleyman was named after biblical Solomon, builder of the first Temple on Zion. This new Solomon understood what his duty was: to fulfil prophecy and prepare for the Judgment Day. Central to living up to his name was restoring Jerusalem to its full former glory.
Süleyman’s work was motivated by the fast-approaching Day of Judgment.
A MUSLIM MILLENNIAL MOMENT
Gülru Necipoğlu, a highly awarded Turkish scholar and expert on Islamic architecture, points out in detail the way millennial dates cast their magic spell over the Süleyman and his subjects.
First, you may wonder, what millennium was there in the 1500s? Well, the Islamic calendar dates from Anno Hegirae (AH), the year of Muhammad’s migration from Mecca to Medina. So Süleyman’s is the tenth and what was to be the final century of the era, the time when a messianic final caliph was supposed to conquer the world and prepare it for Judgment Day.
As Süleyman ascended the throne in 926 AH and ruled until 973 AH, all signs pointed to him.
This new Solomon dedicated his life to restoring and preparing Jerusalem. The walls you see today are his. Prominent inscriptions from his time explicitly call him “the second Solomon,” linking his work on the Temple Mount with the Temple’s original Jewish builder.
He poured all his energy, wealth, and time into the city, sprucing it up for Jesus and Israfil’s imminent arrival.
As Necipoğlu notes, “The tenth and foremost ruler of the House of Osman thus claims to be the divinely appointed messianic renewal of religion and justice in the tenth and last century of the Muslim era, Süleyman continued until the end of his life to refurbish the Dome of the Rock, which marked the future site of the Last Judgment.”
Süleyman the Magnificent was a Zionist.
THE OCEANS BLUE
A wholly more unexpected Zionist of this period is Christopher Columbus.
Few are aware that Columbus crossed the seas hoping to fund a new holy war to retake Jerusalem.
But this was his well-documented motivation, the culmination of a long career battling Muslims as a man who firmly believed he lived in the last days.
Here again, we tend to remember the material consequences while forgetting that what personally motivated Columbus was the world to come.
His crew included Arabic and Hebrew speakers, which he would need to accomplish the venture. He thought he was heading to India where he would meet a prophesied king who would then amass an army and march with him to Jerusalem.
As we know, that didn’t work out so well. There was that whole new continent in the way, a fact that actually took some time for him to digest.
After much strife and turmoil, Columbus returned to Europe where he lived to complete his life-long project: not a voyage, but a compendium of End Time prophetic literature, The Book of Prophecies.
He began this work as a young man, scouring the prophetic scriptures and biblical genealogies to determine exactly when the end would come. Naturally, he calculated it would be very soon.
His example is not isolated. Puritan and other immigrants to North America saw the entire enterprise of the New World in terms of expanding the Christian domain. For example, Harvard president Increase Mather is typical of the English-speaking Americans to come.
Mather wrote with considerable influence about the imminent demise of Ottoman antichrist Islam and the return of the Jews to Jerusalem so that Jesus could come again.
Zionists all.
MODERN TIMES
By the late nineteenth century, prominent British and American Christians began to see that they may have a hand in hastening the day of the Lord by helping Jews return to Zion.
It wasn’t a new idea—Columbus had the same idea and Puritan theologians wrote about the same thing; even Isaac Newton studied the possibility.
What changed as the twentieth century approached was the scale of information dissemination and the opportunity afforded by growing American power. A pivotal figure was William Blackstone, author of the 1878 mega-bestseller Jesus is Coming.
Blackstone was a volcanic and passionate Zionist, wealthy and politically well-connected. He was also exceptionally persuasive.
Having secured the backing of banking magnates J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, he set his energies to lobbying then president Benjamin Harrison in support of a Jewish state.
This was history’s first pro-Israel lobby, started in 1891. Let that sink in: this is six years before Theodore Herzl, the father of modern Jewish Zionism, published his work, The Jewish State.
That’s how deeply the idea is embedded in the Western Christian identity, and it is quite possible that there would have been no Jewish political Zionism without it. (It’s clear that some important contemporary Jewish Zionist pioneers took their cues from these Christians.)
This was no fringe movement either. Even President Woodrow Wilson—a devout believer—came under Blackstone’s influence through the president’s Kentucky-born Jewish appointee to the Supreme Court, Louis D. Brandeis. A pillar of progressive social reform and godfather to modern privacy and free-speech laws, “the people’s lawyer” was also a leading Zionist and a big fan of Blackstone’s efforts on behalf of the Jewish people. Surprising to us today, on the political spectrum, Jewish Zionism was at this time a progressive project.
CHRISTMAS PRESENT
Wilson was not alone: Christian lovers of Zion in the United Kingdom dominated British foreign policy around the time of the First World War. British Prime Minister Lloyd George noted of his Baptist upbringing, “we had been trained even more in Hebrew history than in the history of our own country.” In fact, he confessed, “I could tell you all the kings of Israel. But I doubt whether I could have named half a dozen of the kings of England, and not more of the kings of Wales.”
This surely impacted the prime minister’s decision making around General Allenby’s campaign against the Muslim Ottomans in the Holy Land during the war.
It was under his administration that Britain issued the Balfour Declaration, the British government’s support for the establishment of a “National Home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. His government further pledged Britain to “use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of that object.”
BEST ENDEAVOURS
Those best endeavours included the reconquest of Jerusalem.
The triumph of General Allenby (also a believer) at the Battle of Armageddon in the Palestine campaign, and his capture of Jerusalem from the Ottoman Caliphate, galvanised Christian Zionists who saw a return of Jews to Zion as the necessary prerequisite of the return of Christ.
This was the first time in 700 years that Jerusalem was not ruled by Muslims.
Despite a warning from the Ministry of Information about the danger of upsetting British Muslims, the government and popular press presented the Palestine campaign as a continuation of the Crusades. Books like the Khaki Crusaders, The Modern Crusaders, The Last Crusade, With Allenby’s Crusaders and The Romance of the Last Crusade all chose to tell the story of Jerusalem’s recapture in those terms. The Department of Information released an early documentary during the war titled The New Crusaders: With the British Forces on the Palestine Front. Church bells rang out across Christian lands when Jerusalem was “liberated from tyranny” (to quote Allenby).
It happened on the first day of Hanukkah and two weeks before Christmas. (Lloyd George had commanded General Allenby to take Jerusalem “as a Christmas present” for the British people.) Coming just a few weeks after the Balfour Declaration, Jews regarded the event as a Hanukkah miracle.
FOR MUSLIMS ALSO A SIGN
Just as important for us to understand is that Muslims saw it that way too, if not as a Hanukkah miracle, nonetheless as a sign of eschatological significance. How could they not? This was Jerusalem.
In fact, it is a fundamental tenet of the Muslim Brotherhood and Brotherhood-inspired political Islam that all Western machinations in the Middle East are acts of the Crusaders. (Brotherhood offshoots include Hamas and, despite it being Shiite, the Iranian Revolution; the ideology of the Brothers is the foundation of all modern Islamic political and militant movements.)
The Brotherhood marked the anniversary the World War One Picot-Sykes agreement thus: “A century has passed since the secret agreement signed on May 17, 1916, by the French diplomat François Georges-Picot with Britain’s representative Mark Sykes,” notes the MB’s spokesman:
The treaty was devised to partition and share Ottoman Empire areas, the last Islamic Caliphate, with the help of local allies who lusted after power, traitors who betrayed their Arab identity and Islam—their faith.
The occupiers, says the MB, “broke the Islamic Caliphate.” Therefore the Muslim Brotherhood strives to “restore the soul of the Islamic homelands” and free them from “a secular Westernizing plot that still works its way among us.”
The Hamas Charter repeatedly refers to the Crusaders too.
And if it is unclear that the Crusades is an ongoing experience for modern Muslims, just consider Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. As thousands made plans to visit Turkey to remember those lost in the Battle of Gallipoli, Mr. Erdoğan urged vigilance:
The Crusades were not finished nine centuries ago in the past! Do not forget, the [World War One] Gallipoli campaign was a Crusade!
JIHAD IN ISTANBUL
Hagia Sophia serves as a barometer in all this. It was the glorious church of Byzantine Christianity, then converted to a mosque after the Ottoman conquest in the 1400s. But when the secular state abolished the Caliphate after the First World War, they converted the mosque into a museum. (Atatürk, founder of modern secular Turkey and deposer of the Islamic Caliphate is one of those “local allies who lusted after power…who betrayed…Islam” in the eyes of the groups like the Muslim Brotherhood.)
In 2020, Erdoğan converted it once again into a mosque, describing it as the first step in restoring full Islamic control over Jerusalem.
President Erdoğan made that point again while opening the October 2020 session of Turkey’s parliament:
Knowing that this struggle will continue until the Judgment Day, we will always be prepared, always strong and always vigilant.
He uses the Turkish word mücadele (mujah-deh-leh) for struggle. It is formed from the Arabic word jihad. The struggle, or jihad toward Judgment Day, he emphasized, is over Jerusalem:
“Here I underline the following point. The Jerusalem matter is not an ordinary geopolitical problem for us…. Jerusalem is our city, it is a city belonging to us.”
He had expanded on Jerusalem’s meaning in another official statement in 2017. It is a succinct summary of the city’s importance to Islamic eschatology, which emphasises Jerusalem as the place connecting earth and heaven:
Time flows in Jerusalem, not according to the cycles we know, but in its own course. Jerusalem is passion, longing. The illumination of humanity’s eye, the bliss of its heart. Jerusalem is the closest place on earth to Allah’s heavenly throne. Because Jerusalem is the second stop of the Isra and the first step of Miraj; The first qibla of the ummah, Jerusalem, the city of the Prophets, is the holy glory and honour of all Muslims. The messages of the Prophet about Jerusalem are that transparent and clear. For this reason, every day Jerusalem is under occupation and captive under the Crusaders’ dirty feet, shame is brought upon Muslims. Until he freed again Jerusalem Salahadin Eyyubi’s eyes knew no comfort of sleep.
President Erdoğan is a Zionist.
MODERN MUSLIM ZIONISM
To sum up the Muslim point of view: At the end of the First World War, Christians again controlled Jerusalem. An international mandate for Jewish return was secured. In a few years, the Islamic caliphate was abolished for the first time ever. The caliphal realm was divided up into never-before existing nation states like Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Turkey. (That’s the dreaded Picot-Sykes agreement.)
These new states, along with Egypt and Iran, became the domains of secular despots who responded to the whistle of either America or the Soviet Union. After the Second World War, the demise of Islam’s power was complete, and the Jewish state of Israel was a fact.
All this was for Jews and Christians an indication of the End Time. That much is commonly understood. We must also understand, however, that Muslims saw it same way. They viewed their loss of Jerusalem and the caliphate and the corrupting secularization of their society as a sign of end times tribulation. And so too, for them, the Jewish return to Zion was a sign. All that remained was for Allah to raise Islam up in divine retribution and restoration of Muslim rule so that the Day of Judgment might come. This is what President Erdoğan is talking about and it is what all modern political Islam is about.
From Iran to Hezbollah and from the Islamic State to the Muslim Brotherhood it is all a form of Zionism—it is still all about Jerusalem’s holy mount. It is a zero sum game.
IT’S NOT POLITICS AS USUAL
Why isn’t this considered more seriously in addressing Middle East conflicts? Partly it is because Western historians and journalists generally avoid religion as a cause even in our own stories. We live in a materialist society that looks for problems and solutions rooted in material issues and mundane life. Experts should listen carefully to Mr. Erdoğan when he says, “The Jerusalem matter is not an ordinary geopolitical problem for us.” He means it.
Materialism is not what drives politics in the Middle East.
Neither is it about human rights.
Conflict in the Middle East is not about having a Palestinian state.
It is about Jerusalem. If not for the desire to possess it, the Palestinian problem would be something to resolve between secular materialist leaders in Jordan, Israel and the Palestinians. But they are not the drivers of action here.
And the only reason for Iran’s involvement in the development and arming of Hamas and Hezbollah is its own vision of global Islamic dominance and Jerusalem’s liberation from what politicians and press across the Middle East call the Zionist-Crusader alliance. (Coincidentally, I was watching CNN-Türk an hour ago, and that’s exactly the term the talking head used—“Zionist-Crusader alliance”.)
Of course it is a mimetic problem, so the corresponding messianic elements in Israeli politics dominate the agenda there with their own vision of apocalyptic liberation. Theirs is a Zionism pitted against the Islamic one.
This clash of prophetic Zionisms is where the conflict lies.
A CHOSEN PERSON
That’s not a hopeful conclusion, so I’d like to end this with a few words on the first Zionist and what he can tell us about being the Chosen People, a status that Jews, Christians and Muslims claim to hold.
Where does this idea come from? Not surprisingly, it is Abraham, the father of Jewish, Christian and Muslim beliefs.
He is iconic of the Mesopotamian world order. He grew up in the original version of state hierarchy, with its intractable militarism, violence and international conflict and its systematic slavery, mind-enslaving propaganda and more.
If we need saving, it’s this Babylonian world order we need saving from—it is the prototype for what any modern-day progressive or conservative would say is wrong with the world. It’s as simple as that.
GO OUT!
Abraham lives as an entrenched part of that system when we first meet him.
He is wealthy. His father was an international trader in the Mesopotamia hierarchy and part of the fraternity of the Moon God Sin. Abraham inherited all of this and was on a business trip between the three Moon God cities, Ur in lower Mesopotamia, Harran midway in Upper Mesopotamia and Hazor in Canaan, which is modern-day Galilee in Israel.
It’s during his layover in Harran that Abraham hears a voice: “Now the LORD said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you… So Abram went, as the Lord had told him….” The New Testament’s Book of Hebrews reflects Jewish tradition on this, saying that Abraham “looked forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.”
Superficially, it may look like Abraham was still following in his father’s footsteps. And indeed, sojourns along this route were nothing new to a clan like theirs. When we met Abraham’s father Terah, he was on a well-worn path from Ur to Hazor in Canaan (with the Harran layover). Abraham is set to finish the third leg when he hears the voice.
It tells him he is no longer to identify with his gods and its culture, and that his next stop will be something not of his experience, insecure and unknowable.
PROMISED LAND
It is a call to insecurity, a call to faith.
He was to set out in the name of an unknown god who had no association with anything in the world system that had enriched him. “Go-you-forth from your land,” said the voice, “from your kindred, from your father’s house to the land that I will let you see.”
It’s all about coming out, undoing, and letting go of certainty to enter something unknown and as yet unseen: “the land I will let you see.”
Let’s break down the vocabulary. When Abraham heard the command to leave his “land,” he heard eretz, meaning “territory” or “country.” A modern example shows what it means: the State of Israel is Eretz Yisrael. This, then, is about political identity; he would be leaving his country, his citizenship.
He would also have to leave his kindred, or môledeth—his people, his culture.
There is more. He must leave the bayt or “house” of his father, which of course is the same word as “temple” and carries with it all the weighty spiritual issues associated with the ancestral dwelling. He would leave behind his ethos, his framework of reality, including this all-important house. It was not an easy ask.
MUSLIMS CHRISTIANS AND JEWS AGREE
Muslims, Christians, and Jews see this as a great act of faith, reflected in the words of the New Testament, which recalls that Abraham went forth “not knowing whither he went.”
Henceforth he would pass from place to place on a day-by-day basis, harkening to a voice not connected to any conventionally known support structure—economic, legal, or social.
He lived each day on faith alone. Abraham refers to himself as a stranger and wanderer. At seventy-five years of age, he had no itinerary, no destination, and crucially, no return ticket.
If it stopped there, we would not need to ask about the Chosen People. But as it happens, the voice added a footnote:
“I will make a great nation of you, and I will give-you-blessing and will make your name great. Be a blessing! I will bless those who bless you, he who reviles you, I will curse. All the clans of the soil will find blessing through you!”
A CHOSEN NOT-A-PEOPLE
Here Abraham gets a commission to become a nation or a people that as yet does not exist.
That new nation serves as an antidote to the Babylonian-style (and still new to the world) nation of violence and oppression which to this day characterises world politics. “All the clans of the soil will find blessing through you!”
Abraham’s nation was to be different—the whole point of his calling is to come out of the system and start a new non-Babylonian paradigm. This is something that so far eludes the planet, as Babylon’s archetype remains standard.
Nonetheless, this is Abraham’s destiny and his destination. But please note that it is not as an adversary to the nations of the global order; it is not as a scourge that God called him. To the contrary, it is explicitly as a blessing to them. The idea is to become a priestly nation and a light to the others, to speak to the nations of the world through his progeny.
EXCEPTIONAL?
That kind of exceptionalism is politically incorrect.
For progressive Christians and Jews, it is particularly delicate; we want to have moved past this regressive idea of a special people. And yet it is our exceptional Judeo-Christian ethics that allow us to become progressive in the first place.
Our progressive roots found nourishment in Jewish philosophical soil. If not for this, there would be no humanism—let alone the religion of Christianity that, for its many faults, is the foundation of modern liberal ideas.
Neither would there be Islam—the great force of equality in the Near East for over a millennium.
My advice for now: Don’t reject what the Hebrew tradition can teach us because it was exceptional.
And let’s be honest about our own exceptionalist attitudes. We like to pretend that we do not think of ourselves as special. Who are we kidding? Who doesn’t think that their liberalism or conservatism, socialism or capitalism, has the most reasonable solutions to the world’s problems? Don’t you think you can be a blessing?
Of course you do! So let the Jews be a blessing. Equality is not uniformity. In any family, there are roles and separate gifts; the equality comes from love and respect, not from identical characteristics, qualities, and skills. If my brother is a doctor, I’m glad he will bless me with his exceptional skills and know-how.
Sometimes we need a good Jewish doctor.
THE NUMBER OF THE GODS
This idea of calling Abraham’s descendants as a unique kind of nation appears elsewhere in a peculiar passage of the Hebrew Bible:
“When the Most High apportioned the nations, when he divided humankind, he fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the gods; the LORD’S own portion was his people, Jacob his allotted share.”
Upon first reading, this Hebrew line comes off like an unsophisticated relic, something that the Bible’s editors missed while proofreading. (Indeed, it was re-written and nearly lost to us, saved by the confirming text of the Dead Sea Scrolls!)
Now, after decades of contemplation, I’ve come to think of this as a profound insight.
What is the writer talking about? He is referring to the Tower of Babel, when one language and nation split into many, each nation shared out “according to the number of the gods.”
Primitive foolishness, it might seem, until we remember that cultures and identities are ruled by ideas, and that culture is every bit as powerful as gods were thought to be. Ideas give life and take it away, they enrich and impoverish.
Looking past the archaic nomenclature, we see a striking sociological vision in this ancient line of Hebrew: the gods represent named archetypes of consciousness, the monikers that categorise identities, affiliations, and cultures.
Revisiting our discussion of “the Market” and “the People” in my previous post will help make clear what our scribe refers to as “the gods.”
We may also consider words that end in “-ism” and “-ist” and “-ity,” all of which bear special scrutiny in this regard, as they indicate realms governed by overarching concepts and proprietary language—our identities, affinities, nations, and tribes gathered under a name. It’s the stuff we kill each other over.
GODS? REALLY?
So the statement is not so much primitive as it is fundamental—a truth laid bare in primordial terms. We modern materialists are less aware of the god-like archetypes that control us. That’s not a sign of sophistication, it only means that we are more obtuse than our ancestors. These ancient people were tuned into the fact that they were beholden to such things, while we, as staunch materialists, remain oblivious to the disembodied powers that we serve.
The truth is that we are absolutely bewitched by our gods.
If you are recoiling at the notion, rest assured that we are not talking about human-like deities.
I’m talking about the real social and ideological structures that we create, forget we have made, and then serve blindly.
When someone says “we,” meaning their country, nation, culture, or as is common now, their social media–defined micro-culture, they are evincing the programming of their collective archetype, their “nation” as defined by their inviolable identity, their “god.” It is completely reasonable to think of these as gods, for they dictate and define the behaviour of those under their banner, and we do serve them, often in our time defending them with violence.
YAHWEH’S SHARE
Fine. It’s a great insight! But there’s more.
Our wise writer discerns a symmetry to do with Abraham’s promise to be a blessing to those very nations thus assigned to the gods.
Abraham’s heir, Jacob (Israel), did not belong to any of those gods. He was assigned to become “YHWH’s own portion” and to be YHWH’s “allotted share.”
While this also speaks of an overarching idea that maintains a constructed reality (a god), what regulates it is this as yet unknown transcendent YHWH. This is the non-material god of Abraham who is therefore also the God of Christians and Muslims. YHWH is not a normal name—not a noun, but a verb.
YHWH is a god who is not a god, an archetype for a nation that is not a nation.
It is an antithesis of the world system of inevitable violence and oppression.
PROMISED LAND
Along with this nation that is not a nation, and god that is not a god, there is a land that is not a land.
The Promised Land, or “the land I will show you,” is a phase of consciousness, for Abraham actually ended up exactly where he was headed in the first place. He wound up in Canaan.
It was how he lived in it that place that made it a land of promise.
For Abraham, it meant going to the place where his father served the Babylonian system and its ideals—just as he would have done anyway. But now he went to live there as a stranger. To be there, but not to be ofthere. To dwell there but and not to be secure there in the conventional sense of security, which presupposes material assurances and weapons for protection.
The Hebrew prophets often echo this theme too as they disavow and condemn Israel’s trust in armaments and urge them to live by faith alone.
“Alas for those who go down to Egypt for help and who rely on horses, who trust in chariots because they are many and in horsemen because they are very strong, but do not look to the Holy One of Israel or consult YHWH!… If you do not stand firm in faith, you shall not stand at all.”
Abraham lived this out. He was required to be present in the system so as to pay careful attention to every delusory facet, point by point and lie by lie, to see things as they really are and to live in a fully conscious, awakened state. The patriarch needed to reach that liminal place of promise by walking a path through the darkness of his worldly fate (as do we all).
FREE PALESTINE!
That is where the Promised Land—Zion—exists. It is not real estate to possess, conquer, and rule. It is not a political philosophy to convert others to. By the time he got to Canaan, Abraham had learned that home is not a house, not a temple and its ideals—it is an eternal and transcendent space.
Stephen, the first Christian martyr, proclaimed this with his dying breath.
Abraham, he said, left Harran understanding that his offspring would not inherit a conventional legacy. God “did not give him any of it as a heritage,” Stephen reminded his listeners, who “became enraged and ground their teeth at Stephen” and dragged him away and stoned him to death.
Why were they so angry?
Context is important. The men assembling to stone Stephen were zealots for whom the square footage of the Promised Land had become a sign of concrete, political salvation.
Their land was under Roman occupation. They dedicated their lives to getting the Land back under their control—it was all about “Free Palestine!”
No longer understanding Abraham’s quest, Stephen reminded them that their patriarch’s earthly security included “not even a foot’s length” of ground.
NOT EVEN A FOOT’S LENGTH
Who today among any of the Abrahamic religions in Jerusalem understands that?
Abraham’s life-long commitment to homelessness strengthens this message. In the lovely words of the 1599 Geneva Bible, “By faith he abode in the land of promise, as in a strange country, as one that dwelt in tents.”
I need not remind the reader that the idea of “house” is about more than shelter; it has always been a temple and an anchor that preserves sanity. For Abraham to eschew the eternal security of the ancestral sacred house—to make himself homeless—was an enormous decision.
We understand, then, that Abraham charts the Promised Land in another dimension. Citizenship in a country or possession of real estate does not define it. Recalling again the words of Hebrews, Abraham “looked forward to the city…whose architect and builder is God,” we see once more the contrast with Babylon, whose enormous architecture stood as a claim of eternal permanence, representing every kind of human construction—social reality, ideology, religion, power and politics.
Though Abraham resided in Babylon-aligned Canaan, he lived in tents to show his understanding of the lie of civilisation’s promise. He lived in the city with heavenly foundations. And there, he is truly at home.
THANKS, BUT NO
All this helps us understand how the Jewish people became chosen. And it shows that to be chosen is not about political power.
Furthermore, despite the people’s failure to live in the revealed truth, the people nonetheless carried the truth forward, often through self-criticism. Sometimes it comes as an object lesson in the chosen people’s struggle to live up to the calling. Indeed, most of the Hebrew Bible is exactly that.
One last note, then, on Chosen People status and how failure can serve that end. It is the story of Abraham’s descendants struggling against their calling as a nation not supposed to be like the other nations.
The story occurs at a time when Abraham’s descendants did not yet possess a state—they had no political structure, borders or kings.
And they were getting tired of it. In this scene, the people accost their spiritual guide Samuel to demand that he get out of the way. They want a new political and social system, and they want it right now, consequences be damned. They want nothing less than assimilation into the world order: “Appoint for us, then, a king to govern us, like other nations,” they demanded.
This was the un-nation, not part of the system, now clamouring to be exactly like the others.
Shocked, Samuel sought the voice of the LORD and was told he had no recourse. It’s the catch-22 of democracy: sometimes the people choose what’s bad for them. “Listen to the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them,” says YHWH.
LIKE OTHER NATIONS
This story is a pedagogic device, the moral clear: though blessed with the Abrahamic revelation, the people were chronic backsliders. “They have rejected me from being king over them,” YHWH tells Samuel, “just as they have done to me, from the day I brought them up out of Egypt to this day, forsaking me and serving other gods.”
This last judge warns the Israelites, telling them exactly what being like the other nations means:
“These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots.”
It goes on and on: He will take your daughters, he will take the best of your fields and vineyards, he will take your grain and give it all to his soldiers and courtiers. He will take the best of your livestock. He will make you his slaves. “And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the LORD will not answer you in that day.”
Despite the warning, “the people refused to listen to the voice of Samuel; they said, ‘No! but we are determined to have a king over us, so that we also may be like other nations.'”
GROUPTHINK
This was groupthink at its worst, a veritable Twitter storm of crowd-driven stupidity. But bound by the will of the masses, and cancelled from his position of judge, Samuel anoints the first-ever king to rule among Abraham’s descendants.
His name is Saul, meaning “asked for”—as in, “you asked for it!”
Right off the bat there are problems. Saul was plagued by demons and soon Samuel brought news that his days were numbered. “Because you have rejected the word of the LORD, he has also rejected you from being king.” Saul’s dynasty collapses entirely, with his sons falling in battle to the pork-eating Philistines, and the king committing suicide.
The remainder of the Hebrew Bible is a litany of such calamities. The children of Abraham fail to fulfil their calling as the antidote to all the power and violence of Mesopotamia.
But it is as a political entity that they fail, for by its very nature such a thing fails this calling. The calling itself does not fail. It is still God’s—it is God’s choice, not theirs or ours.
And so, as a failing people, they bear the message forward, preserve the revelation and thus still fulfil the calling in the midst of failure.
NOT OUR CHOICE IS IT?
It is God’s choice that makes the Jewish people chosen. And the choice succeeds: we do have the revelation.
Jesus bore it and passed to the Gentiles including the Arabs who gave us Islam. The work of God continues. If we want to live in the Promised Land, we won’t entangle ourselves in the false promises of mundane land and power politics, nor of security and material attachments. Beware. Wake up. Go forth in faith to the city whose foundations transcend the structured fantasy of our present Mesopotamian-style systems.
True Zionism is the journey of Abraham’s faith.
MORE HOPE (I HOPE)
Concluding this, I should mention another return to Zion. It is The Reconciliation Walk, a journey to Zion made by thousands of Christians who shadowed the Crusader path on a pilgrimage of reconciliation and peace.
Their approach to Zion came 900 years after the first Crusaders made their way to the “Temple and porch of Solomon.” As we read, those Christians, in their own words, “rode in blood up to their knees” in a “splendid judgment of God….” They said that Zion’s mount was “filled with the blood of the unbelievers, since it had suffered so long from their blasphemies.” Theirs has been the template for Zionism ever since.
It was exactly nine centuries to the day after this horror that the Reconciliation Walkers concluded their work in Jerusalem on July 15, 1999.
The context for this effort was a period of burgeoning religious violence that would culminate in Sept 11, 2001. To address this, the pilgrims hoped to set a new example by bringing with them a confession: Christians had often misrepresented the message and calling of Jesus and the Hebrew prophets—they asked for forgiveness and friendship in charting a new way forward.
It was a large gesture, but a simple one.
Some said it was naïve. What was needed was more politics, the critics said.
I say let’s have more of that naïve example—this was one of the best expressions of Zionism in modern memory, and one that truly understood that this is not a matter of ordinary politics.