The Joseph Story Ep. 6.
Jewish scholar Yair Zakovitch says that the book of Genesis is the Table of Contents for the Bible. Everything is contained Genesis in embryonic form, it is the genetic code of the Bible.
The more I study Genesis the more I’m convinced he’s right. I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration to say that most every point Paul makes in his letters can be made on the basis of texts from Genesis.
Perhaps Paul’s most important point is taken from a line in the Joseph story.
In Romans 9–11 Paul is making an intricate argument about God’s faithfulness to his people Israel, despite their unfaithfulness, and he’s trying to show that God’s including the gentiles in the new covenant is consistent with God’s original promises to Israel. Far from nullifying God’s promises to Israel, it is actually by bringing the gentiles into the covenant that God is keeping his promises to Israel.
And at the climax of this argument in Romans 11 Paul gives a famous–or maybe infamous–line:
Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the fullness of the nations has come in, and in this way all Israel will be saved.
(Rom 11:25-26)
Many commentators on the book of Romans throughout the centuries have been baffled by what Paul might mean by this. What does it mean that all Israel will be saved? Who does “Israel” refer to?
What makes this more difficult to answer is that it is a fact of history that there are a multitude of names to refer to the people from this region: Jew, Israelite, Hebrew, Israeli, etc.
Do those all mean the same thing? New Testament scholar Jason Staples has made the definitive case that the answer to this is no.1 Although for the better part of the last two centuries we have treated the main biblical terms “Jew” and “Israelite” as interchangeable, they are not used that way in Scripture (or ancient historical texts like Josephus).
To what does the name Israel refer?
First, it refers to the patriarch Jacob after God changed his name to Israel.
Second, it is applied to the children of Israel/Jacob. Therefore, it comes to refer to the twelve-tribe totality of “Israel.”
But something complicating happens in the history of this people. They split in two. The North secedes from the southern kingdom. The North (which was comprised of ten tribes) retained the name Israel, while the South (comprised of Judah, Benjamin, and Levi) took the name of its most prominent tribe Judah.
After the split between the two kingdoms, those from the North were called Israelites while those from the South began to be referred to as Jews after the tribe of Judah (Yehudim in Hebrew and Ioudaioi in Greek).
This, of course, means that after the split the terms “Jew” and “Israelite” are not interchangeable names for the same group of people, but rather, as Staples has shown, the term Jew is a subset of Israel.
In other words, all Jews are Israelites, but not all Israelites are Jews.
The term Israel can refer to the twelve-tribe totality but it can also more specifically refer to the northern kingdom (depending on the book of the Bible you are reading and the context of the passage).
Think of it this way: “Kansan” is a subset of “American.” All Kansans are Americans but not all Americans are Kansans.
And yet, as Staples has pointed out, “Countless scholars [today] regularly alternate between these terms for stylistic reasons.”2 Simply put, we’ve gotten very confused over a pretty simple, but important fact.3
If we fast forward in the story to 722 BC we find another complicating factor. The northern kingdom of Israel was conquered and carried into exile by the Assyrians. The ten northern tribes were never seen again. All that remained were the southern tribes—or, those that were called Jews from Judah—which included people from the tribes Judah, Benjamin, and Levi.
To complicate it once again, this means that while all Benjaminites are Jews, not all Jews are Benjaminites.
So, we can see that the question of who “all Israel” refers to In Romans 11 is not as straightforward as we might imagine.
By “all Israel” Paul almost certainly does not simply mean “all Jews” because there are some Israelites who are not Jews. For example, the Samaritans of Paul’s day did not claim to be Jews but descendants of the northern tribes of Joseph (Ephraim and Manasseh). The Samaritans’ claim was disputed, but the disputation was never over whether they were Jews but whether they were Israelites. In other words, Samaritans are Israelites but not Jews.
The key to answering the question of who Paul means by “all Israel” comes in the other odd phrase he uses in the same sentence. And this line is taken directly from the Joseph story.
Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the fullness of the nations has come in, and in this way all Israel will be saved.
(Rom 11:25-26
The only other place that this odd phrase appears in Scripture is in Genesis at the end of the Joseph story. Jacob/Israel is an old man and about to die, so Joseph brings his two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim, to Jacob so that he can bless them. In a surprising twist, Jacob gives the firstborn rights to the younger son Ephraim. Jacob says that Ephraim’s seed will become “the fullness of the nations.”
Ephraim, of course, becomes the prominent tribe from the northern kingdom. The kings from the North come from the tribe of Ephraim. This means that when the northern tribes are carried away by the Assyrians it is “Ephraim” who is, as Leviticus 26:33 puts it, “scattered among the nations.”
The consistent promise of the prophets is that God will act to restore all Israel—meaning the twelve-tribe totality. Which means he will have to regather the northern Israelites (usually referred to as “the house of Israel” or “the house of Ephraim/Joseph”) who have been scattered among the nations. Here’s just one example from Zechariah:
“I will strengthen the house of Judah, and I will save the house of Joseph, and will bring them back because I have compassion on them. They will be as though I had not rejected them for I am the Lord their God and I will answer them. Ephraim will be like a mighty man…”
(Zech 10:6–7)
What’s more stunning for many Christians today is that all the new covenant promises found in Jeremiah and Ezekiel where God promises to put his Spirit in his people and give them a new tender heart of flesh are made exclusively to Israel. The dry bones in the valley in Ezekiel’s vision are the dry bones of the house of northern Israel—those tribes that have been long gone for centuries.
So, why do gentile Christians read these passages and assume they are promises made to them? Now we are starting to feel why Paul received so much pushback.
Paul thinks that God has acted in one elegant, brilliant move to fulfill both Israel’s original calling to be a light to the nations and his promise that he would restore all Israel.
Paul, along with the other apostles, recognized that God’s Spirit was being poured out not only on Jews but on gentiles as well. Gentiles were receiving new, tender hearts of flesh with the Torah written on them. God was keeping his promise to Israel but in a completely surprising way.
Jews of Paul’s day knew the promise of the prophets was that God would regather his scattered people from among the nations. But they didn’t know how this would happen since the northern tribes had all dissolved. They had inter-married wherever they were taken into exile, so after more than eight centuries there was no trace of them left. They had, for all intents and purposes, become gentiles.
Then it must’ve hit Paul. God promised to resurrect the lost tribes of Israel, but he was doing it by bringing in the gentiles/nations because that’s where the northern tribes had been scattered.
This is why the resurrected Jesus commissions his disciples in Acts 1:8 to take the good news to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. God is restoring Israel—resurrecting the lost northern tribes—by bringing in the nations into which they assimilated.
So “all Israel” looks something like the chart below—where “exiled Israelites” or “Ephraim’s seed”—have become “the fullness of the nations.”
Remember Paul says, “Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the fullness of the nations has come in, and in this way all Israel will be saved.” This is how God is saving “all Israel”—by bringing in the nations.
In class we connected this back to the Joseph story.
Here you can read through a substack post from Jason Staples himself, responding to a question I put to him a couple months back on Jesus, Judah, and the Joseph story.
(I especially like the line where he says, “Combs is, of course, exactly right.”)
I’m following the arguments made by Jason Staples in The Idea of Israel in Second Temple Judaism and Paul and the Resurrection of Israel: Jews, Former Gentiles, Israelites.
Staples, The Resurrection of Israel, p. 39.
In The Idea of Israel Staples goes to great lengths to show historically that the terms “Jew” and “Israelite” were never used interchangeably in Scripture or by ancient historians like Josephus.
