Israel

Israel is presented as the chosen nation raised from the faith of Abraham and placed within a long providential history of promise, enslavement, deliverance, law, worship, political decline, exile, and restoration. Its significance is not merely national: through Israel’s seed, the blessing promised to all nations moves toward the coming Messiah, while Israel’s repeated failures reveal the tension between divine covenant and human disobedience.

Formation and Covenant Origins

Israel’s history begins with the call of Abraham, whom God summons from his father’s house, kindred, and false gods beyond the Euphrates. Abraham obeys without knowing the destination, leaving Ur of Chaldea and crossing toward Haran with herds, flocks, servants, and the wealth entrusted to God’s promise rather than to settled possession. He reaches Canaan and pitches his tents around Shechem and the plain of Moreh, where the land is pledged to his descendants. The promised territory is imagined across a broad geography, from Hamath in the north to the southern desert and from Mount Hermon eastward to the western sea, with Jordan marking its eastern limit.

The covenant is larger than territorial inheritance. Abraham’s seed is to become the channel through which all nations are blessed, and that promised seed is identified with the deliverer who will bruise the Serpent’s head. Israel therefore enters the poem as a nation whose political and geographical existence is subordinate to a universal theological purpose. Its history is directed toward a future in which national descent becomes the vehicle of worldwide redemption.

The nation grows from Abraham’s grandson, who leaves Canaan with twelve sons and goes down into Egypt during a famine. Invited by a younger son who has risen to be second in Pharaoh’s realm, the family settles there and multiplies into a nation. A later king, fearing their numbers, converts resident guests into slaves and orders the killing of their male infants. Israel’s identity is thus formed through both descent and oppression: it is a people preserved under hostile rule until deliverance becomes necessary.

Deliverance and National Government

God sends Moses and Aaron to claim Israel from enslavement. Pharaoh is compelled through a sequence of judgments: the rivers become blood, frogs, lice, and flies invade the land, livestock perish, disease marks human bodies, hail and fire destroy the fields, locusts consume what remains, darkness covers Egypt for three days, and the firstborn die in a final midnight stroke. These wounds break the tyrant’s resistance, but his submission remains unstable. When he pursues the departing people, the sea swallows Pharaoh and his host while Israel passes between walls of water on dry ground under Moses’ rod.

The route to Canaan is deliberately not the shortest. Israel travels through the wilderness so that fear of immediate war will not drive the people back into Egyptian servitude, and so that a political order can be established before territorial settlement. There the twelve tribes are to found their government and choose a great senate, ruled by laws given by God from Mount Sinai amid thunder, lightning, and trumpets. The law encompasses civil justice and religious rites, making Israel both a political community and a liturgical people.

The Sinai order also depends on mediation. The direct voice of God is too terrible for mortal hearing, so the people ask Moses to report the divine will. He becomes a figure of mediation, introducing the office that will later be fulfilled more completely by the Messiah. Israel’s law is therefore not represented as an autonomous human constitution: its legitimacy descends from divine command, while Moses’ role shows that access to that command is organized through authorized intermediaries.

The Tabernacle gives this covenantal government a visible center. Israel receives a sanctuary of cedar overlaid with gold, containing the Ark and the records of the covenant, with a golden mercy-seat between two Cherubim and seven lamps representing the heavenly fires. A cloud rests over the Tent by day and a fiery gleam by night, except when the people journey. The nation’s political movement is consequently accompanied by sacred signs, and its passage toward the promised land is guided by an Angel.

Land, Warfare, and the Problem of Freedom

After the wilderness period, Israel is conducted toward Canaan, where it fights battles, destroys kings, and wins kingdoms. The promised land is not acquired through ordinary migration alone but through a combination of divine direction, military struggle, and covenantal identity. Israel’s possession of Canaan is tied to Abraham’s promise, yet the nation’s security remains conditional upon obedience rather than guaranteed by ancestry.

The history of Israel is repeatedly threatened by sin. The people who descend from Abraham can abandon the living God and bow to bestial gods, as earlier generations had done. Their idolatry is not an isolated religious error; it alters their political condition. When the Israelites forsake God’s altar, their heads are made to bow before contemptible enemies, and their military defeat becomes the outward counterpart of spiritual submission.

Israel’s later political history clarifies the poem’s distinction between liberty and domination. Humanity was given dominion over beasts, fish, and birds, but not the right of one human being to rule another as an absolute lord. Yet after the original lapse, true liberty is lost because reason is obscured or disobeyed; disordered desires and passions seize government within the person, and God permits violent rulers to enslave people outwardly. Tyranny is never excused by this judgment, but it appears as a consequence of inward servitude. Israel’s history becomes one of the principal arenas in which divine law, human freedom, national sin, and political coercion intersect.

Monarchy, Decline, and Exile

Israel eventually lives in Canaan under judges and then kings. When national sins interrupt public peace, God raises enemies against the people; when the nation repents, he saves it first through judges and later through kings. David, the second king, is renowned for piety and strength and receives an irrevocable promise that his royal throne will endure. From David’s line will come the Woman’s Seed, the figure anticipated in the promises to the Serpent, Abraham, and the nations.

David’s son Solomon is famous for wealth and wisdom and will enshrine the Ark, previously wandering in tents, within a glorious Temple. Yet the royal line is not presented as uniformly faithful. Some rulers are good, but the longer record is marked by idolatry and accumulated faults. The sacred institutions themselves become vulnerable to the corruption of those meant to serve them, and the nation’s sins eventually provoke God to withdraw his presence and expose the land, city, Temple, Ark, and holy objects to a conquering power.

The conqueror is Babylon, whose high walls appear in the poem as the site of confusion. Israel is carried into captivity for seventy years. Exile is both political dispossession and covenantal judgment: the nation loses its land and sanctuary because its public life has become inseparable from religious defection. Yet the punishment is not the end of the covenant. God remembers mercy and the promise sworn to David, and after the appointed period he brings the people back by the leave of their foreign kings.

On returning from Babylon, Israel first rebuilds the house of God and lives for a time in modest prosperity. Growth in wealth and population then produces faction. Dissension begins among the priests, whose calling should be peace, and their conflict pollutes the Temple. The leaders eventually seize the scepter, disregard David’s descendants, and surrender the rule to a stranger, thereby barring the true Anointed King from his inherited right. The nation’s institutional failure reaches its sharpest form when priestly guardianship becomes political seizure.

The Messiah and Universal Fulfillment

Despite Israel’s repeated reversals, its history remains the line through which the promised deliverer arrives. At the Messiah’s birth, a previously unseen star announces his coming and guides Eastern sages to offer incense, myrrh, and gold. An Angel tells simple shepherds where he is born, and a choir of Angels sings while they keep watch by night. His mother is a virgin, while his father is the Power of the Most High; he will ascend a hereditary throne, extend his reign across the earth, and make his glory reach the Heavens.

Israel therefore has a double narrative function. It is a concrete nation with tribes, territory, institutions, wars, rulers, priests, captivity, and restoration, but it is also the historical vessel of a promise that exceeds national boundaries. Its law exposes sin without finally removing it, while its sacrifices appear as shadows awaiting a more precious blood, offered for the unjust. The movement is from strict law to a better covenant, from ceremonial types to truth, from servile fear to filial acceptance, and from works of law to works of faith.

The nation’s story ultimately turns Israel’s particular calling outward. The seed promised through Abraham is the same redemptive line associated with the Woman’s Seed and the Davidic throne, and through that seed all nations are to be blessed. Israel’s failures do not erase its role; they make visible the need for grace, mediation, and the Messiah. Its history thus joins political theology to salvation history: legitimate rule must come from a rightful source, freedom cannot be reduced to self-assertion, and the national covenant reaches its fullest meaning only when its promised blessing becomes universal.