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Transcript 349B — Who Are the Jews?
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum.
CALLER: Yes. In the Bible when it speaks of Jews, how did they become Jews? Was it a religion, or was it because they lived in a certain part of Judea? You know, they speak of Father Abraham, but he was not a Jew. And the Jews of today, are they descendants of the Jews in Bible times?
HC: The question relates to the origin of the Jews. Actually, the Jewish nation came into being from Abraham. Abraham was the progenitor. He was the beginning of the nation of Israel, or the nation of Jews. Abraham actually was born and raised in the land of Ur of the Chaldees. It would be in the fertile crescent, near the Euphrates River someplace that he grew up.
But when he was about seventy-five years of age, God called him out of Ur of the Chaldees. And after a brief stop in Haran, where his father died, he left Haran and came into the land that God would show him. Now Abraham came into the land of Canaan, which is now called the land of Israel, as a complete stranger and as a pilgrim. You can read about this in Genesis 12. And God gave him certain promises.
God promised that He would make a great nation of him. God promised that in his seed all the nations would be blessed. God promised that he would be the father of a multitude of nations. God promised that He would give him the land as an everlasting possession.
When Abraham was ninety-nine years old, it was the year 2028 BC., and God gave a sign of the covenant that He made with Abraham. It was the sign of circumcision, in which God declared that all of the males eight days and older were to be circumcised. This would include Abraham as well as all of his slaves and his son Ishmael, who was thirteen years of age at the time. They were all circumcised. This became the sign that God had a particular covenant with Abraham and his seed.
Abraham in turn fostered a son named Isaac. Ishmael was not the son that God was focusing on. There was another son that was to be born to Abraham named Isaac. And the promises flow from Abraham through Isaac to the son of Isaac, who was Jacob. Isaac, incidentally, had twin sons, Esau and Jacob.
Esau was not the son of promise, either. It was Jacob. So now we have the patriarchal line, beginning with Abraham, then through Isaac, then through Jacob. And Jacob became the father of twelve sons. The third or fourth son of Jacob was Judah.
Now these twelve sons became the patriarchal heads of the twelve tribes of Israel. Everybody from Abraham, from the time he was circumcised, was now called a Jew. Abraham would have been called a Jew. They weren't called Jews yet. They were called Hebrews in that day, or something like that. Actually, the word Jew comes from Judea. The major tribe was Judah. The land of Israel was also called the land of Judea. After the nation became a very great nation, then, on the death of Solomon, who reigned as king over Israel, the kingdom was divided. And the two tribes to the south, the large tribe of Judah and the small tribe of Benjamin, became a nation all in itself. And it was called the nation of Judah for a long time.
Well, these are the Jews, you see, that we read about. Actually, in the Bible God indicates that in His program, the way He looks at mankind, the true Jew is not a blood descendant of Abraham. By blood descent, anyone who is a blood descendant of Abraham can call himself a Jew, that is, if he came through Isaac and if he came through Jacob. The descendants through Ishmael, the brother (or actually half-brother) of Isaac, were not called Jews. Ishmael became the forbearer of the Arab nations. And Esau, the twin brother of Jacob, who also was a blood descendant of Abraham and Isaac, was not a Jew. He was cut off. He was set aside. The true line of Jews flowed through Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, through to the twelve sons of Jacob. They only were called Jews after the name of Judah, who was one of the sons of Jacob.
So this became the nation of Israel. And this is the nation that God gave the initial promises to, gave the task of preparing the Word of God. It is the descendants of Abraham, in this covenant line, that were the chief scribes of God in preparing the Bible for us. They are the ones to whom Jesus came.
But the true Jews that God has in view, looking at the larger perspective, are not composed of those who are blood descendants of Abraham, but those who are followers of the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus of course was a Jew, because He was a blood descendant of Abraham, coming through Judah, coming through David, and so forth. And therefore, since He is the head of the Kingdom that we belong to, since He is a Jew, we also are Jews. And in Galatians 3, for example, God really underscores that the true seed of Abraham are those who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, whereas someone who is a blood descendant of Abraham, while he is by lineage, by blood descent, a Jew? in actuality, in God's sight He is not considered to be a Jew unless he has become born again, unless he's become a child of God.
So in the Bible, therefore, we have really two nations that are called Israel, or two nations that are called Jews. We have the historical, literal nation, made up of those who are blood descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. They are called the nation of Israel. We also have a spiritual Israel, or a spiritual nation of Jews, composed of all who are born again believers, whether we are Gentiles or whether we are Jews. It makes no difference. If we believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, we are the spiritual Israel, the eternal Israel, the heirs of all the promises that were given to Abraham that were of the eternal variety. They are all fulfilled in spiritual Israel, not in literal Israel, or the blood descent Israel.
I hope this helps a little bit.