This is the fourth installment of an article on the Kingdom of God.

Part 1 began with Jesus’s proclamation at the start of his ministry about the kingdom of God. Part 2 looked at Jesus’s sermon at Nazareth, in which he explained the nature of the kingdom he was inaugurating. Part 3 shifted to the biblical backstory of the kingdom, beginning with the royal calling of humanity created to image God, including how we squandered our calling through sin and violence, culminating in the tower of Babel.

The current installment traces the story of Israel from Abraham to the Babylonian exile, with a focus on the theme of “rule” (power and agency). This backstory is essential for understanding the kingdom of God in the New Testament.

The Call of Israel—Election and Covenant

God’s response to this imperial violence was to call one couple, Abraham and Sarah, out of the nations of the world, so that they would become the progenitors of an alternative nation, who would function as a model or microcosm of God’s purposes for humanity on earth. God promises to bless this chosen nation so that they would flourish as a people, with the long-term purpose that through them blessing would come to the other nations of the world (Gen. 12:3; 18:18; 22:18; 26:4; 28:14); this would, in effect, restore the human race to its original purpose of imaging God.

But this long-term blessing is delayed as Abraham’s descendants (named Israel, after one of his grandsons) are enslaved by the Egyptian empire, whose Pharaohs typically styled themselves as the living image (indeed, the incarnation) of the gods on earth, which justified their absolute power. But Israel’s God (the Creator of all peoples) intervened to deliver Abraham’s descendants from Egyptian oppression by the hand of Moses, to whom he revealed his distinctive name, YHWH (Exod 3:14). The name, probably pronounced Yahweh, is typically written without vowels, since in later centuries Jews (including those responsible for the text of the Bible) viewed the divine name as too sacred to be pronounced.

The central event in the Old Testament is the exodus from Egypt, which climaxed at the Red Sea, when the people were pursued by Pharaoh’s army. Initially trapped between Pharaoh’s chariots and the Sea, God made a path through the waters for his people to escape. The final line of the victory song that Moses and the Israelites sang when they escaped the reach of Pharaoh’s power was: “YHWH will reign for ever and ever!” (Exod 15:18). Under their breath they may have whispered, “and not Pharaoh”; they had become part of an alternative kingdom.

After delivering the Israelites from Pharaoh’s army through the Sea, YHWH led them to Mt. Sinai (Exod 14–19), where the Torah (divine instruction, including the Ten Commandments) was given as part of the covenant God made with them (Exod 20–24). At Sinai, God clarified the calling of this newly redeemed people: “Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” (Exod 19:5–6a)

God’s elect people, chosen for a royal-priestly role, were intended to carry on the holy task, which had been distorted by human sin, of mediating God’s blessing and presence into the world by how they lived, including how they exercised power in the pursuit of justice. Since the human race was not fulfilling its created purpose, God calls Israel to be imago Dei—to reflect his purposes through their communal life. They are to model the sort of just and righteous life that God intended for all people, by embodying the values of the covenant God made with them at Sinai.

Monarchy and Exile

Although Israel originally came into being as a loose confederacy of twelve tribes, without a unifying monarchy, within a few centuries the people asked for a king so that they could be “like the other nations” (1 Sam 8:5). God graciously granted their request (1 Sam 8:7, 22), while providing normative standards for the king to follow (Deut 17:14–20). Given the typical practice of absolute power by ancient kings, these standards were intended to substantially limit the power of Israel’s rulers. However, most of Israel’s kings ignored these standards and ended up no different from the kings of the other nations. Many tolerated, or even fostered, idolatry (compromising the worship of YHWH with allegiance to other gods) and this idolatry led to injustice, which was the consequence of ignoring the value system embedded in YHWH’s covenant.

Indeed, it was the idolatry of Solomon, Israel’s third king, combined with the oppressive practices of Rehoboam, his son and successor, that led to a split in the nation (1 Kgs 11:20–12:24). The ten northern tribes seceded from the unified kingdom in the tenth century BCE, forming their own nation (the Northern Kingdom of Israel or Ephraim), with Samaria as its capital, leaving the much smaller Southern Kingdom of Judah (the “house” or dynasty of David), with Jerusalem as its capital.

About two hundred years later (722 BCE), the Assyrian empire invaded and conquered the Northern Kingdom and deported much of the population. The inhabitants were resettled in a variety of nations that Assyria had conquered, while the Assyrians settled foreigners from conquered nations in Israel (this is the area that in New Testament times became Samaria and Galilee). Many refugees from the north also fled south and settled in Judah.

A little over a century after the Assyrian conquest of the North, the Babylonian empire (which had in the meantime conquered Assyria) invaded the Southern Kingdom of Judah and deported some of its inhabitants to Babylon (597 BCE); a second invasion followed ten years later (587/6 BCE), when Babylonian forces destroyed much of Jerusalem and demolished its temple, deporting even more inhabitants to Babylon.

At this point the line of Davidic kings (the only Israelite monarchy left) came to an end in massive failure. Although there are complex historical explanations for these imperial conquests of the Northern and Southern Kingdoms and the forcible exile of the people that followed, the Bible’s prophetic literature understands these events ultimately as consequences of the sins of God’s people, their disobedience to the covenant, especially through the leadership of unrighteous kings (2 Chr 36:20–21; with more detail in 2 Kgs 24–25).

Hope for the Future after the Exile

It was precisely in this time of national crisis—which included the ending of the monarchy, the destruction of the temple, and exile from the land—that hope for a new beginning arose, especially in Israel’s prophetic literature. Some of the prophets living on the edge of exile and others from within the exilic period began to articulate a vision of a hopeful future beyond exile.

The starting point of this vision was a return to the land, portrayed in Isaiah 40–55 as a new exodus; just as God liberated Israel from Egyptian bondage in ancient times, so God would release the Jews (the exiled Judeans) from their Babylonian captivity. Whereas at the exodus God’s people passed through the Sea to escape Pharaoh’s army, God was doing a “new thing”; this time the journey would be through the desert or wilderness, as the exiles traveled from Babylon back to their homeland (Isa 43:16–21).

But the return to the land was just the start; the prophets also envisioned the healing of the social order (such that justice and righteousness would prevail between people), the flourishing of the natural world (even the desert would bloom), a peaceful relationship with the nations (in place of war and oppression), the forgiveness of sins and a new heart (enabling obedience to God after a history of rebellion), the restoration of righteous leadership (in contrast to the corrupt kings of the past), and God’s intimate presence among the people in the renewed land.

In part 5 of this series, we will examine the rise of messianic expectation after the Babylonian exile and how this was fulfilled in Jesus’s mission.