The Story of Israel from Abraham to the Exile (The Kingdom of God, part 4)

Posted on June 29, 2025 by J Richard Middleton

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.

Most of Israel’s kings, however, 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.

Created in God’s Image: The Royal Calling of Humanity (The Kingdom of God, part 3)

Posted on June 21, 2025 by J Richard Middleton

This is part 3 of a series of posts on the kingdom of God. Part 1 can be found here. Part 2 can be found here.

The kingdom of God in the teaching of Jesus is a distinctly Jewish idea, rooted in Israel’s Scriptures. To understand the significance of this kingdom we will need to explore some of the biblical backstory—especially the theme of “rule,” a royal metaphor for the exercise of power.

Imago Dei: The Royal Calling of Humanity

The opening chapter of the Bible recounts the creation of humanity (male and female) with the vocation or calling of being God’s “image” on earth (Gen 1:26–28). Genesis 1 here draws on (and interacts with) the royal ideology from the cultures of the ancient Near East (such as Mesopotamia and Egypt), which viewed kings (and sometimes priests) as the “image” of their gods. These human leaders were thought to have a function similar to that of the “image” (or cult statue) of the god, which was located in the temple. Just as the cult statue was thought to mediate the presence and power of the god from heaven to earth, kings (and some priests) claimed to be the gods’ unique earthly delegates, exercising power over the people on the gods’ behalf (a royal function), by which the gods’ presence was made manifest in their society (a priestly function).

Genesis 1 draws on this ancient, highly elitist notion of the “image of God,” but radically democratizes or universalizes it, applying it to all people, male and female (irrespective of their social status). This biblical vision of all people sharing the “royal” status of the “image of God” (imago Dei in Latin), with equal dignity in the sight of the Creator, helps explain a well-recognized historical fact: when the people of Israel came into existence as a nation (after their exodus from Egypt), they existed for centuries without a monarchy—something entirely unique in the ancient Near East. The idea of all humanity created to be God’s image functioned as a radical critique of—and form of resistance to—the royal ideology of the ancient societies among which Israel lived.

In Genesis 1:26–28, the image of God is manifested in the ordinary human exercise of power or agency in earthly life, involving “rule” (or “dominion” in some translations) over the animal kingdom (equivalent to animal husbandry) and “subduing” the earth or land (equivalent to agriculture). In Genesis 2, the human vocation is portrayed (without using the term “image”) as working and protecting a garden of fruit trees that God planted (Gen 2:15). Since God planted the garden, God is portrayed as the first gardener and humans implicitly image God as they continue tending God’s garden. Psalm 8 echoes the theme of animal husbandry from Genesis 1, when it describes humans as created a little less than God (similar to being God’s image in Genesis 1) and granted rule over various forms of animal life—on land, air, and water (Ps 8:5–8).

The image of God (imago Dei) is both a gift (humans are granted the status of being VIPs in God’s world) and a calling or vocation (we are commissioned as God’s ambassadors in the world). Every person is both gifted with royal dignity and also authorized to represent God’s rule in the ordinary practices of earthly life. Whereas Genesis 1 and 2 focus on caring for animals and farming the land, Genesis 4 extends this by mentioning that humans invented and developed cities, nomadic livestock herding, musical instruments, and metal tools (Gen 4:17, 20–21). This suggests that God is imaged by all forms of legitimate cultural innovation, as people develop the potentialities of earthly life.

But Genesis 3 portrays humans rebelling against their Creator (transgressing the limits God instituted) so that the gift of human agency or “rule” becomes distorted and twisted, with corrupting effects on the social order.

Life, Death, and Violence in Human History

In the Garden of Eden narrative, humans are warned that “death” is the consequence of disobedience to God (Gen 2:15–16). This death was not the introduction of mortality, as if humans had previously been immortal and only now would have an ending to their life; the idea of original immortality is an idea imported by later interpreters into the text. Rather, humans are created from “dust” (Gen 2:7), a term used throughout the Bible as a metaphor for mortality (see especially Ps 103:13–14). The “death” warned about in Genesis 2 is best understood as the constriction and diminishing of life, where “life” refers to the fullness of earthly flourishing.

Immediately upon disobedience, the original harmony in the garden begins to be distorted, as the primal couple cower in fear before God and in shame of nakedness before each other (Gen 3:7–8, 10), while ordinary human relationships, like marriage, childbirth, and farming, became disharmonious (Gen 3:16–20). Ultimately, humans are exiled from the garden, losing access to the fullness of life (symbolized by the Tree of Life in the center of the Garden) and the intimate presence of God. These consequences are various ways of describing the “death” that results from sin.

Yet humans retain the dignity of being God’s image and the call to represent God is not rescinded (see Gen 9:6). But violence (the misuse of the power or agency associated with the image of God) is introduced into human history, evident in Cain’s murder of his brother out of jealousy (Gen 4:8) and Lamech’s revenge killing of a young man who injured him, while boasting about it to his two wives (Gen 4:23). Distorted human “rule” then spirals out of control, until violence fills the earth and life becomes corrupted (Gen 6:5, 11–12), which generates the flood to cleanse the earth of this corruption.

But the respite is only temporary and human violence culminates in the story of Babel (the normal Hebrew word for Babylon), an empire that tries to dominate others and impose its will (and even language) on conquered peoples (Gen 11:1–9). The tower of Babel is likely a ziggurat, a series of giant steps for the gods to descend from heaven to their favored city, thus providing religious legitimation for the empire. With the rise of every “Babylon” in history, every imperial legitimation of violence in the name of law and order (including Rome in the time of Jesus), God’s purposes for life and flourishing are impeded. In the “Babel” of Genesis 11, God’s purposes for blessing seem to have come to a dead end.

How will God respond to this imperial violence? That is the topic of part 4 of this series (The Story of Israel from Abraham to the Exile).

Three Contemporary Laments

Posted on January 13, 2025 by J Richard Middleton

I’ve been reflecting on the value of lament prayer ever since I went through a particularly dark time in my life many years ago. After not praying for some months, I found the lament psalms in the Bible as the door to hope, which opened me up to praying again.

These psalms are also known as protest or complaint psalms, and for good reason.

Lament as the Door to Hope

Lament psalms (like my own lament prayers) are not decorous and “proper”; they do not conform to the way that many Christians think we ought to pray. They are utterly honest, and thus often abrasive, attempts to grapple with God over situations that do not seem right.

Although there are approximately fifty psalms in the Bible that are typically regarded as laments (that is, about a third of the Psalter), the psalm that meant the most to me at the time was Psalm 88, arguably the darkest and most despairing of them all. I was particularly struck by the translation of Mitchell Dahood in his Psalms commentary in the Anchor Bible series.

To know that such honest prayers were canonized in the Bible (as models for our prayer) and to be able to articulate my own pain (no holds barred) to the Creator of the universe—that is what reawakened my faith. I gained a sense through lament prayer that God was willing to take my suffering seriously. That was the kind of God I could trust.

So it led to a deeper commitment to God on my part—in response to God’s own commitment to take suffering seriously. Indeed, God took it so seriously that it led to the cross.

Lament in Popular Music

Over the years, as I have come to value lament prayer, I noticed that there were some profound lyrics by various contemporary artists that articulated lament or protest to God, which people of faith could learn from.

Three pieces that have particularly impacted me are “Bartender” by the Dave Matthews Band (2002), “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” by the Smashing Pumpkins (1995), and “Dear God” by XTC (1986). All three songs are formulated as prayers, addressing God with complaints or questions, and calling on God for help.

“Bartender” moves generally from petition to complaint. Intertwined with verses that address first “brother of mine” then “sister of mine” and then “mother of mine,” we find two verses where the singer pleads directly to God (the Bartender) to fill his glass “With the wine you gave Jesus that set him free / After three days in the ground.” Also interspersed between various verses is the cry: “I’m on bended knees / Oh, Bartender, please!” And once, “Oh, Father, please!”

In the second half of the song, complaint dominates, with the admission that the singer is overcome by another drink, which seems stronger than the one he’s been asking for. In counterpoint to the plea for resurrection life in the first half of the song, we find (also stated in two verses) this deathly admission: “The wine that’s drinking me / Came from the vine that strung Judas from the Devil’s tree / Its roots deep, deep in the ground.” Yet perhaps complaint doesn’t quite have the final word, since the song ends with the passionate cry: “I’m on bended knees / Oh, Bartender, please!”

You can find the lyrics here to a haunting acoustic solo version of “Bartender” sung by Dave Matthews (without the band). This is the original version (with the band).

The complaint in “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” is that “the world is a vampire, sent to drain” and speaks of “betrayed desires,” while the chorus articulates the singer’s experience that “despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage.” In the midst of repeating this line over an over, there is an external voice saying, “What is lost can never be saved.” Yet the singer yearns to be significant to God, almost screaming the line: “Jesus was an only son for you!” The song ends seemingly without hope, with the refrain, “I still believe that I cannot be saved”; the external voice has been internalized.

Warning: This song is in the “metal” genre. The music is especially abrasive (which makes it even more powerful). I’ve had some older church people ask me to turn it down (or even off!). However, I used to play this song in the car on my way to band practice at church. My kids, who would often accompany me, came to call it “the church song”!

“Dear God” also contains petitions, asking God to “make it better down here” and pleading: “we need a big reduction in amount of tears.” Specific problems are cited in the first two verses, including poverty and war, which afflict “all the people that you made in your image.” And in each case God is indicted as the cause of the problem. Starvation is because “they don’t get enough to eat / From God” and war is because “they can’t make opinions meet / About God.” And each verse ends by saying “I can’t believe in you.”

Then the third verse turns to the “crazy” things written in the Bible (“Your name is on a lot of quotes in this book”) and those people made in God’s image “Still believing that junk is true / Well I know it ain’t and so do you / Dear God.” The musical variations, from gentle to insistent, with violins at one point, make the lyrics especially poignant.

Then comes the bridge, where the music first pulls back, then increases in dynamic intensity to a climax. This section juxtaposes various elements of Christian theology (which the singer refuses to believe) with a list of wrongs in the world, followed by this declaration: “The hurt I see helps to compound/ That Father, Son and Holy Ghost / Is just somebody’s unholy hoax.”

But the song ends with a highly paradoxical statement: “And if you’re up there you’d perceive / That my heart’s here upon my sleeve / If there’s one thing I don’t believe in / It’s you / Dear God.” The question is why someone who doesn’t believe in God would tell this to God. Indeed, why they would write an entire song addressed to a God they don’t believe in? Because (and that’s the point of “my heart’s here upon my sleeve”) they desperately want to believe.

It was my engagement with lament prayer that led to my book, Abraham’s Silence: The Binding of Isaac, the Suffering of Job, and How to Talk Back to God (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021). Here I addressed examples of vigorous prayer in the Bible, including the lament psalms, prophetic intercession in the tradition of Moses, and the book of Job. These examples prodded me to ask why Abraham didn’t lament or protest when God asked him to sacrifice his son, Isaac. The book ends with a theology of lament prayer applicable to Christians in a world of pain and suffering. You can take a look at the Table of Contents and read the Introduction to Abraham’s Silence here.

In a follow-up post, I will note some of the other things I’ve written on lament.

A version of this blog is posted on the Northeastern Seminary website.