Discovering the Lost Tribes of Israel in Romans 9–11

PAUL AND THE RESURRECTION OF ISRAEL: JEWS, FORMER GENTILES, AND ISRAELITES. By Jason A. Staples. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024. Pp. 435. Hardcover, $39.99. In a famous baraita from the Babylonian Talmud, the sages describe a procedure for admitting male proselytes into the community. The candidate is at first dissuaded; if he persists, the court lectures him about certain of the commandments as well as the punishments for not performing them. Once the candidate accepts upon himself the yoke of the commandments, he is circumcised. When the wound heals, he immerses in a ritual bath, and when he emerges, he is deemed to be “like an Israelite in all respects” (hare hu keyisrael lekhol devaraw).1 When I first learned this passage a quarter century ago, I wondered why the sages said that the man becomes an “Israelite” in all respects rather than a Jew, for as yet, I was unaware that in rabbinic literature, the standard appellation for a Jew is, in fact, “Israel(ite)” (yisrael). So, I asked my teacher—fatuously—whether a convert might choose to become a Reubenite, a Danite, a Naphtalite, or some other kind of Israelite instead of a Jew. The teacher rebuffed me with what I can only describe as extreme prejudice. Alas, if only Jason Staples had composed Paul and the Resurrection of Israel some twenty-five years ago, I might have had at my disposal an elegant retort, for he contends that, on Paul's reckoning at least, a gentile can join Israel as a Reubenite, a Danite, or a Naphtalite! The premise of this new book is that in the centuries preceding the rise of the sages, Jews, by and large, refrained from using the term Israel(ite) to refer to themselves or to one another. They preferred rather the term Jew, indicating their descent from the inhabitants of the erstwhile Southern Kingdom of Judah. They reserved the term Israel, on the other hand, mostly for descriptions of the biblical Israelites in the past or of a reconstituted twelve tribes of Israel envisioned in the future. Thus, as Staples reminds readers over and again, in Jewish literature of the Second Temple period, “Israel” often does not mean “Jew,” “Jew” often does not mean “Israel,” and historians should stop proceeding as if they do. The exegetical payoff of this insight is to be found largely in Romans 9–11, where, according to Staples, Paul deploys the term Israel, as one should expect, with reference to the biblical Israel of the past and to the eschatological Israel of the future. Paul argues that the incorporation of gentiles into God's people, Israel, constitutes a reversal of the forced migration and assimilation of the ten tribes of the kingdom of Israel following the Assyrian conquest. Like other restorationist Jews, Paul anticipated that, at the end of times, these tribes would rejoin Judah and Benjamin to form a restored Israel. The problem, Paul believed, was that these northern tribes had become so integrated among the nations that they had become, for all intents and purposes, gentiles. The solution, Paul contends, is that the death and resurrection of Christ has made possible the return of these northern tribes—qua gentiles—such that the “all Israel” that Paul famously proclaims will be saved in Romans 11:26 comprises the believing Jews of Paul's day, who remain in Israel as Jews and Benjaminites, and the believing gentiles of Paul's day, who return to Israel as the ten northern tribes. It turns out that it is possible for a gentile to join Israel as a Reubenite, or a Danite, or a Naphtalite; you just have to be immersed in a baptismal font rather than a mikveh. The book is a success. I cannot imagine ever again writing about Romans 9–11, or Romans 2, or any other passage in which Paul speaks about Jewish identity or gentile inclusion without consulting this volume. It is thorough, deep, and rich. It is also ingenious. The way Staples corrals an endless array of biblical verses, extra-biblical verses, and seemingly incongruous strands in Paul's own writing, weaving them together into a novel and coherent reading of Romans 9–11, is quite frankly breathtaking, and I marvel at the tour de force. Most exciting is that Staples's reading provides a new and provocative approach to thinking about gentile inclusion in Paul's letters in terms of ethnic transformation. Staples rejects the classical view that, for Paul, gentiles join God's people as spiritualized “Christians” while also challenging more recent proposals, especially common within the so-called “Paul within Judaism” perspective (e.g., Thiessen 2016; Fredriksen 2017), which suggest that gentiles join God's people as gentiles. He proposes instead that gentiles, through the spirit afforded by Christ, are transformed into actual Israelites, actual Israelites from the northern ten tribes. Full disclosure: I am predisposed to finding merit in this reading because it resembles my own approach (Garroway 2012, 2018). Nonetheless, my offering in this symposium comes not to praise Staples—nor to bury him!—but simply to ask a few questions that might help scholars in the field of Pauline studies understand his position better to determine whether they find it convincing. I have narrowed my concerns down to three, so here goes. First, I think Staples needs to clarify further how the olive tree metaphor Paul deploys in Romans 11:17–24 fits into his reading. He argues, correctly in my view, that the olive tree represents Israel, that the branches broken off represent Jews in Paul's day who have forsaken their birthright by rejecting the messiah, and that the branches grafted in symbolize the baptized gentiles who have miraculously been transformed into Israelites. What remains unclear to me is why, if these gentiles, in fact, represent the ten northern tribes who were themselves cut from the tree eight centuries earlier, they are depicted as unnatural branches, why Paul describes them as having grown from a different tree with a different root, why their ligation is described as para phusin, “against nature,” while the reincorporation of excised Jews will be kata phusin, “according to nature.” Nothing in Paul's metaphor suggests to me that he understands the incorporation of gentiles as any sort of homecoming, that the gentile branches return to where they belong, alongside their long lost Jewish and Benjamite brethren, drawing nourishment from the Israelite root that was originally theirs. Paul describes the incorporated gentiles rather as arrogant newcomers with little claim to the tree who should thank God day and night for plucking them from gentile obscurity and miraculously grafting them into a sacred birthright they never had. The metaphor offers nothing, or at least nothing I can see, to indicate a reconstitution of the once-united twelve tribes of Israel. Second, I wonder if Staples's reading of Romans 9–11 simply expects too much from readers. His interpretation is incredibly complicated, often requiring a capacity for balancing simultaneous significations and a mastery of biblical intertexts that many contemporary scholars lack, not to mention the typical mid-first-century Roman denizens for whom Paul was writing. One marvels at Staples's ability to marshal the disparate parts of Romans 9–11 so ingeniously into one overarching schema, but I have to confess to having read some sections of the book three or four times before I could understand how all the pieces fit together. Staples's Paul expects a lot from his readers. A few examples: In Romans 9:30–31, Paul reveals the scandalous truth that some gentiles, who were not striving for righteousness, nonetheless attained it, while “Israel,” despite pursuing a law of righteousness, failed to reach the law. This pair of verses is a mare's nest, as everyone recognizes, but usually, interpreters find here a parallel between baptized gentiles who have found righteousness over and against unbaptized Jews who have fallen short. Yet, such a reading would mean that Paul here uses the term “Israel” to mean Jews, which Staples cannot abide, so he argues instead that the aorist verb describing Israel's failure must refer to a failing in the past, and hence, the failure of biblical Israel to remain faithful to God. The aorist verb can, of course, refer to a failing in the past, but the verb describing the gentile attainment of righteousness is also an aorist, and it surely describes something happening in Paul's own day. Perhaps to account for this parallel, Staples proposes that the term Israel here carries a doubled meaning, referring explicitly to the failure of biblical Israel in the past but implicitly to the failure of Jews, qua Israel, in the present. This doubled signification then becomes a thread in Staples's reading of the entire passage. Just one verse later, Israel is said to have failed because they stumbled over a stumbling stone. That stone, Staples says, is “theological while reading forward and then Christological when considered retrospectively” (218). In other words, the stumbling stone is God or the Torah when one reads Romans 9:32 at first, but then it becomes Christ as one continues through the subsequent verses. Keeping track of such a tricky hermeneutic asks a lot from readers. The doubling then continues all the way until the climax of the passage, when Paul says that a partial hardening has come upon Israel so that all Israel will be saved. Since the first Israel cannot mean simply Jews, Staples says that Paul here describes a twofold hardening, not only the hardening of Israel qua the Northern Kingdom that led to its eradication in 722 BCE, but also the hardening of Israel qua contemporary Jews that has led to the incorporation of gentiles qua the Northern Kingdom so that “all Israel” can be saved. Again, it is a testament to Staples's ingenuity as an interpreter that these layers of meaning eventually line up—for the most part, at least—but I wonder whether anyone reading this letter or hearing it read aloud would ever, even on a dozen recitations, put it together the way that Staples has. Granted, the letter probably came with some interpretive guidance, and maybe Phoebe did, in fact, sit with the Roman audience and explain carefully how Israel here means explicitly this but implicitly that, and there implicitly this but explicitly that, and how the stumbling block means this when reading forward but that when reading backward. It is certainly possible. But I can only imagine Roman gentiles asking Phoebe why Paul could not have told them in simpler terms that they had become manifestations of the ten northern tribes when they entered Israel through Christ. Indeed, Paul never says anything explicit about the ten northern tribes or their reappearance in the form of baptized gentiles—not in Romans 9–11 nor in any of the several other places where Paul discusses gentile inclusion at length, most prominently Romans 2, Romans 4, Romans 15, and Galatians 3. The lost tribes are only found by Staples in a brilliantly fashioned network of intertextual allusions from Hosea, Isaiah, Genesis, and elsewhere. My last question is of a different sort. Between this book and his previous one (Staples 2021), Staples has admirably situated Paul against the backdrop of Jewish traditions in the centuries leading up to Paul's ministry in the mid-first century CE. An equally worthy historical-critical approach would be to consider Paul against the traditions that developed in the decades and centuries following his ministry, the Tannaitic tradition and deutero-Paulines. On the first score, I wonder how Staples would account for the phenomenon mentioned at the outset of this review, namely that the sages in the Tannaitic tradition refer to themselves routinely as Israel. True, they also use the term Israel to describe both biblical Israel and a restored eschatological Israel, but for them, Israel was also the routine appellation for a Jew. In other words, the sages demonstrate exactly the opposite tendency from what Staples finds to be normative in the Second Temple period, yet this work offers no explanation for why this development came about despite the geographic and chronological proximity of the Tannaim to Paul. On the second score, what of Ephesians, an epistle widely thought to have been composed by an admirer of Paul who knew Paul's letter to the Romans well? In Ephesians 2:11–22, the author appears to recapitulate Paul's view of gentile inclusion, perhaps even specifically as Paul describes it in Romans 9–11. The author reminds her Ephesian gentiles that, before their baptism, they were gentiles in the flesh and estranged from the politeia of Israel, but that now they have been brought near through Christ. A dividing wall has been broken down, and two previously hostile groups have been reconciled. These two groups are presumably Israel and the gentiles, by which I mean Jews and gentiles in pseudo-Paul's own day. There is no reference in Ephesians to the ten lost tribes of Israel, at least as far as I can tell, which raises the question of why so early an interpreter of Paul, perhaps the very first, failed to reproduce this key schema in Paul's thinking. Admittedly, this last question about the Tannaim and Ephesians asks about something that does not appear in the present volume. To some extent, that is unfair. On the other hand, Staples's reading of the ten lost tribes in Romans 9–11 would ultimately be more compelling if he were able to support it more consistently with evidence that is largely overlooked here, not just the Tannaim and Ephesians but also Paul's other discussions of gentile inclusion, for example, in Romans 15 and Galatians 3. The good news, I suspect, is that Staples has a third volume in the works in which he can tackle the evidence he did not have space to address in the first or second volume. If the first two books offer any indication of what that third book will be like, we are in for a treat

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