Jason A. Staples. The Idea of Israel in Second Temple Judaism

“For they are not all Israel who are descended from Israel” (Rom 9:6, NASB). So begins Paul’s prolonged discourse on his hopes for his own people. “They are not all ‘Jews’ who are descended from Israel” is perhaps an apt summary of Staples’s hopes for how scholars might classify the people descended from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. His ambitious study should accomplish nothing less than a paradigm shift in the way many in the guild think about Israelite identity. His thesis is succinct as it is well-documented: “Throughout the period covered by this book, one constant is that Israel is the name either for the tribes of the biblical northern kingdom or for the twelve-tribe covenantal people of Yhwh” (p. 339). Relatedly, this means “Jew/Judean” is not synonymous with “Israel,” and one could be an Israelite but not a Jew: “That is, ‘Jew’ continues [in the post-exilic period] to refer to the subset of Israel specifically derived from the kingdom of Judah” (p. 340). Rather than a mere semantic quibble, however, Staples argues that grasping the distinction in the labels Israel, Israelite, Samaritan, and Jew is key to understanding the “restoration eschatology” (p. 95) that governs the shape and significance of not just much of the Hebrew Bible but numerous Second Temple texts and the emergence of early Christianity as described in the Gospels and Paul’s letters.After an introduction, the study is divided into three parts: Israel’s Disputed Birthright, Restoration Eschatology and the Reconstruction of Biblical Israel, Israel and Restoration Eschatology in the Diaspora. In the opening chapter of part I (“Jews and Israelites in Antiquity”), Staples levels a thorough critique of “Karl G. Kuhn’s 1938 TWNT article on the terms Israel, Jew, and Hebrew” (p. 26). Kuhn argued that “Israel” was the name the people used for themselves (an “insider” label), while “Jew” on the lips of outsiders was a pejorative label. Staples convincingly argues that Kuhn’s conclusions resulted from overlaying nuances present in his own context onto the ancient data, with the consequence that the negative valence of “Jew” within Nazi Germany was ascribed to ancient uses of “Jew” despite the fact that “there is no evidence that Ioudaios was ever a term of aspersion in pre-Christian antiquity” (p. 29). Staples’s extended critique of Kuhn is necessitated by the fact that, in Staples’s estimation: “Kuhn’s paradigm has been taken for granted by scholars of this period for nearly a century” (p. 39). It is in the wake of his deconstruction of Kuhn’s paradigm that Staples acknowledges an anomaly that requires an explanation, which this book offers, namely: “‘Israel’ is almost never used by an outsider to refer to a Jew in the extant literary or epigraphic record” (p. 40).In response, Staples argues that the pre-monarchic period classified the twelve-tribe panoply of God’s covenant people as “Israel.” After the monarchy divided into “Northern Kingdom” and “Southern Kingdom,” “Israel” regularly referred to tribes of the Northern Kingdom or the prospectively reunited people post-restoration, and “Jews” referred to a “subset” (p. 51) of Israel, denoting persons “descended from the southern kingdom of Judah or otherwise incorporated into that ethno-religious group. In its broader sense, the term [Ioudaios] not only includes those specifically from the tribe of Judah but includes at least Levites and Benjaminites, as persons . . . included among the returnees from the southern kingdom of Judah . . . to the Persian province of Yehud after the Babylonian Exile” (p. 52, italics original). Thus, all Jews are Israelites (being a subset of the twelve-tribe people named “Israel”), but not all Israelites are Jews, as the former may describe persons of the tribes of the Northern Kingdom and the latter the Southern. The distinction in terminology thus measures not an “insider/outsider” division but at times a geographical or ethno-religious claim and at times an eschatological perspective, in which use of “Israel” codes the hopes for a restored and reunified twelve-tribe people regathered from the world’s four corners after Israel’s endurance of the promised discipline of Lev 26/Deut 30.Parts II and III defend these claims in their examination of the Hebrew Bible, 1 Enoch, and 1–2 Maccabees (Part II) and the LXX, Josephus, Philo, DSS, and numerous other Second Temple texts (Part III). It would be unnecessary to summarize the arguments pertaining to each textual group as many reduce to a (persuasive) demonstration of widespread employment of features of Deut 28–32, Lev 26, and prophetic texts, in literary depictions of Israel as still enduring the covenantal wrath and awaiting the promised restoration, including their return from exile and the reunification of the scattered tribes.In the preface, Staples acknowledges that his book toggles between examining the “forest” and “the trees” and concedes that “this book really involves two forests—the concept of Israel and the relationship of that concept to restoration eschatology” (p. xii). While his arguments about the relation of the labels “Israel” and “Jew” are helpful in themselves (I find them convincing), I hope they are recognized as materially dependent upon his arguments about the biblical and Second-Temple conviction that “restoration” (à la Deut 30/Lev 26) had not yet occurred. This is to say: my difficulty is not in narrowing my critique but in naming the more helpful insight. Through a thorough examination of the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish texts that interpret it, Staples shows that an expectation of covenant restoration was widespread among groups of the period and that a reunification of Israelites and Jews into the one people, “Israel,” was a feature of that restoration. Scholars who opt for an alternate construal of “Israel” language and/or downplay the significance of the ongoing perdurance of “the age of wrath” in Second Temple literature, including the New Testament, must now grapple afresh with Staples’s arguments to do so

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