Dear Andie—



In human society there is a phenomenon known as “self-fulfilling prophecy” – i.e., statements that, once being made, inspire people to bring about their realization. Or, as Theodor Herzl had put it in the introduction to his book The Jewish State, “No man is powerful or wealthy enough to transport a people from one domicile to another. Only an idea can achieve that” (see http://www.wzo.org.il/en/resources/view.asp?id=282). However, importantly, in the above quotation Herzl did not speak directly of the prophecies of biblical books but rather of something else: “The idea of a State probably has such a power.” For, in fact, the prophecies of the biblical books had been available for more than two millennia prior to Herzl’s time, yet these prophecies did not succeed in persuading the Jews to move en masse to their Promised Land. It was only after the idea of the nation-state developed and gained popularity in Europe that a Jewish movement, centered on migration to the Promised Land and on the establishment of a Jewish nation-state there, succeeded in attracting large masses of Jews and inspiring them to put this plan into practice.

Moreover, there are three further comments to make about your question. First, most (if not all) books of the Hebrew Bible were written in a world where the possibility of massive removal of a population from its native land was a clear and present danger (starting with mass expulsions of conquered populations practiced by the Assyrian kings in the 8th-7th centuries B.C.E.). In these circumstances, it was understandable that the authors of biblical books, who wanted to warn the populations of Israel and Judah that they would be punished if they disobeyed the will of their deity, would choose the threat of exile (without getting, for the moment, into the question of which biblical threats of exile were intended from the outset as threat, and which were written as “post factum prophecies” only after the expulsions of populations from the defeated kingdoms of Israel and Judah had occurred). However, not all of the biblical threats of exile end in a promise of the restoration of exiles to their homeland. Thus, in Leviticus 26:41-45 God is quoted as saying: “I also will walk contrary unto them, and bring them into the land of their enemies; if then perchance their uncircumcised heart be humbled, and they then be paid the punishment of their iniquity; then will I remember My covenant with Jacob, and also My covenant with Isaac, and also My covenant with Abraham will I remember; and I will remember the land. For the land shall lie forsaken without them, and shall be paid her Sabbaths, while she lies desolate without them; and they shall be paid the punishment of their iniquity; because, even because they rejected Mine ordinances, and their soul abhorred My statutes. And yet for all that, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them, neither will I abhor them, to destroy them utterly, and to break My covenant with them; for I am the Lord their God. But I will for their sakes remember the covenant of their ancestors, whom I brought forth out of the land of Egypt in the sight of the nations, that I might be their God: I am the Lord” (quoted according to the JPS translation of 1917, with modernization of the English spelling). That is, God promises to keep his covenant with the people of Israel while they are in exile and to let the land be purified by desolation, thus compensating for earlier inobservance of the sabbatical year, but he is not promising to return the exiles to their homeland. (We should note that it is important to understand the threat of exile in the book of Leviticus on its own terms rather than seeing it through the lens of other passages in the Bible which do promise return of the exiles.)

Second, some of the prophecies you quoted are taken out of their immediate context, but when taken in context, they can be easily seen to never have been fulfilled. A good example is Ezekiel 37:19-22: “Thus says the Lord God: Behold, I will take the stick of Joseph, which is in the hand of Ephraim, and the tribes of Israel his companions; and I will put them unto him together with the stick of Judah, and make them one stick, and they shall be one in My hand. And the sticks whereon you write shall be in your hand before their eyes. And say unto them: Thus says the Lord God: Behold, I will take the children of Israel from among the nations, whither they are gone, and will gather them on every side, and bring them into their own land; and I will make them one nation in the land, upon the mountains of Israel, and one king shall be king to them all; and they shall be no more two nations, neither shall they be divided into two kingdoms any more at all” (quoted according to the JPS translation of 1917, with modernization of the English spelling). Now, the tribe of Ephraim “and the tribes of Israel his companions” are the tribes of the northern kingdom of Israel, which were conquered and exiled by the kings of Assyria in 734-720 BCE; and they had never returned from the exile. On the other hand, those Jews who did return from exile in the modern period, and who see themselves as descendants of the tribe of Judah (as is shown by the very etymology of the term “Jew,” from Greek Ioudaios = “a person from Judah”), are not governed by a king, nor are likely to create a monarchy in the observable future.

And third, the dangerous thing about promises that are believed to be of divine origin is the tendency to see them as absolute and eternal truth, for this tendency often prevents people from analyzing the reality that faces them and making intelligent choices. Thus, in the modern State of Israel there are people who understand the prophecies like “And I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be plucked up out of their land which I have given them, says the Lord your God” (Amos 9:15) as precluding the possibility of withdrawal from the territories conquered by Israel in the Six-Days War and held under Israeli military occupation. Thus a religious view undermines the ability of the leadership of the State of Israel to use its power of decision-making based on a rational consideration of the current legal and political circumstances, as statehood demands. It is perfectly legitimate to see the Bible, with its prophecies, as one of the fundamental components of Jewish identity and as a source of inspiration for the Jewish people, but it is perilous to put it as a stumbling block before rational judgment.



For more on prophecy, see also our essay Prophecy, the weekly portion of Ki Tavo, the essay The Prophet Ezekiel Contradicts the Words of the Torah, and our answer to Prophecies in the Torah.



Daat Emet