The Kingdom of God. John Bright
what do these words ‘Kingdom of God,’ which you use so often, mean?” On the contrary, Jesus used the term as if assured it would be understood, and indeed it was. The Kingdom of God lay within the vocabulary of every Jew. It was something they understood and longed for desperately. To us, on the contrary, it is a strange term, and it is necessary that we give it content if we are to comprehend it. We must ask where that notion came from and what it meant to Jesus and those to whom he spoke.
It is at once apparent that the idea is broader than the term, and we must look for the idea where the term is not present. Indeed, it may come as a surprise to learn that outside of the Gospels the expression “Kingdom of God” is not very common in the New Testament, while in the Old Testament it does not occur at all. But the concept is by no means confined to the New Testament. While it underwent, as we shall see, a radical mutation on the lips of Jesus, it had a long history and is, in one form or another, ubiquitous in both Old Testament and New. It involves the whole notion of the rule of God over his people, and particularly the vindication of that rule and people in glory at the end of history. That was the Kingdom which the Jews awaited.
Now the Jews looked in particular for a Redeemer, or Messiah, who should establish the Kingdom of God victoriously. And since the New Testament declared that Jesus was that Messiah who had come to set up his Kingdom, we are at once driven back into the Old Testament to consider the messianic hope of Israel. We think particularly of Isaiah, who gave the hope of the coming Prince of the line of David its classic form. There leap to mind the words so often read as the Christmas lesson: “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; . . . and his name will be called ‘Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace’ ” (Isa. 9:6). But since the expectation of the coming redemption is expressed repeatedly in the Old Testament in passages which make no explicit mention of the Messiah,1 it is clear that we have to do with a subject as wide as the entire eschatological hope of Israel. For the hope of Israel was the hope of the coming Kingdom of God.
But we cannot consider that hope in a vacuum, as it were, by an analysis of the various passages that express it. That hope had its roots in Israel’s faith and in Israel’s history, and we must attempt to trace them. This is not idle antiquarian curiosity, as a moment’s reflection would show. Isaiah, for example, although he gave the hope of the Messiah Prince its definitive formulation, and although we may declare that he was surely inspired of God to do so, clearly did not shape his idea out of the blue. Revelation, here as always, was organic to the life of the people, and its shape was hammered out of tragic experience. Before there could have been the hope for a Prince of David’s line, there had to be—David. Before the hope of a messianic Kingdom there had to be—the Kingdom of Israel. In short, before Israel’s hope of the Kingdom of God could assume such a form, she had first to build a kingdom on this earth. We shall therefore have to go back and consider the rise of the Davidic state and those ideas which it released into the Hebrew soul.
The Davidic state would, however, be a very poor place to begin, for it created neither Israel’s faith nor the notion of the Kingdom of God. True it powerfully shaped and colored both for all time to come, but Israel’s faith had already assumed its normative form long before David was born. The idea of the rule of God over his people was already there. Indeed, the Davidic state was itself no little limited by that idea, and there were some, as we shall see, who even felt that it was in fundamental contradiction to it. So we are driven back into that earliest and formative period of Israel’s history in which both people and religion took shape. There, in the heritage of Moses himself, we shall find the beginnings of her hope of the Kingdom of God. For this was no idea picked up along the way by cultural borrowing, nor was it the creation of the monarchy and its institutions, nor yet the outgrowth of the frustration of national ambition, however much all these factors may have colored it. On the contrary, it is linked with Israel’s whole notion of herself as the chosen people of God, and this in turn was woven into the texture of her faith from the beginning. Only so can its tenacity and its tremendous creative power, both in Old Testament and New, be explained.
We have opened a subject as wide as the Old Testament faith itself, and one to which we shall find it difficult to do justice in so brief a compass. But we have no course but to essay it. There is no other way.
I
We must, then, begin our story in the latter half of the thirteenth century B.C., for it was then that Israel began her life as a people in the Promised Land.
Let us look briefly at the world of the day. The long reign of Ramesses II (1301-1234)2 was moving toward its end, and Egypt’s great period of empire had not long to go. Egypt was now an ancient country with well-nigh two thousand years of recorded history behind her. Some three hundred years before, under the dynamic pharaohs of the XVIII Dynasty, she had entered her period of greatest military glory, at the height of which she ruled an empire which stretched from the fourth cataract of the Nile to the great bend of the Euphrates. The instruments of power were in her hands, and she knew how to use them. Her army, based on the horse-drawn chariot and the composite bow, possessed a mobility and a fire power few could withstand. Her navy ruled the seas. And in spite of temporary weakness in the early fourteenth century, as the XVIII Dynasty gave way to the XIX, and in spite of Hittite pressure in the north, the empire had been maintained fundamentally intact. Ramesses II was able to fight the Hittites to a bloody stalemate in Syria and to end his days in peace and glory—and considerable vainglory.
But the great Ramesses died, and under his successors the glory of Egypt slipped away. His son Marniptah came to the throne, already an old man, and in his short reign (1234-1225) had to fight twice for Egypt’s life. Hordes of strange peoples, whom the Egyptians called the “Peoples of the Sea,” were pressing upon the land down the invasion route from Libya, that route most recently traversed by Rommel’s famed Afrika Korps. Only by the most strenuous effort was the pharaoh able to repel them. Then Marniptah died, and there ensued twenty years of weakness and anarchy followed by a dynastic change. Although the XX Dynasty took over and restored order, troubles were by no means at an end. Ramesses III (1195-1164), who might be called the last of Egypt’s great pharaohs, had need of all his strength in order to deal with yet further invasions of the “Peoples of the Sea” from Libya, from the direction of Palestine, and by sea.
The “Peoples of the Sea” are an intriguing subject into which we cannot go.3 Their names: Ruka, Tursha, Aqiwasha, Shardina, Perasata, etc., show them to be Aegean peoples in a great race migration. They interest us chiefly because in the Perasata (Pelasata, biblical Peleshet) we recognize the Philistines—of whom more later. Although Egypt was able to save herself, she was internally sick. Bled white by incessant war, her army depending ever more largely on mercenaries, the drive which had sustained her for so many centuries had nearly played itself out. Apparently the will to empire had been lost. At any rate, under the successors of Ramesses III, the futile Ramessides (IV-XII), all traces of the empire vanished, never to be recovered again. By the latter part of the twelfth century Egypt was but a memory in Asia—albeit a potent one, as later history illustrates.
On the northeastern frontier of Egypt lies Palestine, the stage of the drama with which we are concerned. For centuries Palestine had been an Egyptian province. She had developed no political unity; Egypt had allowed none.4 Her population, predominantly Canaanite, was organized into a patchwork of petty city states, each with its king, subject to the pharaoh. In addition Egyptian governors, with their garrisons and tax-gatherers, were spotted through the land in a sort of dual control. Since the Egyptian bureaucracy was notoriously corrupt and rapacious, the land went from bad to worse. And when at last the power of the pharaoh slipped away, there remained a political vacuum. Left without a master were the Canaanite kinglets, each behind the ramparts of his pitiful walled town. Virtually every man’s hand was against his neighbor in a sordid tale of rivalries too petty for history to notice. No unity existed, and Canaan was incapable of creating any.
Now Palestine is geographically defenseless, as all who have seen it on the map know.5 Not only is it sandwiched between the great powers of the Nile and the Euphrates and condemned by its position and small size to be a helpless pawn between them; it is also wide open to the desert on the east. Its entire history has been