Dear Editor
I write this to you in the form of a letter because this is a personal view.
We Christians have grown used - too used - to the idea of a land "set apart" for God's people, a "good and broad land, flowing with milk and honey" (Ex. 3:8), "a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey" (Deut 8:8).
Too often we forget that it is we who are God's people. And that the land which God promised to Abraham and to Moses, God promises now to us. For we are now "a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people" (1 Pet. 2:9). The Old Testament has given way to the New. The Church is "the Israel of God" (Gal 6:16), "heirs of Abraham through promise" (Gal 3:29).
Too often we forget that the land set apart was "the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites". Our God is not a God of ethnic cleansing. Our God is not the God who said "you shall utterly destroy them...that you may not do according to their abominable practices" (Deut 20:17-18). Our God is a God who commanded "You shall not kill" (Deut 5:17).
Too often we forget that the God who gives can also take. "They entered and took possession of this land. But they did not obey your voice.... So the city is given into the hands of the Chaldeans." (Jer 32:23). Too often we forget that the God who promised a return from exile in Babylon two thousand five hundred years ago, promised too to "cause a righteous branch to spring forth from David, who will execute justice and righteousness in this land." (Jer 33:15)
These promises, said Paul, are made to us. The line of kings came to an end. The temple whose detailed workings occupy chapter after chapter of the Old Testament saw its last sacrifice a few years after the death of Jesus himself. The twelve tribes had broken apart centuries before - if indeed they had ever been truly united in the legendary times of David and Solomon. Jerusalem for us is not "the place which the Lord your God shall choose, to make his name dwell there," as the Deuteronomist repeats again and again. It is the city where our Lord was crucified, just as for Muslims it is the city to which God transported Mohammed in a trance.
What is going on in the Middle East today is immensely saddening. But its roots lie in the politics of the twentieth century, in the break-up of the Turkish Empire after the First World War, in the fascist (and not only the fascist) wave of anti-Semitism in the earlier part of the century, in the policies of the superpowers, in the ending of a colonialist and paternalistic era. Nothing (apart from the depths of human selfishness) is predicted in scripture (and the Bible is in any case not a sort of horoscope or work of Nostradamus!), nothing can be inferred from scripture.
Except for one thing. That God loves us all, Jew, Muslim, Christian, atheist. And a god of love has no place for those who destroy, whether with tanks or with suicide bombs. Pacem concede Domine nostris temporibus. Give peace in our time, O Lord.
Hector Davie