ABSTRACT
Central to the auto-narrative of the ‘Israelites’ as represented in the Bible, and to both Judaism and Christianity which appropriated it, is the ideology of covenant. The Israelites of the Bible, or the Jews, or the Christian Church, are the ‘chosen people’, specially selected and favoured by God in contrast to all other nations and peoples. If the intention of the writers-editors of the Pentateuch was to help forge national identity, then the religious ideology of the covenant can be seen as key to their project. The story of a unique covenant between God and Israel, projected into the distant past, gave the Israelites a narrative, central to which was the idea that they were special to God, chosen above all other nations even if those nations had, like the Babylonians, the Greeks and the Romans, proved themselves militarily superior. Whatever oppression they might suffer, Israel could be secure in the knowledge that they were God’s ‘own possession among all peoples’, a ‘holy nation’ set apart to God (Exodus 19.6). It is a commonplace of biblical scholarship that in ancient Jewish thought
there seems not to have been a preoccupation with death or with life after death, let alone a geography of other worlds. It is this world, this life, which is the space of the divine covenant which continues with the blessing or chastisement of God; and it is this life, not death and an afterlife in some other world, which is desired and emphasized. As Giza Vermès summarized it,
The general hope was for a long and prosperous life, many children, a peaceful death in the midst of one’s family, and burial in the tomb of one’s fathers. Needless to say, with this simple outlook went a most sensitive appreciation of the present time as being the only moment in which a man can be with God.
