ABSTRACT
As a dominant driving force in civilization, the main root of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the Hebrew Bible has authored and nourished national identity and religious-cultural nationalism: in the belief in the chosenness of the nation and its necessarily moral foundations; its unity across divisions of class, geographic dislocation and cultural assimilation; fierce criticism of and grievance against its enemies, internal as well as external; acceptance of guilt for national failings and defeats, and grief-ridden penitence leading to moral reform; hopes for freedom, regeneration, and the ingathering of exiles; vengeful hatred of oppressors, and readiness to fight and die for the nation; and also the interconnection of the personal life with that of the nation.1 The Hebrew Bible also prefigures paradoxical conflict in national identity: between the individual and the group, chosenness and egalitarianism, the narrowly national and the universal.
