Aspects of the Rabbinic Concept of Israel 1 A Study in the Mekilta 2

ISRAEL designates in rabbinic literature, and to us, a specific people, the Jews. It is the concept which expressed and evoked throughout all the stages of this people's history its sense of nationhood. “Scripture,” say the Rabbis, “designates them as a nation, as it says ‘And who is like Thy people Israel, a nation one in the earth’ (I Chron. 17.21),” ⁴ the Rabbis thus adducing sound Scriptural warrant for their own national self-consciousncss. In whatever respects the rabbinic concept of Israel may differ from its biblical antecedent, the core of the concept, the awareness of nationhood, remains the same. Without the concept of Israel, or some other equivalent, there would have been no Jewish people, no Bible, no rabbinic literature. It is an excellent example of the way in which an organic concept interprets, organizes and oft-times creates the facts of experience.