Theological Musings of a Thirty-Something

I love Paul’s epistle to the Romans, and I think I find myself in good company when I say that. Despite the almost overwhelming difficulty intrinsic to the letter, I find myself time and time again going back to it, reading and re-reading, praying and praying again, and slowly but surely, finding myself, like Paul says, “transformed through the renewing of my mind.”

Reading through the letter of Romans is like climbing a great Pauline mountain; though the hike is gruelling at times, and though I may at times find myself taking the wrong path up the mountain (and therefore enduring unnecessary sweat and confusion in the process) the summit of the mountain is not difficult to reach. And the view at the top is breathtaking. It is the view of Rom 15:6-7, that grand Pauline vision of Jew and Gentile, hand in hand, brought together by the one risen King Jesus, with one voice glorifying the one true God. This is the summit of the mountain and to stop our hike up the mountain at some lower peak which focuses simply on my or your own personal salvation is, I think, to mistake the summit for a ‘pit-stop,’ no matter how amazing and glorious the view from that ‘pit-stop’ is.

But I want to focus on one particular pit-stop along the trail and (hopefully) give some clarity about it. This specific ‘pit-stop’ in Romans is the following:

“…And in this way all Israel will be saved.” (Rom 11:26; ESV)

Those nine English words (and the five Greek words that stand behind them) have divided biblical interpreters of all shapes and sizes for centuries and will probably continue to inspire passionate debate for centuries to come. And it is easy to see how this sentence might elicit more than a small smattering of emotional fervour among interpreters. These verses are tremendously difficult, being found within the context of Romans 9-11, a harrowingly treacherous part of the hike up the mountain. These chapters contain more places to slip and fall off the edge (or at least to sprain you ankle) than anywhere else along the trail. Paul seeks to answer the question: “Has the word of God failed?” (9:6). Essentially, has God failed his chosen people Israel? Since many Jews have not accepted their own Messiah, have God’s promises failed? Paul’s answer is an unequivocal “me genoito!” “By no means!” But how Paul goes about answering this question is another story.

Within this sustained argument of Paul, we find the following few verses, which we will focus on:

“Lest you [Gentiles] be wise in your own sight, I want you to understand this mystery brothers, a partial hardening has come upon Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. And in this way all Israel will be saved, as it is written,

“The Deliverer will come from Zion / he will banish ungodliness from Jacob / and this will be my covenant with them / when I take away their sins.”

(Romans 11:25-27)

I should first make clear that I am not seeking to answer all the questions regarding this passage (I don’t think I could even if I tried). I am simply wishing to share with people some helpful parameters for understanding it. Paul did not write Romans 11:25-27 in a vacuum. He wrote it within a literary and cultural context. And in order to enlighten this very context I will be comparing this passage to one found in the Jewish Mishnah. Now, in due course I will explain what the Mishnah is and what it says. However, firstly I shall set the ground work of our study by focusing on this particular Romans verse in question (and the Isaiah passage it quotes).

The debates regarding these verses surround the question of what Paul means when he says “all Israel” in this passage. Is Paul here talking about (1) some great end-time repentance of the ethnic Jewish people yet to come in world history? Or (2) is he speaking about the remnant of the Jews and the fullness of the Gentiles brought together and filled with God’s Spirit, therefore being counted as ‘God’s true Israel?’ I’ll let you decide which one is true, but hopefully by the end of this article, you will have a bit more clarity in your interpretive endeavour.

I want to firstly focus on the Old Testament quotation that Paul used to support his claim that “all Israel would be saved.” A rather bizarre one on face value. The primary quotation comes from Isaiah 59:20-21:

“And a Redeemer will come to Zion / to those in Jacob who turn from transgression,” declares the LORD / And as for me, this is my covenant with them,” says the LORD…”

(Isaiah 59:20-21)

To be honest, anyone reading this verse must stop stop and think, “Paul, how on earth does this passage from Isaiah support your claim that all Israel will be saved?” But stick with me and I think we’ll get some clarity on this.

When we look at Isaiah 59:20-21, we need to keep in mind that the Isaiah Paul read, studied and prayed was an Isaiah without chapter breaks. It was one long continuous scroll. Therefore, I take it as a basic assumption that when Paul quoted one verse in the Hebrew Bible, he had the entire sweep of the surrounding passages buzzing around in his mind. This is significant because Isaiah 59:20-21 flows naturally into Isaiah 60, and that matters for reasons we will shall soon see.

Before the verses in question (59:20-21), Isaiah 59 speaks of the LORD being displeased as he looks upon unfaithful Israel because of her evil and oppression (v. 15b). Israel shed’s innocent blood, speaks lies, colludes with corruption, and walks upon highways of “desolation and destruction” (v. 2-8). Israel hopes for God’s righteousness, light and salvation to overtake them, yet because of their unfaithfulness, it does not (v. 9-15a). In response, God himself acts; he puts on his armour and brings both salvation and judgment to his covenant people in an act of just faithfulness (v. 15b-19).

It is at this particular moment in Isaiah 59 that we read the passage Paul quotes, the promise of ‘the Redeemer [who] will come to Zion” (v. 20) to make a covenant with his people (v. 21). This is God coming to his people, both to save and to judge.

After this dramatic moment, we read of Israel’s glorious restoration in chapter 60. A huge sigh of relief resounds as, finally, Israel’s ‘light has come’ and ‘the glory of the LORD has risen upon [her].” (60:1). The one key thing I want to pull out of this chapter is how it speaks of Israel’s scattered children coming from distant coastlands in droves to this newly glorified Zion, with the wealth of the nations and foreign kings following them. Here is a selection of verses about that:

(v. 4) “Lift up your eyes…your sons shall come from afar.”

(v. 5) “The wealth of the nations shall come to you.”

(v. 9) “For the coastlands shall hope for me [the LORD], the ships of Tarshish first, to bring your children from afar, their silver and gold with them.”

(v. 10-11) “foreigners shall build up your walls, and their kings shall minister to you…that people may bring to you the wealth of the nations, with their kings led in procession.”

Keep all this in mind as we move forward into what might seem to people an unexpected turn on our hike. We shall now turn to the Jewish Mishnah.

Now, a quick introduction on the Mishnah. The Mishnah is essentially a collection of Jewish oral traditions handed on by the rabbis before and after the time of Jesus. These oral traditions were finally written down around the year 200 AD to preserve these oral law of the rabbis. These are the same oral laws we see Jesus engaging with in the gospels (eg. Mark 7:1-23).

Why I turn to the Mishnah is that I think it gives us an insight into how some Jews (from one particular brand of Judaism at the time) were thinking and interpreting their scriptures in ways similar to Paul. The one passage from the Mishnah I want you to read is below:

(Mishnah, Sanhedrin 10:1)

“All Jews have a share in the World to Come, as it says (Isaiah 60:21), “Thy people are all righteous; they shall inherit the land for ever, the branch of my planting, the work of my hands, that I may be glorified.” [But] these have no share in the World to Come: One who says that [the belief of] resurrection of the dead is not from the Torah, [one who says] that the Torah is not from Heaven, and one who denigrates the Torah. Rabbi Akiva says: also one who reads outside books, and one who whispers [an incantation] over a wound… Abba Shaul says, also one who utters the Divine name as it is spelled.”

(Here is a link to the the Mishnah online if you want to read the passage yourself)

https://www.sefaria.org/Mishnah_Sanhedrin.10.1?lang=bi

What can this text from the Mishnah tell us about how Jews were thinking in Paul’s day? Firstly, it brings together a tension where, on the one hand, it says that “all Jews have a share in the World to Come,” yet, in the very next breath, the Jewish author qualifies that statement by saying “except for this Jew, this Jew, this Jew and that one.” What this essentially shows is that it is perfectly plausible, from both a historical and a hermetical standpoint, for a Jew in the 1st or 2nd century AD to speak passionately about “all Israel being saved!” but not actually meaning all ethnic Israelites. This doesn’t prove anything about what Paul is or is not saying in Romans 11:26, but it does, without a doubt, prove that it is certainly not ‘anti-Semitic’ or ‘supercessionist’ to claim that when Paul is talking about ‘all Israel being saved’ in Romans 11 he’s not necessarily talking about all ethnic Jews. This was how many Jews in Paul’s day were thinking—there were numerous Jewish groups that qualified what it meant “to be Israel” so as to naturally find their own sub-group or movement within the boundary markers they’d set up. As seen in this passage, the author could on the one hand say “God will be faithful to all Jews!” yet at the same time look at the Sadducees (who denied the resurrection) and other Jews practicing incantations and saying the name of God, and mumble under his breath “…except for those Jews.”

But moving on from that point, what I found the most exciting and shocking about this passage from the Mishnah was the verse from the Old Testament that was used to support this Jewish author’s claim that “all Israel will inherit the Age to Come.” Look at the passage again.

(Mishnah, Sanhedrin 10:1)

“All Jews have a share in the World to Come, as it says (Isaiah 60:21), “Thy people are all righteous; they shall inherit the land for ever, the branch of my planting, the work of my hands, that I may be glorified.”

This blew my mind when I read it a few days ago. Why? Because the author is using a passage from Isaiah 60 to undergird his whole argument! This whole passage essentially leads me to conclude that, if you were to go back in time to the 1st or 2nd century AD and asked a Torah-observant Jew to give his ‘proof-text’ for the belief that “all Israel would inherit the Age to Come,” one place a Jew might go is Isaiah 60, the very same body of scripture that Paul’s quote from Isaiah 59:20-21 naturally flows into. This is the chapter that talks about glorious Zion and the nations streaming into her. And when the Mishnah here speaks of “all Jews having a share in the World to Come,” it’s qualifying that by using the definition of Isaiah 60:21: “all [the] righteous” ones, those who will be the “branch of [God’s] planting.” These words alone should sound alarm-bells in the mind of any average reader of Romans. After all, in Romans, Paul seeks to identify the ones who are truly God’s justified/righteous ones in ch. 3-8 (and therefore who will inherit the world to come) and also qualifies God’s covenant people as branches within God’s olive tree. The themes of “the righteous ones” and “the branch of [God’s] planting” find themselves nestled within Paul’s letter to the Romans.

Now, where does this leave us?

Again, I want to repeat that I am not seeking to answer all the questions regarding this passage (I don’t think I could even if I tried). Like I said earlier, Paul did not write Rom 11:25-27 in a vacuum. He wrote it within a literary and cultural context. Through reading this passage of the Mishnah, we get a glimpse into these contexts. We discover another Torah-reading Jew like Paul writing something very similar to what Paul does in Romans 11, claiming that “all Israel will inherit the World to Come,” yet quickly qualifying that “all Israel” doesn’t actually mean what we might naturally think it means.

Whereas the Mishnah restricted “all Israel” into a stricter and more exclusive sub-group within the Jewish people, essentially focusing more and more inwardly, Paul on the other hand, as the Jewish apostle to the Gentiles, widened the definition of “the righteous ones” so that the nations might flood in and be a part of God’s glorious new covenant people (like Isaiah 60 had promised). The Mishnah focused inward on stricter and stricter exclusivity. Paul focused outward in response to the extravagant mercy of Israel’s God towards the nations.

This contrast alone might partly explain why, in the original Hebrew of Isaiah 59:20, it reads:

“And a Redeemer will come to Zion” (Isaiah 59:20)

But Paul seems to intentionally change the words of that passage, saying,

“The Deliverer will come from Zion” (Rom 11:26; Greek)

For Paul, the vision of Isaiah had to be radically re-read in light of Jesus and the events of the early church unfolding before him. As the church had experienced in their early years, the nations were not streaming into Jerusalem as Isaiah 60 had said, but the proclamation of the Deliver was streaming from Jerusalem, and the apostle Paul was the living embodiment of that reality.

But more importantly, through comparing Rom 11:25-27 with the Mishnah, we can see that it is highly probable that when Paul envisioned that ‘final Israel’ that would be saved in its entirety, he had Isaiah 60 in his mind (just as the Mishnah did). And this chapter 60 of Isaiah (which follows God’s judgment on wickedness in Israel in ch. 59) speaks of a glorious Zion where Gentiles and where the inhabitants of Zion “shall all be righteous” (Isaiah 60:21). This was a Zion where Jew and Gentile dwelt together, with the glory of the everlasting God was in their midst.

And, in almost perfect poetry, this leads us right back to the summit of the mountain:

“That together [both Jew and Gentile] you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore welcome one another as Christ as welcomed you, for the glory of God.” (Rom. 15:6-7).

I am still aware that this passage is filled with difficulties. I often find myself still torn on this whole issue, trying to figure out what Paul really meant about “all Israel” and what he really thought would happen. And I might very well be wrong in my connections here. Yet, no matter what the right answer really is (and whether I have it or not), I know for sure that I can no longer read Romans 11:25-27 again without having Mishnah, Sanhedrin 10:1 buzzing around in my mind. And I’d encourage you to do the same.