He Dwells Among Us: Son of God and Son of Man

By William Emmanuel Abraham

This book traces and clarifies steps towards the fulfillment of the promise to Abraham through the twists and turns of Israelite history to culminate in the unexpected manner of its fulfillment. The manner of the fulfillment is to be understood not through prophecy but through Levitical Law, which Jesus declared he had come to observe and not set aside. To do otherwise would ignore that declaration and inevitably distort the nature of Jesus’ mission and salvific work. This book accordingly provokes new questions but also leads to conformable answers. Why would the magi come from Babylon to worship a Judahite baby? Why was there the temptation in the wilderness? Why did Jesus establish a priesthood? How does Levitical law explain Jesus’ missing body? Above all, what does it really mean to say that the Son of God and Lord of life died?

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Aug 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664237919

William Emmanuel Abraham

A lifelong Christian and retired philosophy professor, the author taught in universities in England, Ghana and the United States. In addition to professional philosophical writings, he spent a lifetime discovering God’s hand in the unfolding of his design for human beings and the dynamics of salvation history. He is the author of a previous book, What Did Jesus Do?

Book preview

Copyright © 2021 William Emmanuel Abraham.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by

any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying,

recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system

without the written permission of the author except in the case of

brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author

and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of

the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of

people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

WestBow Press

A Division of Thomas Nelson & Zondervan

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.westbowpress.com

844-714-3454

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or

links contained in this book may have changed since publication and

may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those

of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher,

and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are

models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-6642-3792-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6642-3793-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6642-3791-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021912601

WestBow Press rev. date: 08/03/2021

Scripture quotations marked (NRSV) are from the New Revised Standard Version

Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the

United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the Holy Bible, New

International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica,

Inc.® Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.

zondervan.com The NIV and New International Version are trademarks

registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.®

Scripture quotations marked (CJB) are taken from the COMPLETE JEWISH

BIBLE, Copyright© 1998 by David H. Stern. Published by Jewish New Testament

Publications, Inc. www.messianicjewish.net. Distributed by Messianic Jewish

Resources Int’l. www.messianicjewish.net. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked (RSV) are from the Revised Standard

Version of the Bible, copyright © 1946, 1952, and 1971 National

Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America.

Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture marked (Brenton) taken from the Septuagint version of

the Old Testament by Sir Lancelot Charles Lee Brenton.

Scripture texts marked (NAB) in this work are taken from the New American

Bible, revised edition © 2010, 1991, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian

Doctrine, Washington, D.C. and are used by permission of the copyright owner.

All Rights Reserved. No part of the New American Bible may be reproduced

in any form without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Scripture quotations marked (NASB) taken from the (NASB®) New American

Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995, 2020 by The Lockman

Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. www.lockman.org

FOREWORD

H e Dwells Among Us is an exegetic explanation and pastoral development of the promise God made to Abraham and its complete fulfillment and fruition in the Promised One, Jesus the Messiah, the Word of God. The Word of God became a human being who lived among us as the ultimate sacrificial lamb of God and atoned for the sins of the world once and for all. Through his atonement, he creates for each of us the opportunity of everlasting life with God.

In his previous book, What Did Jesus Do? Professor William Emmanuel Abraham discusses how Jesus fulfilled the prophecy and the Law. Through his birth, Jesus fulfilled biblical prophecy about the Messiah, the Anointed One of God. Through his mission and ministry, he fulfilled the Law, including Levitical stipulations for the atonement for sin.

In this present monumental book, He Dwells Among Us, which follows-up on his previous book, Professor Abraham draws from his deep reservoir of philosophy, biblical exegesis and hermeneutics, and elucidates for us the promise God made to Abraham through a systematic and comprehensive discussion. He identifies and traces the step-by-step progression by which the promise finds its total fulfillment in Jesus Christ. In his presentation of the Word of God from Adam all the way through the Bible to Jesus Christ, Abraham fully accomplishes a long and complex journey.

He Dwells Among Us highlights the scope of the promise made to Abraham, covering all families of the earth, who are beneficiaries of the salvation and the universal restoration of the blessings of everlasting life, lost through the lovelessness that characterizes the fallen nature of humankind. Professor Abraham wonderfully digs deeper and deeper into the treasures of divine revelation to find and share with us a most profoundly enlightened understanding, which can be applied to Christian living in the light of the Promise.

This author presents the entirety of the Promise and its plenary completion with a freshness and accuracy characteristic of a gifted and diligent storyteller and word artist.

If we conscientiously and dispassionately scrutinize in the Bible the promise of God and the progressive stages towards its fulfillment, it should become clear to us that the Old and the New Testaments make one continuous, undivided and indivisible Testament. The author, therefore, advocates reading and pondering the Bible as one continuous Sacred Testament, without a hiatus. Introducing an unnecessary dichotomy into Sacred Scripture to make two phases should be discouraged and avoided. To quote the author, The Bible, for Christians, should correctly stand as one, and unfold, in a single continuous span… (page 22). This can be illustrated by an African image in which the Bible is likened to weaving new threads on existing threads to form a single rope.

The author creatively makes use of a vast range of introductory background information (history, geography, archeology, culture, customs, life situation, language, social and religious practices) as ancillary tools to facilitate the proper understanding and appropriate interpretation and application of the biblical message to life in God’s kingdom of heaven on earth, leading to everlasting life according to God’s plan of salvation.

In the illuminating manner he handles the biblical text, the author invites readers, teachers, preachers and hearers of the word of God to hear afresh what the Bible says on the subject matter of the Promise and its fulfillment in Jesus Christ. In his original and coherent narrative of the Promise and its step-by-step fulfillment, the author avoids cataloguing and reviewing what others have said and recycled, focusing rather on the source texts.

Another strength of the book is its pastoral presentation of the Word of God as a mirror to all readers and beneficiaries in our own age of the Promise declared by God to benefit every family of the earth, a presentation which enables us to correctly grasp, personally assimilate and disseminate God’s magnanimous Promise.

The studious reader will find Professor Abraham’s book He Dwells Among Us a very rewarding experience, from its striking elucidation of Christian biblical faith, clarity of insight into related narratives in Tanakh (the Hebrew Scripture), to revelatory expositions relating to the birth, life, ministry, teaching, parables, miracles, passion, death, resurrection and ascension of the Messiah. The serious, systematic and thorough reader will be delighted to discover a fresh biblical consciousness and appreciation of the Church’s teaching. Christian devotions, practices, beliefs, and the liturgy, especially the nature of the celebration of the Eucharist, of prayer life, what to pray for, and how to pray.

Professor Abraham opens wide insightful access to Sacred Scripture for all the world-wide beneficiaries of God’s promise.

Professor Abraham’s outstanding book, He Dwells Among Us, will without doubt and deservedly, attract a large community of scholarly readers, pastors, preachers and teachers, biblical experts and students of the Bible, biblical exegetes and biblical theologians, biblical pastoral ministers of the Word of God and Liturgists. This book deserves a warm reception in libraries of theological Seminaries and Biblical Colleges, as well as a wide readership.

Rev. Monsignor Wynnand Amewowo

(Former Director of Biblical Center for Africa and Madagascar, Nairobi, Kenya).

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1     The Human Predicament and How We Became Mortal

Chapter 2     The Patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob

Chapter 3     The Birth of the Nation of Israel

Chapter 4     In Search of the Promised Land

Chapter 5     Settlement of the Promised Land

Chapter 6     The Promise Fulfilled

Chapter 7     The Mission Begins

Chapter 8     The Teacher of Righteousness

Chapter 9     The Transfiguration and the Signal for the End

Chapter 10   The Climactic Days

PREFACE

J esus Christ said that the Law and the Prophets were about himself, and that he had come to earth to fulfill both. Matthew reports, Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill (Matthew 5:17 NRSV). This means that any account which presents him as only fulfilling the Prophets will have distorted both the nature of his ministry and the manner of its completion. Jesus is that descendant of Abraham appointed by God to be a blessing to all the families of the earth (Genesis 12:3 NRSV). Psalm 133:3 reveals the nature of the blessing to be everlasting life for human beings. And yet, the accounts with which we are familiar tend to concentrate on what Jesus did and what was done to him. Such an approach is destined to sidestep Jesus’s specific purposes in doing the things he did and the specific reasons for what was done to him.

It naturally fell on the last of the prophets to herald the promised Messiah and identify him to the Judahites and the world. John the Baptist, as the last of the prophets, came to prepare the way for the promised Messiah by calling the people to repentance and the forgiveness of their sins through a baptism of renewal. The Baptist identified Jesus as the Messiah. Jesus would divide his time between giving a clearer definition of the Law, fulfilling it, and teaching us how to live in accordance with it. He would also do good to those seeking or needing it. While accounts of his life confidently say that this or that thing he said or did fulfilled one prophecy or another, it is hard to find accounts which similarly present how elements of his mission fulfilled the Law also.

One crucial example of such misdirection has to do with the manner of Jesus’s atonement for human sins. It is through the atonement that he created a path to everlasting life for us. His sacrifice of atonement was subject to all provisions of the governing Levitical Law, for nothing would be an atonement sacrifice unless it fully conformed to each of the Law’s stipulations. Leviticus 1:1-17 lays out requirements for every atonement sacrifice, including the one that would create a path to everlasting life for us.

A prophetic Psalm of David states, you will not abandon me to the realm of the dead, nor will you let your faithful one see decay (Psalm 16:10 TNIV). Contrary to the general belief, the guarantee that the Messiah’s body would not be left to decompose was not a promise of his resurrection. The promise of resurrection was the first clause, which avers that he would not be abandoned in the realm of the dead.

In Judahite practice, corpses were left in their tomb to decay and decompose. After a year, the bones were collected and interred in an ossuary. As the Messiah’s body would in fact be needed for the completion of the atonement sacrifice to satisfy Levitical law, it clearly could not be left to decompose in the usual Judahite manner, and thus be rendered unfit for the required immolation. Jesus’s body would need to be fresh for that purpose. Levitical law stipulates immolation as the final step of an atonement sacrifice. Jesus acknowledged that he would meet all the law’s requirements. His sacrifice was a free-will offering, being neither obligatory nor coerced in any way (cf John 10:18). It was in that same spirit that he fully cooperated at every stage in his arrest, trial, conviction, sentencing and crucifixion. He did not at any time offer a personal defense. He even sought forgiveness from the cross for the people who were engaged in his execution.

An atonement sacrifice does more than obtain the forgiveness or remission of sins. It purges sins and makes it as though they had never been committed. It expunges the death which is the wages of sin. It opens up the path to everlasting life for us. This topic is more fully discussed in the final chapter of this book.

Presenting Jesus’s ministry as a fulfillment not merely of prophecy, but of the law too, leads to a fuller and more revealing account of his mission. It enables us, for example, to understand the correct significance of his missing body in the tomb. What happened to it and what both Peter and John understood and believed from what they saw are likewise discussed in the final chapter.

With his own new commandment, Jesus instituted the kingdom of heaven on earth for us. With his own blood, he sealed the covenant through which we undertake to live by his new law. My previous book What Did Jesus Do? was my initial attempt to present Jesus from the viewpoint of both the fulfillment of prophecy and the fulfillment of law. This present book is a much more complete and thoroughly substantiated presentation. Through his birth, Jesus fulfilled prophecy; through his mission, he fulfilled the law. Unless we understand the ways in which he fulfilled the law, we cannot with clear conviction grasp what he did, much less understand how he did it. Our faith would rest on an incomplete and opaque foundation. In the end, correctly understanding what we profess to believe is the surest bulwark against wavering. Jesus himself stressed the necessity of understanding that which we believe (Mark 4:12; Matthew 13:13,14; cf Isaiah 6:9).

If we are to understand how Jesus fulfilled the law, it is essential not to detach the Gospels from Tanakh or Hebrew Scriptures, as though the Gospels were free-standing, self-contained accounts of Jesus and his mission. On the contrary, the Gospels are much better understood as compositions by evangelists who rooted their acceptance and understanding of Jesus Christ wholly in Hebrew Scriptures and wrote to complete those scriptures with the story of the doings and teachings of the Messiah promised in Tanakh. Mark quickly establishes Jesus as the Son of God. He was first known on the basis of the archangel’s announcement which was the fulfillment of the prophecy of Tanakh (Isaiah 7:14). Matthew and Luke derive Jesus from genealogies flowing from and through Tanakh. And John introduces Jesus as the creative and missionary Word of God, who emerges out of the Father, and is declared by God in Tanakh to go out and not return without having accomplished his mission. The Gospels themselves cannot be well understood unless grasped as the fulfillment of the central promise in Tanakh.

There are three simple distinctions indispensable to a proper understanding of the Gospels. Ignoring them is bound to lead to palpable errors of understanding and interpretation. Expositions of the Gospels have persistently ignored the distinctions in question and have, in consequence, often generated accounts which, in many cases, are simply not to be trusted.

The first distinction is between what one sees a person do and what that person is in fact doing. The second distinguishes between what one hears a person say and what that person is saying. The third is reading a sentence with its lexical meaning while overlooking the context that fixes the utterance’s intended import. I illustrate the distinctions and apply them to three scriptural passages to demonstrate the result of overlooking them. In each case, it is bad.

Imagine that someone comes to me and asks why I am opening and shutting my mouth noiselessly. My response could be that I am going over an argument. This would be an example of what someone sees me do not being what I am really doing. For an example of the second, suppose I say to someone who has been working extremely hard for me, you must be really tired, and he says at least, you are observant. I might respond by saying he did not understand me. I was not trying to tell him something he already knew. I was suggesting that he might want to take a break. If he should now say that I had said nothing about his taking a break, he would simply have misunderstood my communication. In life, many things we say have a force different from their lexical meaning. It is the difference between a locution and an illocution. I shall now proceed to illustrate similar points using scriptural passages.

In different accounts, Jesus was said to be Beelzebul himself (Matthew 10:23), or to be possessed by Beelzebul (Mark 3:24) or be using the power of Beelzebul to cast out demons (Matthew 12:24-26; Luke 11:15, 18,19), Beelzebul being the prince of all demons whom Jesus identified with Satan (Matthew 12:24,26). There was an occasion when a blind, mute and demon-possessed man was brought to a synagogue for Jesus to heal. Many onlookers were so astonished by his success that they wondered aloud whether Jesus might not be the Messiah, son of David. It had never been known that a demon obeyed a human being. Certain Pharisees who were present at the time disapproved of Jesus’s known habit of performing healings on Sabbath days and in synagogues. They felt certain that God could not favor a flagrant flouter of his Sabbath law, which commanded cessation from all usual labors on that day. From Jesus’s habitual disregard of that law, they inferred that it must be by Beelzebul’s power that he performed his feats. Jesus was outraged because the Pharisees were associating the power of God with Satan’s power. He pointed out that they might as well absurdly say that Satan was letting him use Satan’s own power to fight against Satan. Could a house still stand if divided against itself in that way? Many sins could be forgiven, but not a sin against the Holy Spirit, such as identifying God with Satan. The Pharisees picked up rocks and encouraged others to do the same. They were ready to stone him to death.

Some concerned witnesses rushed to Jesus’s home to warn his mother and family of his plight. Led by Jesus’s mother, the entire family hastened to the synagogue. They intervened by saying that Jesus had lost his mind. Many commentators on that episode claim, in light of this, that even Jesus’s own mother believed, or at least said, that he was insane. After all, everybody heard his mother describe him in that manner. Now, it would have been good if those commentators had paused to ask themselves what Jesus’s mother was doing, or indeed really saying, by uttering those words. Was she stigmatizing her own son, whom the archangel Gabriel identified as the Son of God, by asserting publicly that he had become insane?

It should not take another mother to recognize what Mary was doing. She was attempting to extricate her son. We often try to protect people by telling others who are offended by them to ignore what they were saying or doing. And this is not out of some conviction that the people we are trying to help are insane or are confused and do not know what they are saying or doing. Similarly, it should be obvious that neither Jesus’s mother nor his cousins really believed that Jesus was insane or made that assertion. Their ploy happened to work. The scribes and Pharisees relented and let Jesus leave unharmed in the company of his family. Even then, a group of people followed them home, taunting madman, madman.

Those expositors who say otherwise, simply ignore or overlook the context and its manifest influence on Mary’s words and behavior. They fail to distinguish between Mary’s uttering those words (her locution) and what she was doing with those words (her illocution). Such expositors simply go with the lexical meaning of her words and decide that she was making an assertion of lunacy. Had they but read the situation with imagination and put themselves in Mary’s place, they would have thought otherwise. They would have realized that her entire meaning was that they should let her son go. She did what she thought would help her son out of the predicament his family believed him to be in.

A second example can be found on the occasion of Jesus’s cousins urging him to come down to Jerusalem with them (John 7:2-10) for the seven-day celebration of the Feast of Booths (Sukkot or Tabernacles). Upon its conclusion, the priests gathered a prescribed sacred assembly and presented burnt offerings to God. Since ordinary work was forbidden on that day, the closing assembly was always very crowded. Jesus’s cousins brought up the wonderful things he had been doing in Galilee. They pointed out that if he ever hoped to become recognized and officially acclaimed for any of it, he ought to come to Jerusalem with them and perform similar deeds for the multitude to see. Jesus responded that many people in Jerusalem hated him and wanted him dead. As it was not they who were hated, they should not take unnecessary risks by letting themselves be seen with him. He therefore urged them to go ahead, promising to follow later. Scripture says at that point that his cousins did not believe him. Expositors and commentators pounce on that last clause and infer that those cousins did not believe in Jesus and were now skeptical about his Messianic claims! Of course, taken in isolation from its context and paragraph, that single remark could mean just that, especially if the cousins thought that Jesus’s reluctance proved he was showing diffidence. When the sentence is read in its context, however, that would be an outrageous way to understand it.

The cousins themselves had been extolling Jesus’s Messianic feats performed in Galilee. They were only encouraging him to take his show to Jerusalem, where the impact would be greatest and of most consequence. Those cousins would be horrified to learn that their words are frequently taken today to mean they did not believe Jesus was the Messiah. Jesus’s response simply cautioned them that they, too, would be in peril if they arrived in his company, and that it would be safer for them to go separately. What the cousins did not believe was that Jesus would come at all. They evidently thought that the danger he faced was what was keeping him out of Jerusalem. As he had promised, Jesus did go separately and some people in his audience did threaten him with death by stoning.

The third example concerns Jesus’s reason for visiting John the Baptist by the River Jordan and the result of that meeting. The discussion of this example is extensive and can be read in Chapter 7 with its unusual conclusion.

I gratefully acknowledge the many things I learned about Judahite beliefs and traditions from diverse sources. I also acknowledge the indulgence of members of my family who endured reading this book in its various drafts, in particular my son Henry who sought other editorial help for me and was himself an invaluable collaborator. I also acknowledge my daughter-in-law, Jane, who, with Henry, laboriously compiled the index. Jane had a hand in determining the title of this book. Finally, I owe a special debt of gratitude to my own spouse, Marya, who suffered through all the drafts of the seemingly endless versions as they fitfully evolved.

And now to Monsignor Wynnand Amewowo, erstwhile Director of Biblical Center for Africa and Madagascar (Nairobi, Kenya) who graced this book with a foreword. Words cannot describe the profundity of my gratitude to him for the grace, scholarship, thoroughness and fidelity which he brought to reading the publisher’s version of this book, despite its fitful emendations.

William Emmanuel Abraham

Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA.

INTRODUCTION

One Testament for All

T anakh is, at its heart, the story of God’s promise to Abraham and Sarah that in Abraham all the families of the earth would be blessed. It is also the story of the progressive stages towards the fulfillment of that huge promise. As Christians believe, the Gospels depict the story of the promise’s fulfillment. Combined, the two scriptures spell out the story of human redemption, from God’s initial promise to its fulfillment through the restoration of the possibility of eternal life to human beings and their renewed companionship with God. From its first utterance to its fulfillment, the promise was not intended only for Abraham and his biological descendants; it included every human race and family on earth in scope. In addressing Abraham, God said, I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families on the earth will be blessed (Genesis 12:2-3 NRSV). What was this blessing to be? We have an answer in the Psalms, It is like the dew of Hermon, which falls on the mountains of Zion, for there the Lord ordained his blessing, life forevermore (Psalm 133:3 NRSV). The greatest blessing to all families of the earth is not riches or even universal peace, for those are transitory and pass away. That greatest blessing, life without end. everlasting life. And that blessing, spoken to Abraham, bore down to all families on earth. After all, why would the God of the entire universe do good only to biological descendants of Abraham, and not to all the families he created? There was one personage, though, who would want to curse Abraham– the Adversary whose attempts to sabotage humankind would be nullified by Abraham’s promised descendant.

The scope of the blessing of Abraham is universal, and God intended to endorse it through a line of individual inheritors until it reached its culmination in the one person who would realize it. Stories of the blessing’s specific inheritors, from Abraham and Sarah, establish the history of those adjustments and convergences which would guide it to its eventual fulfillment. Correspondingly, the historic occurrences that preceded and led to the original bestowal of the promise form its preamble. Consequently, the entire comprehensive Testament that memorialized the prelude and the full developmental stages up to and including the blossoming of the promise ought to be conceived in aggregate, and deemed as constituting one continuous and comprehensive Testament.

When sin came into the world, human beings became doomed to die an incessant death. We all became doomed through inheriting the one corrupted nature that transformed human beings into a mortal species. The subsequent history of humanity confirmed that the initial corrupting lapse could not be dismissed as a mere aberration. Warfare and the involuntary suppression of others became rampant; and man became a predator to man. Having gained knowledge of normative and utilitarian good and evil, human beings sought to erect a building that would breach the gates of heaven and set us up again as neighbors to God. By Noah’s time, human behavior had sunk to such a level of degeneracy as to have led God to consider extinguishing the species itself. According to Genesis 6:5, God observed the extensive evil that human beings perpetrated, and saw that all inclinations of thought in the human heart were evil. He grieved over what he saw (Genesis 6:6). Providentially, his approbation of the way of life of just one innocent man, Noah (Genesis 6:9), stopped him from destroying the entire human race with the world-wide flood which he sent. One man and one woman had together initiated a pattern of behavior whose subsequent depravity propelled humanity to the brink of extermination. Likewise, one man was to gain us reprieve.

Perhaps, it is regrettable that Noah, forewarned about the coming deluge, did not intervene on behalf of his fellow human beings beyond his own family, unlike his descendant Abraham, who persistently bargained with God for the wicked city of Sodom. God had picked Noah and his close family to be the only human survivors of the deluge. As a result, subsequent human beings became Noah’s descendants. That fact rebranded us positively as the descendants of a human being whose nature and deeds had pleased God, rather than negatively as the descendants of human beings whose behavior had brought about the expulsion from Eden and the condition of mortality.

Notwithstanding the fact that human beings now enjoyed a renewed beginning with Noah, the covenant that God made with him only promised that God would never again threaten human destruction by water. Human beings were not yet saved from the possibility of perpetual death. Though propitious for us, the preservation of Noah’s family did not imply that the human species would now evade endless death. Following Noah, the human species continued to linger under its primary threat of extinction because of sin. Even so, humanity could boast that it now had in Noah a common ancestor who was mindful of God and whom God was to call righteous. In his covenant with Noah, while now allowing the eating of meat, for the first time God forbade the ingestion of any blood (Genesis 9:1-4).

Noah’s mindfulness boded well for God’s blessing of his descendant, Abraham; for he too was mindful in his own way. By this blessing, Abraham was named the founder of multiple nations, vast in numbers and exceptional in their destiny. In one breath, God added an astounding universal blessing which every family on earth would experience as the fruit of his blessing of Abraham. The original blessing itself would work its way through a narrow line of successive individual sons, generation by generation. That fact that the blessing was to work its way through specific individuals, and not through descendants as a whole, is what made it necessary to name and designate specific individuals as the patriarchs of the future promised nation. The same fact also proved that the ultimate heir of the Abrahamic blessing, and therefore the consummator of the universal blessing, would be a single individual.

As to the patriarchs, God himself named only Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as such. A patriarch of the coming nation would, starting from Abraham, be a solitary son on whom the promise devolved. One may ask why, even though there were countless inheritors of the promise, God designated three persons patriarchs. As part of the answer, it should be acknowledged that the Abrahamic pledge did not as a rule directly embrace every child of all those on whom the blessing devolved. All persons who were not directly involved in the blessing still stood to gain from it on account of its universal embrace, for the climactic descendant would bring it to all the races and families on earth, past, present and future. The pledge was never reiterated for all the sons of any of the patriarchs, but always to just one. That fact was what created the need to specify patriarchs by name. To begin with, even though Ishmael was Abraham’s first son, he could not inherit it, because the blessing would pass to a son of Abraham and Sarah.

That fact made Isaac, the son whom Abraham had with Sarah, the second bearer of the promise and the second patriarch after Abraham himself. In the case of Isaac’s own children, the line bypassed his elder son Esau, and curved towards the younger son. This came about through a ruse which their mother, Rebecca, devised. A patriarch was that son through whom the line passed, its specific inheritor. In a case where a Patriarch is the final patriarch, he becomes the founder of the promised nation, and all of his children become foundational members of the new nation. All the children of a patriarch are directly covered since they became foundational members of the nation promised to Abraham. Jacob was that final patriarch.

God made him and his children the nucleus of the nation which would descend from Abraham. For this reason, God bestowed upon Jacob the eponym of Israel, the name of the nation that would be seeded by him and his family. As the name Israel purports, that nation’s ruler would be God himself. It would live under God’s rule and his laws and decrees. The fundamental law of that nation is to love and serve the one Lord God with all one’s heart and all one’s might and all one’s soul and to love every other member as oneself. In that way, the people would become a holy nation, for God, their founder, is himself loving and holy, and his laws and edicts express his nature. Those whose actions and attitudes are entirely guided by those laws and edicts would accordingly be deemed holy.

God’s declaration to Jacob was even fuller than the one to Abraham. As regards Jacob, God said to him, ‘Your name is Jacob; no longer shall you be called Jacob, but Israel shall be your name’ (Genesis 35:10 NRSV). God further said to him, ‘I am God Almighty: be fruitful and multiply; a nation and a company of nations shall come from you, and kings shall spring from you. The land that I gave to Abraham and Isaac I will give to you, and I will give the land to your offspring after you’" (Genesis 35:11, 12 NRSV).

Each of Jacob’s twelve sons would likewise become an eponym for one of the tribes or clans constituting the new nation of Israel. It is seldom observed that most of Abraham’s descendants did lie outside the line and were not progenitors of the Nation, even though all of them, like all families of the earth, would be among the blessing’s heirs. The same is true of Joseph, who is sometimes erroneously referred to as a patriarch. Only those who are direct ancestors of the promised person who is to be sent could have been patriarchs at all, and even though attempts are sometimes made to bestow the title of patriarch on Joseph, among Jacob’s sons it was not Joseph but Judah that was really such a direct ancestor, and it was he, rather than Joseph, who carried the mantle of the promise. But even Judah could not be a patriarch, because his father Jacob was already the final patriarch and founder of the nation. Of Judah, God spoke as follows, The scepter will not pass from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his legs, until he comes to whom obedience belongs, and it is he whom people shall obey (Genesis 49:10 CJB).

Incubating God’s nation required its own strategies. Jacob and his household needed a safe and nurturing space in which to multiply and become viable as God’s nation. After a sequence of complicated events, he securely led his household and their possessions into the secluded and relaxed province of Goshen in Egypt that God had selected for them. Hundreds of years later, his descendants lived there as a mature nation. They had become prosperous and comfortable, and showed little inclination to leave in search of their own Promised Land. They could not imagine becoming more prosperous or more contented elsewhere than they already were in Goshen. Besides, they had become involved with the ways and gods of their Egyptian hosts. In that circumstance, it was up to God himself to so alter their circumstances as to make them eager to leave Goshen.

God had revealed their coming travail to Abraham, when he forewarned him that his offspring would be sojourners in a land that was not theirs and would-be servants there and would be afflicted for four hundred years. God at the same time assured Abraham that he would bring judgment on the nation that enslaved them and that they would leave that nation carrying great reparation with them (Genesis 15:13f).

The instrument by which God would prod them into wanting to leave Egypt was a Pharaoh who did not know Joseph and could thus be indifferent to their well-being. It would only be a matter of time, in fact centuries, as it turned out; but such a Pharaoh who did not know Joseph would certainly arise. Under that Pharaoh, the Egyptians’ resentment of the Hebrews’ success soared, and they feared that they could be harboring a fifth column should Egypt be at war with one of their major enemies. Pharaoh decided to curb the prominence of the Hebrew population. He drastically ordered the neonatal slaughter of all their sons, the dispossession of their property, and ultimately their enslavement. Suddenly, Goshen no longer held any allure for the children of Jacob. They became disposed and eager to leave Egypt by any means possible.

God empowered Moses, a descendant of Levi, son of Jacob, to extract them and lead them out of Egypt. Under Moses, they saw their first real chance to leave, and seized on that opportunity. Although God, their founder and King, had provided them with commandments and decrees and rules by which to live, they did not steadily follow them after their escape from Egypt, and, as a result, were beset by multiple corrective vicissitudes. Their repeated lapses, including bouts of apostasy, served only to delay the coming of the promised descendant. To bring them back and set them on the right course, God occasionally allowed them to be overcome by other nations to induce them to repent and turn back to him. He would then rescue them and restore them. Tanakh, the Hebrew Testament, is an incidental record of their successes and failures, and of the successive steps that God took towards the fulfillment of his promise to Abraham as indeed to all the families of the earth.

The time did come when the Israelites were no longer involved with idols and false gods. They now lived once again under their own leaders’ direction and the laws of their one God. The Sanhedrin, their supreme council, governed their population and rabbis and priests taught them. Jacob’s descendants were finally at peace with other nations. As the Roman Martyrology puts it, in the forty-second year of the reign of Caesar Octavian Augustus, the entire world being at peace, the conditions would be ripe for the arrival of the Promised One. It would be into such a milieu, in which God’s laws and rules were paramount, pursued and generally observed, that the promised descendant could be born and raised.

The supreme blessing on all races and families of the earth was their discharge from the liability to eternal death which had been brought about by sinfulness. The blessing would be universal, like the sinfulness itself, and secure release. The fulfiller of the promise made to Abraham would accordingly be that descendant who would bring it about.

Given that the Testament is the record of the Abrahamic promise and the steps leading to its fulfillment, it is a perplexing thing that the Old Testament and the New Testament are treated as two separate, distinct and even discontinuous testaments. It is not as if the two were only accidentally related and lacked all internal and organic mutual involvement. Since, according to Judaism, the Messiah has not yet come, and their Testament, in fact, records the history of stages towards the fulfillment of the Abrahamic promise of the One to be sent to us, the Testament as such cannot be completed except with a Book recording the arrival of the Messiah, and thus the fulfillment of the promise to Abraham. Their story must continue to hang in a still-open prophecy, in fact, with such as the Book of Malachi, or 2 Chronicles in which the Persian King authorizes the return of the descendants of Judah to Judea and Jerusalem. That is the predicate of the Testament, and it should be the predicate of any religion premised on that promise. In consequence, there can be only one Testament, and the sole surviving question should be whether the Abrahamic promise has already been fulfilled or not.

According to Christian belief, the promised Messiah has already arrived and did so in the person of Jesus Christ. For Christians, then, the pre-existing Testament can be completed through the addition of the Gospels, amplified without division by the Acts of the Apostles, the Letters, and the Book of Revelation. Since the Abrahamic promise was supposed to bring about the birth of the Messiah, the Christ, and the implementation of the ancient promise of redemption, Christians are obliged to regard their additional writings as a continuation of the already existing Testament (Tanakh), which was devotedly and studiously compiled by Israelite scholars and priests, to whom the world owes an illimitable debt. It is surely time to abandon on grounds of faith that division between an Old Testament and a New Testament (or between the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible), which has been promoted and observed for too long. Logically, the story of the Messiah should peculiarly be seen as the continuation of the pre-existing Testament, which therefore is inappropriately termed Old (or Hebrew). The Bible, for Christians, should correctly stand as one, and unfold, in a single continuous span, the story from the declaration of the Abrahamic promise to its fulfillment in Jesus Christ, together with an account of the ramifications of that consummation.

The Order of Mass consists of two principal liturgies, the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist. The one liturgy imitates a synagogical service. Its readings generally predate the coming of the Promised One but at times they relate to its aftermath. A homily and sundry prayers form the transition to