3. The restoration of Israel (11:25–29)
D. God’s purpose for Israel (11:1–29)
1. Israel’s alienation not final (11:1–12)
A ‘disobedient and contrary people’ Israel might be, but God had no more written them off now than in earlier days when they rejected his word through Moses and the prophets. ‘Those whom he foreknew he also predestined’ is a principle not set aside in their case. As in Old Testament times, so in apostolic times God’s purpose in choosing his people was safeguarded by his reservation of a faithful ‘remnant’. In Elijah’s day, when national apostasy had assumed the dimensions of a landslide, there was a loyal minority of seven thousand who refused to worship Baal; so now in Paul’s day there was a believing minority of Jews who had not rejected the gospel. Paul ought to know: he was one of them. Of Paul’s membership in one of the tribes of Israel there could be no doubt; yet he was a believer in Jesus, as were many more of his kinsfolk ‘according to the flesh’. They constituted a faithful remnant, chosen by God’s grace, and their existence was in itself proof that God had not abandoned Israel or given up his purpose for them. Even if Israel as a whole had failed to attain his purpose, the elect remnant had attained it. The ‘hardening’ which affected the majority had been foreseen by God (here three further testimonia—from Isaiah, from Deuteronomy and from the Psalter—are adduced, in addition to the composite ‘stone’ testimonium in 9:33). But it was not to be a permanent condition.
Israel had stumbled, but had not fallen so as to rise no more. Through her stumbling the blessings of the gospel had been extended more immediately to the Gentiles. Repeatedly in the Acts of the Apostles it is the refusal of the Jewish community in one place or another to accept the proffered salvation that is the occasion for the missionaries’ presenting it directly to the Gentiles. ‘It was necessary’, said Paul and Barnabas to the Jews of Pisidian Antioch, ‘that the word of God should be spoken first to you. Since you thrust it from you, and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, behold, we turn to the Gentiles’ (Acts 13:46; cf. 28:28). Had the Jews accepted the gospel, it would have been their privilege to make it known to the Gentiles; as it was, the Gentiles heard it without their mediation. But if the stumbling of Israel had been the occasion of so much blessing to the Gentile word, what would Israel’s revival and restoration mean but a veritable resurrection!
1. Has God rejected his people? The question (so framed in Greek as to require the answer ‘No’) and the statement in verse 2, ‘God has not rejected his people’, echo the LXX wording of Psalm 94:14, ‘the LORD will not forsake his people’ (cf. 1 Sam. 12:22).
A descendant of Abraham. Here the phrase is used primarily in its natural sense (cf. 2 Cor. 11:22), but not to the exclusion of its spiritual sense (cf. 4:16, above).
A member of the tribe of Benjamin. Cf. Philippians 3:5. It is an ‘undesigned coincidence’ between Paul’s letters and Acts that, while it is only from the former that we learn that Paul belonged to the tribe of Benjamin, it is only the latter that tells us that his Jewish name was Saul. It is not surprising that parents who traced their descent from the tribe of Benjamin and cherished high ambitions for their new-born son should give him the name borne by the most illustrious member of that tribe in the history of Israel—‘Saul the son of Kish, a man of the tribe of Benjamin’ (to quote Paul’s reference to Israel’s first king in Acts 13:21).
2. Do you not know …? A common expression in Paul (cf. 6:16).
What the scripture says. Cf. 9:17. Here the reference is to 1 Kings 19:10, 14, where Elijah is the actual speaker.
Of Elijah. Literally ‘in Elijah’—i.e. in the section of the books of Kings dealing with Elijah (perhaps 1 Kgs 17:1–2 Kgs 2:18). Cf. Mark 12:26, where ‘in … the bush’ means ‘in the section of the book of Exodus dealing with “The Bush”.’
4. God’s reply. Greek chrēmatismos, used of a divine response, like the transitive verb chrēmatizō, from which it is derived (cf. Matt. 2:12, 22; Luke 2:26; Acts 10:22; Heb. 8:5; 11:7; 12:25).
‘I have kept for myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Baal.’ Quoted from 1 Kings 19:18, in a form closer to the Hebrew text than LXX (which reads ‘thou wilt keep …’)—although there is nothing in MT or LXX corresponding to ‘for myself’. The Hebrew text is best rendered by the future tense: ‘Yet I will leave …’—the reference being to the small minority which alone would survive the slaughter to be wrought by the swords of Hazael, Jehu and Elisha (1 Kgs 19:17). Paul’s point, however, is that now as then there is a believing remnant.
In the Greek text here we find the odd phenomenon of the feminine form of the definite article preceding the masculine noun Baal. This reading does not occur in our extant manuscripts of LXX, but it apparently reflects a stage in the transmission of the text where the idolatrous name Baal was marked for replacement (in public reading, at least) by the feminine Hebrew noun bōšet, ‘shame’.
5. A remnant, chosen by grace. Greek leimma (‘remainder’) is found here only in the New Testament, and in the LXX only in 2 Kings 19:4, of ‘the remnant that is left’ after the Assyrian invasion in Hezekiah’s day. The ‘remnant’ here comprises those who have believed the gospel, but behind their faith lies the divine election. Their forming part of the ‘remnant’ is thus no longer on the basis of works (verse 6).
7. The rest were hardened. Greek pōroō means ‘make hard’ or ‘render insensitive’ (cf. the noun pōrōsis, ‘hardening’, in verse 25). In modern English ‘blindness’ is commonly used to denote this moral or spiritual insensitiveness; hence NEB, ‘The rest were made blind to the truth.’ If it be asked by whom they were ‘hardened’, verse 8 seems to provide the answer. Not for the first time in this letter (cf. 1:21b; 9:17–1811) such inward insensitiveness is divinely inflicted as a judicial penalty for refusal to heed the word of God.
8. ‘God gave them a spirit of stupor, eyes that should not see and ears that should not hear, down to this very day.’ A conflated quotation from Isaiah 29:10 (‘the LORD has poured out upon you a spirit of deep sleep, and has closed your eyes …’) and Deuteronomy 29:4 (‘to this day the LORD has not given you a mind to understand, or eyes to see, or ears to hear’). The reference to unseeing eyes and unhearing ears is reminiscent also of Isaiah 6:9–10 (‘Hear and hear, but do not understand; see and see, but do not perceive …’), used in all four Gospels as a testimonium of the failure of Jesus’ hearers to pay heed to his message (Matt. 13:14–15; Mark 4:12; Luke 8:10; John 12:40; cf. also Acts 28:26–27). See comment on 10:16 (p. 206).
The word translated ‘stupor’ is katanyxis (so Isa. 29:10, LXX), which literally means ‘pricking’ or ‘stinging’, and hence comes to be used of the numbness which results from certain kinds of sting (NEB accordingly renders ‘a numbness of spirit’).
9–10. And David says, ‘Let their feast become a snare …’ Verses 9 and 10 are taken from Psalm 69:22–23 (LXX). This psalm was widely current in the church from earliest days as a testimonium of the ministry, and especially the passion, of Christ (cf. the quotation of verse 9b in 15:3 below, of verse 9a in John 2:17 and of verse 4 in John 15:25, and the allusion to verse 21 in Matt. 27:34). If the speaker in the psalm is taken to be Christ, those against whom complaints are voiced are interpreted as his enemies (cf. the application of verse 25 to Judas Iscariot in Acts 1:20). The emphasis of the present quotation probably lies on the words of verse 10, ‘let their eyes be darkened so that they cannot see’ (from Ps. 69:23), which carries on the theme of the composite quotation in verse 8 and is directly relevant to the temporary ‘hardening’ or ‘blindness’ that has overtaken all Israel apart from the believing remnant.
11. Through their trespass salvation has come to the Gentiles, so as to make Israel jealous. This is Paul’s interpretation of the words from the Song of Moses (Deut. 32:21), already quoted in 10:19. It is by the blessing bestowed on those who formerly were a ‘no-people’ in relation to him, by the salvation which a ‘foolish nation’ has received through accepting the gospel in faith, that God will stir Israel to jealousy.
12. How much more will their full inclusion mean! The ‘full inclusion’ (plērōma, lit. ‘fullness’) of the Jews is to be understood in the same sense as the ‘full number [plērōma, ‘fullness’] of the Gentiles’ in verse 25. The large-scale conversion of the Gentile world is to be followed by the salvation of ‘all Israel’ (verse 26); this salvation involves their ‘full inclusion’.
2. Admonition to Gentile Christians (11:13–24)
Paul now addresses himself more personally to the Gentiles among his readers. He may have been told of a situation in the Roman church which called for such an admonition. In any case, Gentile Christians, on hearing his argument thus far, might be inclined to think patronizingly of their Jewish fellow-believers as refugees, mercifully rescued from the doom about to overtake an apostate nation, and to dismiss from any place in the divine purpose the majority of that nation. ‘Jew as I am by birth,’ says Paul, ‘I am the Gentiles’ apostle, and I esteem the honour of my commission very highly. This I do not only for the sake of the Gentiles to whom I carry the gospel, but for the sake of my Jewish brethren as well. I want to stir them to emulation, as they see Gentiles entering into the full enjoyment of gospel blessings. I want to make them say, “Why should the Gentiles have all these blessings? Why should we not have a prior share in them?” Well may they say so, for these blessings are the fulfilment of their own ancestral hope; they are bound up with faith in their own Messiah. And when at last Israel is stimulated to claim the Messiah, with all the blessing he brings, words cannot describe the blessing which Israel’s restoration will mean to the world.’
This consummation is not an idle dream, Paul maintains; it is guaranteed by the indefectible purpose of God. The first cake of the batch has already been presented to God, and its consecration means that the whole batch is holy to him. The root of the tree is holy, and the branches necessarily share in its holiness.
This reference to the root and the branches leads Paul on to develop his parable of the olive-tree—a parable which has often been used to show that he was a typical town-dweller, unfamiliar with the most ordinary phenomena of the countryside. For a gardener does not graft a slip from a wild fruit-tree on to a cultivated fruit-tree; it is a shoot or ‘scion’ from a cultivated tree that must be grafted on to a stock of the same or an allied species. Sir William Ramsay does, indeed, quote Theobald Fischer to the effect that it was still customary in Palestine at the beginning of the twentieth century ‘to reinvigorate an olive-tree which is ceasing to bear fruit, by grafting it with a shoot of the Wild-Olive, so that the sap of the tree ennobles this wild shoot and the tree now again begins to bear fruit’.12 That a similar process was not unknown in Roman times is evident from Paul’s contemporary Columella, according to whom, when an olive-tree produces badly, a slip of a wild-olive is grafted on to it, and this gives new vigour to the tree.13
At any rate, Paul’s parable is clear. Here are two olive-trees—a cultivated olive and a wild-olive. The latter produced poor fruit which contained little or no oil; the former normally produced good fruit. The cultivated olive is Israel, the people of God; the wild-olive is the Gentile world. But the olive began to grow weak and unproductive; old branches were therefore cut away and a graft was made from the wild-olive. ‘The cutting away of the old branches was required to admit air and light to the graft, as well as to prevent the vitality of the tree from being too widely diffused over a large number of branches.’14 The graft from the wild-olive is the sum-total of Gentile believers, now incorporated into the people of God; the old branches which were cut away are those Jews who declined to accept the gospel.
In such an unusual grafting, it is said, both the graft and the stock on to which it is grafted are affected: the old stock is reinvigorated by the new graft, and the new graft in turn, fed by the sap of the olive stock, is able to bear such fruit as the wild-olive could never produce.
Gentile believers must not yield to the temptation to despise the Jews. But for the grace of God which engrafted them among his people and made them ‘fellow citizens with the saints’ (Eph. 2:19), Gentiles would have remained for ever lifeless and fruitless. The new life which enables them to produce fruit for God is the life of the old stock of Israel on to which they have been grafted. Israel owes no debt to them; they are indebted to Israel.15 And if they reply that at least they are better than the unbelieving Jews, the branches which were cut off, they are exhorted to learn a salutary lesson from the removal of those old branches. Why were they cut off? Because of unbelief. And if a spirit of pride leads the new graft—the Gentile church—to forget its reliance on divine grace and exchange faith in God for self-confidence, it will suffer the same fate as the old branches; it, too, will be cut off. It is by faith that membership in the true people of God is acquired and maintained; it is by unbelief that it is forfeited. This principle, says Paul, is applied without partiality, to Gentiles as much as to Jews. On the other hand—and here the practical processes of grafting are certainly left behind, for the sake of the spiritual facts which the parable is intended to illustrate—if those Jews, who through unbelief lost their status as members of the true Israel, come at length to faith in Christ, they will be incorporated afresh in the people of God. If old branches which had been cut away from an olive were grafted on to the parent tree once more and began to produce fruit again, that would be an unprecedented miracle in the natural realm. Equally, the reincorporation of the Jewish nation among the people of God when unbelief is replaced by faith would be a miracle in the spiritual realm; but, says Paul, it is a miracle which the grace of God is going to perform.
15. Life from the dead. The meaning may be that Israel’s conversion will be the immediate precursor of the resurrection, to coincide with the parousia of Christ (see note on 11:26, p. 218).
16. If the dough offered as first fruits is holy, so is the whole lump. The allusion is probably to Numbers 15:17–21, where the Israelites are commanded to offer to God a cake from the first ground meal, newly come from the threshing-floor. The presentation of this cake to God (Paul implies) hallows the whole baking. In 1 Corinthians 15:23, ‘Christ the first fruits’ (aparchē, as here), the allusion is rather to the sheaf of the first fruits of barley which was to be ‘waved’ before the Lord on the Sunday following Passover, thus consecrating the whole harvest (Lev. 23:10–11). In the present use of the figure, the ‘first fruits’ should most probably be understood to comprise those men and women of Jewish birth who had, like Paul, acknowledged Jesus as Messiah and Lord.
And if the root is holy, so are the branches. Changing the figure, Paul now says that since a tree is of the same character throughout (cf. Matt. 7:16–20; 12:33; Luke 6:43–44), the holiness of the root sanctifies the branches. It is natural to take the ‘root’ here as referring, equally with the ‘first fruits’ in the preceding figure, to Jewish believers. But it seems inappropriate to call them the ‘root’, and if the ‘root and branch’ figure stood by itself, we should think of the patriarchs as constituting the root of the tree whose branches are the Israelites of the Christian era. This interpretation (which, on the whole, is preferable) would be in line with Paul’s later reference to contemporary Israel as ‘beloved for the sake of their forefathers’ (verse 28). Probably there is a transition of thought as Paul passes from the one figure to the other.16
17. You, a wild olive shoot, were grafted in their place. Perhaps Paul is adapting a Jewish parable in which proselytes are pictured as branches from a wild olive grafted on the good olive tree of Israel.17 For Israel as an olive tree cf. Jeremiah 11:16, ‘The LORD once called you, “A green olive tree, fair with goodly fruit”.’
20. You stand fast only through faith. ‘Through faith’ is emphatic, as RSV indicates by adding the adverb ‘only’ (see p. 114 above, with n. 12); ‘by faith you hold your place’ (NEB). Cf. 5:2 (p. 127).
22. Provided you continue in his kindness; otherwise you too will be cut off. Throughout the New Testament continuance is the test of reality. The perseverance of the saints is a doctrine firmly grounded in New Testament (and not least in Pauline) teaching; but its corollary is that it is the saints who persevere. Since ‘you stand fast only through faith’ (verse 20), it is a healthy exercise to heed Paul’s injunction to the Corinthian Christians: ‘Examine yourselves, to see whether you are holding to your faith’ (2 Cor. 13:5).18
24. Contrary to nature. Paul may be thought to disarm criticism in advance by showing that he is aware of the unnaturalness of the particular kind of grafting here described. But he need mean no more than that the process of grafting is itself ‘contrary to nature’—a view which was commonly taken by the ancients.
3. The restoration of Israel (11:25–29)
Here is unfolded the mystery of God’s purpose for Israel a purpose formerly concealed but now made known. Israel’s blindness is only partial (for some Israelites have already been enlightened), and only temporary, with a view to the blessing of the Gentiles. So far as the proclamation of the gospel is concerned, the order is ‘To the Jew first’; so far as the reception of the gospel is concerned, the order is ‘By the Gentile first, and then by the Jew’. When the full tale of believing Gentiles was made up—a consummation which Paul’s own apostleship was bringing nearer—then all Israel, not only a faithful remnant but the nation as a whole, would see the salvation of God. If their temporary stumbling was prophetically foretold, so was their ultimate and permanent restoration. The new covenant will not be complete until it embraces the people of the old covenant. Temporarily alienated for the advantage of the Gentiles, they are eternally the object of God’s electing love because his promises, once made to the patriarchs, can never be revoked.
It has been objected here that Paul lets his patriotism override his logic: ‘the Jew in himself’, it has been said, ‘was still too strong.’19 He has emphasized more than once, even in this letter, that natural descent from the patriarchs is not what matters in God’s sight, and now he seems to be saying that, because of God’s promises to the patriarchs, their natural descendants must be restored to covenant relation with him. It might suffice to say, with Pascal, ‘the heart has its reasons …’; but there is more than that to be said. Paul had a deeper and clearer insight into God’s grace than his critics; if God’s grace operated in accordance with strict logic, the outlook would be dismal for Jews and Gentiles alike.
One further point: in all that Paul says about the restoration of Israel to God, he says nothing about the restoration of an earthly Davidic kingdom. Without trying to construct an argument from this silence, we may insist that what Paul envisaged for his people was something far better.
25. Lest you be wise in your own conceits. Quotation from Proverbs 3:7a.
I want you to understand. Lit. ‘I do not want you to be ignorant’ (as in 1:13; 1 Cor. 10:1; 12:1; 2 Cor. 1:8; 1 Thess. 4:13).
This mystery. As regularly, Paul uses this word to indicate that he is about to disclose a new revelation which he has received (cf. 1 Cor. 15:51; Col. 1:26–27). The remnant principle of verses 1–7 was a subject of ancient prophetic revelation; that ‘all Israel’ would yet be saved, despite its partial and temporary hardening, was a new revelation, conveyed through Paul. He has been accused of trying to eat his cake and have it—of consoling himself with the thought of ‘a remnant, chosen by grace’, and at the same time insisting on a wholesale restoration of Israel—but if his claim to have received a new revelation be taken seriously, he cannot fairly be blamed. The ‘mystery’ may indeed have been implicit in the ‘revelation of Jesus Christ’ which he received on the Damascus road, even if it was in the course of his apostolic ministry to the Gentiles that its full significance came home to him.20 In Old Testament prophecy the remnant of the old Israel was at the same time the nucleus of the new Israel. So it is here: the existence of the believing remnant is the earnest of the final salvation of ‘all Israel’.
Until the full number of the Gentiles come in. ‘Full number’ is literally ‘fullness’. The bringing in of ‘the full number of the Gentiles’ is to be followed by the ‘full inclusion’ (lit. ‘fullness’) of the Jews (verse 12). The bringing in of ‘the full number of the Gentiles’ is referred to by Paul later on as his ‘offering of the Gentiles’ (15:16).
26. And so all Israel will be saved. It is impossible to entertain an exegesis which understands ‘Israel’ here in a different sense from ‘Israel’ in verse 25 (‘a hardening has come upon part of Israel’). The connecting words ‘and so’ (cf. 5:12) say more than ‘and then’: they imply that ‘in this way’—by the operation of the divine purpose that the gospel should be received by the Gentile first, and then also by the Jew—the salvation of ‘all Israel’ will come about. ‘All Israel’ is a recurring expression in Jewish literature, where it need not mean ‘every Jew without a single exception’, but ‘Israel as a whole’. Thus ‘all Israel has a portion in the age to come’, says the Mishnah tractate Sanhedrin (10.1), and proceeds immediately to name certain Israelites who have no portion therein.
‘The Deliverer will come from Zion, he will banish ungodliness from Jacob.’ Quoted from Isaiah 59:20 (‘And he will come to Zion as Redeemer, to those in Jacob who turn from transgression’). Paul’s wording conforms with LXX, except that LXX reads ‘for Zion’s sake’ and not ‘from Zion’ (which is probably taken from Ps. 14:7 or 53:6, ‘O that deliverance for Israel would come from Zion!’). The reference is to a manifestation to Israel of her divine Redeemer—a manifestation which Paul may well identify in his mind with the parousia of Christ. See comment on verse 15 (p. 214); cf. also Acts 3:19–21. The mention of Zion may suggest further that Jerusalem, for Paul, was not only the place from which the gospel originated (cf. 15:19), but would also be the scene of its glorious consummation.
27. ‘And this will be my covenant with them when I take away their sins.’ For the first few words Paul continues the quotation from Isaiah 59 (where verse 21 goes on: ‘ “And as for me, this is my covenant with them”, says the LORD’), but then passes into the wording of Isaiah 27:9, LXX (‘and this is my blessing of him [Jacob], when I take away his sin’), and the new covenant promise of Jeremiah 31:33–34 (‘But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel … I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more’). See comments on 7:6 (p. 149); 8:4 (p. 163). This is not a covenant yet to be made, but the fulfilment of one made long before.
28. As regards the gospel they are enemies of God, for your sake. The genitive ‘of God’ is not expressed in the Greek, but it is implied: Israel’s present estrangement from God has been the occasion for the Gentiles to embrace the blessings of the gospel and be reconciled to him.
As regards election they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers. This is not a reference to ‘the merits of the fathers’ (zĕkût ’ābôt), the doctrine that the patriarchs’ righteousness constitutes a store of merit which is credited to their descendants. The whole argument of this letter is contrary to such a conception of merit (cf. 4:2). Paul means that the promises which God made to the patriarchs when he called them are secured to their descendants, not on the ground of merit, but on the ground of God’s fidelity to his word of grace, as verse 29 emphasizes.