THE CHOSEN PEOPLE

The more things change ...

… the more they stay the same.

This seems like a good time to talk about “The Chosen People.”
And take a quick look Thomas Paine’s insights into the matter. This won’t take but a minute.

In the midst of the mass (ritual?) slaughter and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, we are seeing the biblical claim raised once again: “This land is mine. God gave this land to me.” [The Exodus Song].

Perhaps some of you were around when The Exodus Song was a “YOOGE” hit in 1960. The movie score was composed by Ernest Gold with lyrics by the newly purified and evangelical Pat Boone) .

The claim of course is that the Jews are the Chosen People of the one and only true God; and that God, moreover, deeded them the ENTIRE True Land of Israel for their own, very own and NOBODY ELSE. For the record, Eretz Israel, or the True Land of Israel — as claimed by Zionists — might look something like this:

Genesis 15:18-21 (KJV): “In the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates: The Kenites, and the Kenizzites, and the Kadmonites, And the Hittites, and the Perizzites, and the Rephaims, And the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.”

The above map is perhaps the most expansive version of “God’s promise” to Abraham, but there is no doubt whatsoever that many Zionists believe they are entitled to and will attempt to regain Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Sinai Peninsula, and much of Iraq … at least.

One doesn’t need to listen very closely to hear these “chosen” claims being made once again by Israeli perpetrators and defenders — many of them Christo-Zionists. “Our deed for the land was given by God,” the plainly state. The Promised Land was, after all and by the biblical account … promised.

If you have not read Paine’s Age of Reason, you owe it to yourself. It is a wonderful and entertaining read; a laugh on every page and a learned and incisive critique of the Bible. Here is Paine’s “take” on the “chosen people” claim:

“Could we permit ourselves to suppose that the Almighty would distinguish any nation of people by the name of his chosen people, we must suppose that people to have been an example to all the rest of the world of the purest piety and humanity, and not such a nation of ruffians and cut-throats as the ancient Jews were,-—a people who, corrupted by and copying after such monsters and imposters as Moses and Aaron, Joshua, Samuel, and David, had distinguished themselves above all others on the face of the known earth for barbarity and wickedness. If we will not stubbornly shut our eyes and steel our hearts it is impossible not to see, in spite of all that long-established superstition imposes upon the mind, that the flattering appellation of his chosen people is no other than a Lie which the priests and leaders of the Jews had invented to cover the baseness of their own characters; and which Christian priests sometimes as corrupt, and often as cruel, have professed to believe.”
Thomas Paine
Age of Reason
Chapter 1: The Old Testament