It is not ‘promise’ that is the fundamental problem when it comes to Jewish belief about a ‘Promised Land’. Nor is it ‘land’. 

The real issue is possession – taking for oneself, no matter how one justifies it, while denying others one has discounted and considered to be outside the ‘promise’ one believes has been made to oneself.

All this goes back to our beliefs about the nature of the author of our beliefs, from which spring our actions.

Biblical Theologian Norman Habel has pointed out that in the Hebrew Scriptures two different Gods, El and Yahweh, emerge, each having a different set of characteristics.

At the risk of oversimplifying, El is the hospitable God of the Canaanites and their High Priest, Melchizedek. According to the legend, before the patriarch Abraham arrives to settle among the Aboriginals in the land of Canaan, Abraham was already learning the absolute centrality of hospitality on his way there; he hosts three itinerant ‘angels’ in his tent in the desert. Then, by contrast, a story follows about the inhospitality of the Sodomites to the visitors Abraham had just hosted.

On the other hand, the later, more dominant Biblical narrative has Moses discovering the God Yahweh, who will liberate the Hebrew slaves from their Egyptian oppressors and lead them to a ‘Promised Land’. Yahweh turns out to be a God to be feared, a violent and vengeful God and one who plays favourites. When the Jews come to the edge of the land they believed Yahweh had promised to them, the text has Yahweh order the Israeli commander Joshua to ‘possess the land’ and kill all the native inhabitants.

This Yahwist understanding is, I believe, one of the underlying sources of the horror being wrought in our Age of Violence – not just in Gaza, but globally. It is an understanding that has filtered into (I suspect) all religions and nationalist movements.

I believe possessiveness, and its inherent exclusion of others, is antithetical to hospitality, and its inherent empowering inclusivity, essential for peace among us.

In our time, Pastoral Theologian Henri Nouwen has conceived hospitality as the making of free space for the other (‘to sing their own songs and dance their own dances’). This is such a radical and significant concept if we are to find a way forward for peace in our Age of Violence. But where to start to make it work?

Compounding the foundations for understanding the dichotomy between hospitality and possessiveness is our propensity to read what has been considered sacred scripture, meant for our guidance and benefit, in our own possessive way. We tend to read the text wearing our own cultural glasses. How can it be otherwise?

Maybe it might be worth recognising that these texts were written thousands of years ago, in languages foreign to us, and in cultures so different to ours, and have to be understood within their own contexts. Which is why Biblical scholars of any substance read texts critically, with ‘suspicion’. 

Why ‘suspicion’? The Bible has many voices. Winners in history write the story as they see it, and leave out the stories of others. There are other voices than that of the triumphalist, violent and jealous God, Yahweh. The more hidden influence of the hospitable God, El, is easily found in passages of Jewish Law about welcoming the stranger – ‘for ‘once you were a stranger in the House of Egypt’. According to theologian Miroslav Wolf, there is no greater injunction in Scripture than to welcome the stranger.

If all this sounds theoretical and distant, we would do well to remember that many Christians who colonised Australia over 200 years ago, brought with them the ‘Promised Land Syndrome’ to exclude and exterminate native Aboriginal people. Like the first Jewish colonisers of Palestine, they were, and still are, intent on ‘possessing the land’. Like the myth perpetrated during the introduction of Land Rights for First Peoples, that Second Peoples would lose their homes, the ‘Not in My Backyard’ movement is still alive and well. Look at the difficulty the Victorian Government is having finding a city site for a Safe Injecting Room! Good luck!

This week there is a significant conference happening in Melbourne: 
Raising our Tribal Voice for Justice: An Indigenous Theological Revolution. 

This is the first-ever national ecumenical platform where Indigenous theologians from Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific will raise up their voices and challenge Churches across denominations to call their followers to action in addressing the injustice, inequality, and systemic failings of Churches history to protect, nourish, and benefit from Indigenous peoples and their knowledges.

The final report from the four-day conference should make for fascinating reading; and what actions spring from it, even more so.