Theopedia

Israelite

“I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin.”

— Romans 11:1 (ESV)

Definition

An Israelite is an individual member of the covenant people descended from Jacob, whom God renamed Israel after their struggle at Peniel (Gen. 32:28). Scripture applies the term to physical descent and to covenant standing alike, but does not treat them as identical: Paul calls himself “an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin” (Rom. 11:1), yet also insists that “not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel” (Rom. 9:6), a distinction that still divides covenant theology from dispensationalism.

Biblical Basis

An individual identity within the covenant nation

The Old Testament already uses the term for a particular person, not only for the nation collectively. When a dispute broke out in the wilderness camp, the text singles out one man by his mother’s status, “an Israelite woman’s son” whose father was Egyptian, distinguishing his own case from “the people of Israel” named around him (Lev. 24:10-16). The New Testament continues this individual usage. On first meeting Nathanael, Jesus commends him by name: “Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no deceit!” (John 1:47). Thomas Watson held the line up as a model of sincerity: “What a Commendation did Christ give Nathanael… Behold an Israelite indeed in whom there is no Guile.”1

Paul applies the term to himself the same way. Introducing his own case as proof that “God has not rejected his people” (Rom. 11:1-2), he writes, “I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin” (Rom. 11:1). Sears reads this as a deliberate move: Paul “appeals to his ethnic heritage as evidence that God has not rejected every Israelite,” presenting himself as a living instance of the believing remnant within the nation.2 Elsewhere Paul lists the same pedigree at greater length, “circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews” (Phil. 3:5). What he means by then counting that pedigree “as loss” (Phil. 3:7-8) is contested at length in modern scholarship’s New Perspective on Paul.

Not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel

Paul states the redefinition directly: “It is not as though the word of God has failed. For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel” (Rom. 9:6). Sears calls this the foundation for everything Paul argues in the following chapters: “not every Israelite is an heir of the promise, only those whom God has chosen apart from their own willing or working.”3 Martin traces the same principle to the Old and New Covenants’ different scope: under the Old Covenant “not everyone in the covenant was regenerate,” which is exactly Paul’s point in citing “Not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel,” whereas under the New Covenant “all covenant people are regenerate” because all receive new hearts by the Spirit.4 Bavinck applies the same verse to the perseverance of the saints: a professing believer who falls away was never truly a regenerate member of the covenant to begin with, any more than every physical descendant of Jacob was ever a true, promise-bearing Israelite.5

Paul draws a closely parallel distinction using the cognate term “Jew” a few chapters earlier: “a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter” (Rom. 2:29). Moo reads this as identifying what actually “marks a person as belonging to the people of God,” a circumcision “performed by the Spirit,” not the physical rite by itself.6 The same individualizing instinct is already present in the Torah. O’Kelley notes that Deuteronomy 29’s warning against presuming on the covenant is grammatically singular in the Hebrew, framed in terms “applicable to every Israelite as an individual,” and stands behind Paul’s own individualizing language in Romans 10 (“do not say in your heart”).7

Historical Development

Second Temple boundary-marking

Second Temple Jewish literature already used “Israelite” as a boundary term separating the righteous from outsiders. Sears cites the Psalms of Solomon, where “the righteous ones (Israelites) are sharply distinguished from sinners (i.e., Gentiles),” grounding that identity in Abraham’s own election: “For you chose the descendants of Abraham above all the nations, and you put your name upon us, Lord” (Pss. Sol. 9:8-9).8 This ethnic-boundary use of the term is the background against which Paul’s own redefinition of “Israelite,” around promise rather than bare descent, works.

Puritan preaching: “an Israelite indeed”

By the seventeenth century, English Puritan preaching had turned Nathanael’s commendation into a standard illustration of sincerity in the Christian life. In a sermon on wisdom and innocence, Watson holds up Christ’s words to Nathanael as the pattern of a heart without hypocrisy, set against “dissembl[ing] Friendship” and serving God only outwardly: “Be what you seem to be: God loves Plainness of Heart.”1

Confessional Witness

No confession in the Reformed family, the 1689 London Baptist Confession included, has a chapter addressing “Israelite,” or “Israel,” by name.

Opposing Views

Covenant theology reads an individual’s true Israelite standing, per Paul’s redefinition of the term around promise rather than bare descent, as finally a matter of union with Christ rather than physical descent from Jacob, open equally to Jewish and Gentile believers. Dispensationalism holds that Israel and the church remain distinct peoples with distinct promises,9 so that an individual ethnic Israelite’s national identity and the promises attached to it are not forfeited by present unbelief, since the distinction dispensationalism draws applies to the whole people, not merely to the corporate label “Israel.”

Objections and Responses

If ancestry alone does not make someone a “true” Israelite, is physical descent from Jacob spiritually worthless? Sears answers that Paul does not treat it that way: the covenant privileges Paul lists, “the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises” (Rom. 9:4), are still really predicated of ethnic Israelites as such, and God’s commitment to “the patriarchs” and their physical offspring continues (Rom. 9:5; 11:28-29), even though that descent does not by itself guarantee any individual’s salvation.10

Doesn’t Paul’s own evident pride in his Israelite pedigree (Phil. 3:5) sit awkwardly with insisting that ancestry does not save? O’Kelley answers that Paul lists the pedigree precisely in order to count it “as loss” once he has come to know Christ (Phil. 3:7-8), alongside his own works under the law, not to hold it up as a ground of confidence before God.11 The fuller argument over what Paul’s pedigree list means, and what “counting it as loss” implies about Jewish identity as such, belongs to the New Perspective on Paul.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Thomas Watson, A Body of Practical Divinity: Consisting of Above One Hundred and Seventy-Six Sermons on the Lesser Catechism (London: Thomas Parkhurst, 1692), 968. ↩ ↩2

  2. Philip Chase Sears, “The Mystery of Israel’s Remnant and Restoration,” in “Mysterion and the Salvation of ‘All Israel’ in Romans 9-11” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 196-197. ↩

  3. Sears, “The Mystery of Israel’s Election and Hardening,” in “Mysterion and the Salvation of ‘All Israel’ in Romans 9-11,” 177. ↩

  4. Oren Rhea Martin, “The Beginning and the End: Situating the Land Promise in Redemptive History,” in “Bound for the Kingdom: The Land Promise in God’s Redemptive Plan” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2013), 92-93. ↩

  5. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 20, “Justification, Sanctification, and Perseverance.” ↩

  6. Douglas J. Moo, The Letters to the Colossians and to Philemon, PNTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 197, quoted in Matthew Michael Barrett, “The Scriptural Affirmation of Monergistic Regeneration,” in “Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 225-226. ↩

  7. Aaron Thomas O’Kelley, “Conclusion,” in “A Historical-Theological Critique of the New Perspective on Paul” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 188. ↩

  8. Sears, “The Mystery Schema of Romans,” in “Mysterion and the Salvation of ‘All Israel’ in Romans 9-11,” 103. ↩

  9. Charles C. Ryrie, Dispensationalism (Chicago: Moody Press, rev. ed. 1995), 39-40. ↩

  10. Sears, “The Mystery of Israel’s Election and Hardening,” 144-145. ↩

  11. O’Kelley, “Conclusion,” 193-195. ↩