The Reformation of Hebrew Scripture: Chosen People, Chosen Nations, and Exceptionalism

Abstract

The Reformation taught a way of reading the Hebrew Bible that made the “Old Testament” the valued possession of Protestants, encouraging them to see the histories and prophecies about biblical Israel as about the present and future not the past, and being fulfilled in Protestants. Calvin used Old Testament verses to prove predestination and “election,” which were concepts also useful to emergent nationalisms. The idea of Chosen people and nations, supposedly the hallmark of “Jewish Israel,” did not disappear with Christianity but was revived and transformed with the Reformation. We see it not just in Milton and the seventeenth century but in the later development of “British” and “Anglo”-Israelism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The obsession with being Israel—with chosenness and “exceptionalism”—persists to the present, and is one of the most important, if troubling, legacies of a way of reading the Hebrew Bible that emerged with the Reformation.