Chosenness, being selected by God, is at the core of the Israelite identity. Chosenness might even define what it is to be an Israelite. Being handpicked by the Lord comes with perks; Israel’s conquest of Canaan, for example, was helped along by it. Chosenness also comes with certain duties in the form of covenants; marrying a Canaanite was proscribed among Israelites. Why, though, was this covenant entrusted to Israel? What was it that distinguished them among nations, especially when time and time again they broke those rules set out for them, doing “... what was wrong in the eyes of the Lord”? These are the big questions of the Hebrew Bible - questions a sophomore essay can’t answer. But this essay will try. The theme of chosenness is so central that it runs through all of their holy text, right from the beginning, …show more content…
With it, duties are introduced - a covenant - which must be performed to uphold their place. Bafflingly, the Hebrew Bible offers scarce explanation why Abraham was chosen to bring this doctrine to the Israelites in the first place.
It’s unclear in the second and third place, too - the rituals of inheritance (that the elder son is chosen to inherit) are defied by the very Lord who set them forth. Again and again, God passes over an older sibling for the younger; from Isaac, one little brother, to Jacob, another. (Genesis is no fun for big brothers.) The arbitrariness of God’s choice recurs in generation after generation in the Book of Genesis. To extrapolate, how could a God with such an arbitrary taste in sons have chosen the Israelite’s non-arbitrarily? We may look to the Book of Deuteronomy for some