BEGINNINGS

The Promised Land

The Promised Land is one of the deepest and richest themes of the Bible. The promises to Israel centred on God’s promise to settle them in a land “flowing with milk and honey” (Exodus 3:17). The description is clearly metaphorical (imagine all the ants) but the place is not. Various passages in the Bible (notably Numbers 34) give specific geographical markers that define the boundaries of what would become the land of Israel.

But the promise operated on a deeper level. In a world of conflict, the place would be a land of peace. For a collection of people enslaved in Egypt, the place would be a land of freedom and community. More importantly, it would be a place of God’s presence, indeed rule. A return, of sorts, to the Garden of Eden.

The term has been appropriated throughout history, reflecting man’s perennial hope for a better way of life: by the Europeans when they colonised America (and by many Americans ever since); by African-Americans during their fight against slavery; by Martin Luther in his civil right campaigns; by Barack Obama in his memoirs. (Less pertinently, perhaps, and certainly with less theological fidelity, it was also adopted by the American House DJ, Joe Smooth, for his 1987 hit single, Promised Land.)

As we well know, in none of the cases has reality quite matched the promise. All of these people found glimpses of the promised land. 160 years after Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, 60 years after the Civil Rights Act, black Americans are still fighting discrimination. Moses himself, through whom God made the promise, was only able to see the Canaan from the top of Mount Nebo, opposite Jericho (though presumably he at least had a good view from there). All of these are echoes of a truer promised land.

And we are only echoes of the people who will live there. When God came to Moses, a Hebrew raised in the Egyptian palace, he found him in exile in the wilderness, having fled Egypt after murdering an Egyptian.