The Brother
They Called Gentile

Section IA Room Full of Strangers

Roseanne Barr spoke about repentance on the night the Sabbath ended and the rabbinic new year began. It was a comedian's set and should be read as one. She asked whether there were any Jews in the room, then whether there were any non-Jews, and welcomed both. She closed by praying for captive children. Nothing here is an accusation against her character.

It is worth examining because she was sincere, and because what she taught that night is what a great many people believe. Her talk is a personal view into a family quarrel that started long before either of us was born, and that most of the modern church has never heard described according to scripture.

Section IIA Year the Bible Never Gave

She called the day the Jewish new year and the birthday of humanity, and said it opens a ten-day judgment in which God decides whether to send a person to the grave or raise him from it. Then came the line that matters: this is according to Torah, she said, and almost nobody knows it anymore.

It is not according to the "Torah" or the Bible. Open the Scriptures to the seventh month and this is the whole of what is given.

A memorial of trumpets and a holy convocation. No new year, no birthday of the world, no ten-day probation. And it is the seventh month, which is a strange place to start a year until you remember that God already told Israel where the year begins. "This month shall be unto you the beginning of months," He said of Aviv, the month of the lamb and the blood on the door. The autumn new year came home from Babylon with the month names, and modern Jews have been observing them ever since.

The ten-day judgment she described is found in the Babylonian Talmud, where three books are said to be opened on Rosh Hashanah, one for the wholly righteous, one for the wholly wicked, and one for those in between, whose fate hangs until the Day of Atonement.² A believer may find that moving. No one may call it Torah. A hall full of Gentile Christians was told they had lost a doctrine of their own Bible that their Bible never contained.

Section IIIA Judgment With No Blood In It

Look closely at her method of repentance, because it is the most serious thing in the talk. God can only forgive what you confess, she said, and then He weighs what you confessed against what you should have confessed and seeks the balance between the two.

There is real moral seriousness in that, and most of us have heard flabbier counsel from a pulpit. But notice what is missing. There is a scale, a ledger, and a self-audit, and there is no blood anywhere in it. The older order never asked that of anyone. On the Day of Atonement the high priest did not carry the people's sincerity behind the veil. He carried blood. And the whole letter to the Hebrews exists because he had to do it again the next year, until one offering perfected for ever those who are set apart by it.

Perfected for ever, not weighed in a balance every autumn. That is why a Gentile believer who has never kept a feast in his life is not standing in that ten-day suspense at all. He was not weighed. He was bought.

Section IVThe DNA Spiral

Here is the kindest moment of the night, and it is also the one I would ask you to consider the most. Turning to the non-Jews in the room, she told them not to be so sure they were not Jews. Somewhere back in the double helix, she said, there are probably Jewish strands in there.

Take it at full value as a welcome. Then notice what it assumes: that standing before the God of Abraham runs through ancestry, and that the best hope available to a Gentile is the chance of hidden Jewish blood. She defined Jewishness itself as a temperament, the people who ask questions and do not trust power. Ancestry and attitude. A covenant is never mentioned, because in that frame a covenant is not what makes the difference.

Start with the word. There is no Hebrew word for Gentile. There is a word for nation, goy, and its plural goyim, and Scripture uses it of Israel as freely as of anyone else. God promises Abram He will make of him a great nation. He tells Jacob that a nation and a company of nations will come out of him. He calls Israel at Sinai a holy nation. The same word is rendered nations in one verse, heathen in another, and Gentiles in a third, and the English reader closes his Bible believing God drew a permanent line between two kinds of human being. God drew a covenant. Men drew the line, and by now both houses lean on it.

Take that word to Joseph. When Jacob blessed the younger son and set him above the elder, he said of Ephraim's seed that it would become the fullness of the nations.³

Ephraim's descendants were not scattered into the nations by accident. They were promised into them. The category the modern world calls Gentile has held Israelite blood by promise since before it held anyone else, and Paul, writing of the day the natural branches come home, is waiting for the fullness of the Gentiles to come in. He is standing on the phrase spoken over Joseph's boy.

So who is the wild branch? The one actually outside the family. Noah's blessing gives the shape of it: God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem. The tents were Shem's. Japheth is brought in to dwell in them, and that is a real grafting and a glorious one, and it is what Paul describes when he tells the wild olive not to boast against the natural branches, because he does not bear the root, the root bears him. That man has no need of a DNA test. He was grafted in.

But the believer sitting next to him, with a surname from some European village and no idea which family he came out of, may not be Japheth at all. Paul does not stop with the wild branch. The natural branches broken off are grafted back into their own olive tree, and he calls that the easier of the two operations. Set that beside what the prophets say became of Joseph's house, swallowed up and numbered among the nations, and some of the people in Christian pews this morning, told all their lives that they are outsiders by birth, are natural branches coming home.

Nobody on earth can sort that room. Amos says God sifted the house of Israel among all nations like grain in a sieve, and not the least grain shall fall to the ground. He knows where every one of them is. We do not, and the moment a man starts hunting a pedigree to prove he is one of them, he has traded one bloodline error for another.

That is the modern error, and it runs in both directions. The word Gentile was turned into a caste, sorting the world into the covenant people and the rest, and the church accepted the sorting and took the lower seat. It was never a caste. It was a word for nations, and inside those nations, sifted and unnamed and known only to God, is the brother. Wild branch or natural branch, both stand in the same tree by the same mercy, and neither one of them got there by his bloodline or ethnicity.

Section VThe Birthright That Was Never Judah's

Now the root of it, sitting in plain sight in a genealogy most readers skip.

Read it again. The chronicler concedes Judah the throne and in the same breath refuses him the birthright and hands it to Joseph. Jacob had already done it on his deathbed, taking Ephraim and Manasseh as his own sons and laying his own name on them: let my name be named on them. The name Israel was placed on Joseph's sons by the man who carried it.

Then Assyria emptied the north, and the record closes the account with a sentence that has governed every century since: there was none left but the tribe of Judah only. Judah did not win the name. Judah inherited an empty house and kept the keys.

What happened to the brother is the part almost nobody preaches. He did not merely go missing.

Among the Gentiles. Hosea names a child Lo-ammi, not my people, and then comes the reversal: in the place where it was said unto them, Ye are not my people, there it shall be said unto them, Ye are the sons of the living God. Paul reaches for that exact passage in Romans 9 and applies it to the people he has just been calling Gentiles. Peter tells scattered strangers they were not a people and are now the people of God. James writes to the twelve tribes scattered abroad, and nobody has ever satisfactorily explained who he thought he was writing to.

The word Gentile, in a great many of its uses, is Judah's word for his own brother.

Ten Words Press

So when a daughter of Judah stands up on a borrowed new year, tells a room of Gentile Christians that there is probably a strand of the family in them somewhere, and sweeps the dog into the same sentence for the laugh, something very old is happening and neither side can see it. Inclusion offered that cheaply is not inclusion. It is the reflex of a house that cannot picture the brother as anything but a guest, and that does not know he is missing because it has never once counted him.

That is the part to understand. It is not personal malice, and I do not believe there was a drop of it in the room. It is institutional arrogance. A whole category of human being was built to hold everyone who is not Judah, and into it went the brother who holds the right to be called Israel. The house that called the modern Jewish state Israel instead of the Kingdom of Judah has never once gone looking for him. Joseph was standing in the room and nobody said his name.

Section VIThe Day We Handed Over

Now the half of this that belongs to us, and it is the half we can actually repent of.

Late in the talk she said she was expanding the Sabbath, because the Christians have theirs on Sunday, so we expand it. She observed, correctly, that the Christian world keeps a different day, and stretched hers sideways as a courtesy to the room. Ironically, the church had already made that call for her. When the churches of Asia kept the fourteenth day on the tradition they traced back to Philip and John, Victor of Rome declared them excommunicate, and the reckoning of the feast passed in time to Alexandria with the Jewish calendar deliberately left out of it.⁴ Rome and Alexandria sent the disciples of the apostles packing, and what was left is the Christian week she was being polite about.

That history is background. The argument is older than Rome.

Go back to the beginning. Six days are called good. One day is blessed and sanctified, and it is the seventh, handed to the human race before there was a Jew or a Gentile in the world, before Abraham, before Sinai, before anyone had a claim to file. She crowned the sixth day as the creation of humanity and never mentioned the day God actually crowned.

And the Fourth Commandment, the ten vows God spoke aloud at Sinai with no man standing between, is the one vow that names the outsider inside the commandment itself.

The stranger within thy gates. He is in the vow. He was never outside it. Isaiah ties the stranger's welcome to that same day, promising the sons of the stranger who keep the sabbath from polluting it that God will bring them to His holy mountain and make them joyful in His house of prayer, for His house shall be called an house of prayer for all people.

Set the two errors side by side and they are mirror images. One house says the day is ours and not yours. The other says fine, we will take a different one. Both are standing on ground that belongs to neither, because the seventh day was sanctified on the seventh day of the world, when the only people alive were the ancestors of everyone.

Section VIITwo Sticks in One Hand

Ezekiel is handed two sticks. On one he writes For Judah. On the other, For Joseph. And then he is told to do the only thing that ever settles a family quarrel over an inheritance.

Not one stick in Judah's hand. Not one in Joseph's. One stick in His hand. The birthright is not transferred from the brother who took it to the brother who lost it. It goes back to the One who gave it, and both brothers stand there with empty hands, which is the only posture in which either of them was ever going to be able to look at the other.

If you are a Christian who has spent your life believing the feasts and the seventh day belong to somebody else, go look at the Fourth Commandment again and find the stranger standing inside it. If you have spent your life certain they belong to you alone, the invitation is the same, because the day was sanctified before the family divided and the Lamb was slain for both halves of the house.

The ten days are a lovely tradition and a terrible gospel. There is no balance to strike. The offering was made once, and it is old enough and wide enough to hold a brother who has forgotten his own name.

Section VIIIReferences