What to Do with Gentiles?
So the young men who were spies went in and brought out Rahab and her father and her mother and her brothers and all she had; they also brought out all her relatives and placed them outside the camp of Israel. Joshua 6:23 NASB
Outside – mihuts. That’s what you do with Gentiles. You save them, but you keep them away, outside the camp. After all, Gentiles are not really like you. You are God’s chosen. They are not. You are part of the household of Israel. They are not. You are a descendent of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. They are not. You have Torah. They do not. So you can save them from extinction (and fulfill the obligation of hesed), but you don’t dare let them in! That would pollute the bloodline. That would be risky. That would introduce the possibility of pagan syncretism. No, oh no, not that! Just let them live on the edge. Shut the door. Close the gate. They really don’t belong.
Mihuts is the issue in Acts 15. Rahab all over again. What do you do with the Gentiles? And Joshua provides the answer that Sha’ul repeats. Joshua brings Rahab into the midst. The verse (v. 25) says, “she has lived in Israel to this day.” But we need the Hebrew to see what is really happening. vateshev bekerev Israel ad hayon. The key is bekerev, translated “in” but really meaning “into the inner parts” or “in the midst,” the internal social structure of the community. In other words, Joshua ensures that Rahab and all her family is fully incorporated into the fabric of the community. She is not left as an outsider.
Why is this important? Because Rahab is not a convert! She is a Gentile from a city that was to be completely destroyed because it was pagan. She is a prostitute, selling sexual favors. She lives in a place of pagan gods. She never confesses her allegiance to Torah. But God is doing something in Rahab’s life, and Joshua has the spiritual awareness to see that. Rahab knows the name of YHVH. Rahab understands and employs hesed. Rahab declares that YHVH has given the land to Israel. How Rahab knows all this is never mentioned but that fact that she does know is enough for us to realize that somehow, some way, Rahab has a relationship with YHVH. And that is enough. She is welcomed in.
The central question of the apostolic letters is the question of Rahab. YHVH is doing something with Gentiles. Peter was forced to acknowledge this at the house of Cornelius. Paul saw it everywhere he went. But what do you do with Gentiles? Do you insist that they become Jews (through the steps of the proselyte) before you welcome them into full fellowship? That’s what the Judaizers claimed. “Yes, let them in, but only after they have converted.” Paul says “No! God is calling them. Who are we to require more than that?” Rahab stands in the background. “If God is bringing them in, we must open the doors and offer full fellowship. Yes, they can learn our way of life after that, but we cannot put requirements on them that God does not.” Rahab is watching. Paul’s argument is Joshua’s action. bekerev. Into the midst. It doesn’t matter if the person doesn’t fit my expectations. It only matters that YHVH has issued an invitation. Rahab is the answer to the Gentile question.
And, by the way, now it is even more significant that the verb used to describe Rahab in the midst is an imperfect, a continuing action. Rahab is still in the midst because YHVH is still sending out invitations. You and I are Rahab’s children. So was the Messiah.
Our job, and the job if every community of the Way, is to develop the awareness of recognizing when God is working in the life of someone outside—and bring them in!
Topical Index: Rahab, mihuts, outside, bekerev, in the midst, Acts 15, Joshua 6:23, Gentile
I see a similar story of the Gentiles position to Israel pointed out in Ruth. Naomi in her decision to return to Beit-Lechem urges the two wives of her deceased son’s to return to Moab and their families. It is during this interaction that Naomi seems to reveal a little insight into the mindset of her Hebrew relationship to Gentiles.
While reading this conversation these verses struck me deeply. “Go back, my daughters. Why do you want to go with me? Do I still have sons in my womb who could become your husbands? Go back, my daughters; go your way; for I’m too old to have a husband. Even if I were to say, ‘I still have hope’; even if I had a husband tonight and bore sons; would you wait for them until they grew up? Would you refuse to marry, just for them?”
I see in these verses that Naomi views a Gentiles entry into a relationship with God and His chosen people as being through a Marriage Covenant. Yet, we know that the story doesn’t end with that impossibility as Naomi presents. We find that it is Ruth’s declaration of faith and commitment to God along with her desire to be of the Israeli nation that she walks with into Israel.
I might add that in verse 1:8 my limited resources show in Hebrew that Naomi declares both wives have shown hesed to her husband and son’s. Similar to your description of Rehab, Skip.
How timely. I am just about to write something concerning Naomi’s statement. You are right. It reveals the common Hebrew view of the time, but it also reveals more, as we will see when I am finished.
Whoo hoo! There’s hope for me! (On a continuing, imperfect basis, of course!)
I started out in life looking at religion as an external job. You have to LOOK ‘right’ to be included. (And, between us, we can say the word, “love”, but, it’s so very messy in application, that it is just best to assume it is only ‘safe’ after it has been thoroughly whitewashed with that external look-right stuff.)
After I got flung outside the camp, it all looked different.
I was reading a book about a lad from New Orleans that got kidnapped and brought aboard a slave trader ship because of his ability to play the flute. Every ship needed someone who could provide music because it had been determined that more slaves stayed alive if you could get them to move, and music was a cue for them to dance. It was called “dancing the slaves”. Well, the book was a lurid, accurate description of the typical conditions to be found in such a place, and this small 13 year old grows old in the process. At one point in the journey, the inhuman hopelessness, stench, sickness and death get to him, and he begins to hate the slaves for being so bad off. He goes to his bunk and refuses to perform his ghastly job. He is promptly strung up and lashed. Afterwards, he goes through a transformation. He no longer identifies with the slavers, and begins to sympathize instead with the slaves, as they are, essentially, being treated the same. He whispers his name to one of the boys, and when his pipe is flung down the hatch by the wickedest man on board and is ordered to find it in the dark, it gets passed to him. He has had a paradigm shift, for sure!
I used to look on the outside for the line between a ‘good’ person and a ‘bad’ one. After reading Soltzenitzyn, I began to hope again. I was going through a particularly low point in my life at the time, but when I began to see that we are all a mixed bag, and that love is not a thing to save for just those who were ‘safe’ to love, I thought that there was hope for me, too. Up to that point, I had been trying very hard to ‘do’ love in some very hard places, and it was only serving to make me a loser. It is hard to get up the next day and do it again. The only reason I didn’t turn to hate instead, some days, I am sure, was because I knew that hate was even more expensive! The knowledge that love was not working out for me; was not ‘paying off’ seemingly at all, was an external clue that I was ‘failing’ at it. But, to understand it as that that is no basis for determining who was ‘inside’ or ‘outside’, put the life back in me. Good thing, too, for the hardest challenge yet was just about to hit me, and I would not have had the courage to hang on if I had not been given that gift of insight.
The day I really identified with the lost was the day I finally started out on the right foot in the love business. Love is never safe. If I cannot love the lost as I love myself, I am not qualified to love at all. If I cannot put myself in the shoes of the one who is nailing me, then I am not qualified to be in the camp. If I cannot see in the worst of the worst someone who is absolutely essential for my welfare, and the welfare of all heaven and the entire universe for all eternity; someone who will be horribly missed if they are not in that eternity, then I do not have what it is going to take to get up in the morning and love. If my offender does not look like me, then I will never have what it takes to truly forgive. Love IS the action where I place the interests and needs of another in the place of my own, with my own, as my own. To be in this camp is to be a person who is striving to include all those who are not (yet!) in this camp.
“He drew a circle to shut me out; heretic, rebel; a thing to flout
But Love and I had the wit to win; we drew a circle that took him in.”
This poem, that I learned at age seven, just before my world blew apart, is still the best sermon I have heard on HOW to love. It taught me what love did, and how it does it. I still find it useful to this day. The ones who are outside the camp put THEMSELVES there. The ones who are inside the camp are the ones who are to take the action of inclusion. Rahab qualified for inclusion because she included the spies into HER circle. Includers are the ones who are included. It takes Heaven to think this stuff up! Perfection is the art of inclusion.
Laurita, You said: “If I cannot put myself in the shoes of the one who is nailing me, then I am not qualified to be in the camp.” No offense, but your thoughts are too “Iffy” for me and your Amy Carmichael definition of love leaves me… wanting.
(If any don’t know “IF” by Amy C. Google it. Sorry, I don’t know how to hyperlink).
If, in my search for “campers” (disciples, converts) I seek out the worst of the worst- those who are more animal than human, who are not yet filled to the full with hate, evil, greed, but are diligently striving toward that goal, I will no doubt find them and in the end I may well be surprised at the depth of my own similar depravity, but more surprised that I should survive the encounter or certainly repeated ones if I am so foolish as to persist in trying to convert the unwilling and unwanting. If, on the other hand, I seek for those people who at least have the hope of becoming human; those who admire and desire attainable attributes such as love, goodness, kindness but don’t know “The Way” I have a better chance at fulfilling His call. No doubt I will fall short of my goal of converting (discipling) the ‘unevil’ (mainly the churched) and I will continue to be disappointed that so few really seek to model Yeshua’s obedience, faithfulness, love of Torah, chesed and forgiveness (myself included), but most likely I won’t be martyred for trying and will live to learn from my failings and will try again…after pouting, grumbling and… napping. No, I don’t need to search the world over for the one in a billion evil men who might see Messiah in me and come into this camp when there are so many who are “ripe unto harvest” and while in the process of “convertsation” do not seek to maim, rob or kill me. I do admire your lofty aim and you may have earned the right to call me unloving, uncaring or even cowardly, but at least I’ll be in the circle that you and love drew me in and at the campfire Yeshua drew, grinning ear to ear that I am still here to hear more of your wars, wisdom and wit. Shalom, Michael
Laurita asked me to post this for her:
I am sorry to bother, but as I cannot figure out to convince the web that I am not a scammer, can I request that you post the following in response to Michael Stanley’s comment in What To Do With Gentiles? Thank you.
Valid point, Michael. I want to wholeheartedly agree with you. There is an aspect of depravity that attracts depravity. People who suffer from rejection, say, attract people who are going to reject them. No doubt. The maelstrom of evil is a sucking vortex that can overwhelm anybody! There but for the grace of G-d, go I. But, there went I. What do you do when those you love are the ones who are nailing you? Did anybody get to choose who put them on a cross? What would you do if you were the child that had to deal with the incestuous father, or the drug-addicted mom, or the boy who’s only source of inclusion is a gang? What do you do if you start out below the line already? You don’t get to choose who you dance with, then.
There is an aspect of righteousness that can enable the ones who have attained it to reach out to the lost without getting themselves dragged down by the sin in others. I have noticed, however, that they tend to be those who have already faced,or have become willing to face, the bottom of their own depravity first. Then there are also the few, and they may be only a few, who have such big, innocent hearts that depravity slides back off of them like water off a duck’s back. Then, there are the rest of us.
I have been forced in my life, like you say, to face the fact that what makes me vulnerable to the evil in others is the evil in me. To the extent that I have not been redeemed in an area of my life, I can be taken down by the corresponding evil in another. I am not safe around those others, then. But, who said life is about staying safe? How many spiritual gates is it going to end up taking before you build a community that is never going to bring you up against the edges of your own secret depravity? What about the rotten bottom we all start out with? How are we ever going to even get to it if the sum total of the actions we take in life are to pretend that bottom either does not exist, or to protect that bottom, and therefore continue to perpetuate that existence by effectively avoiding that which would expose that bottom? What I have noticed is that the majority of supposedly white lily folks out there, who live these marvelous, gentle, polite, sweet lives in special places, would not last a week in the underbelly of society. The love they enjoy is not really able to protect them. They are very vulnerable to misfortune; their upright characters are like hothouse flowers, needing just the same special treatment back that they expend to those around them. What to do with the lost, they have not a clue. How to deal with a twist of fate that lands their own selves in the ditch? They would not know. The ‘rules’ that seem to work perfectly well, and that pass for righteousness in most polite circles; I experienced the well-meaning attempts of those around me who enjoyed playing by those rules, but, try as I might, I just could not seem to get their well-meaning advice and ways to work for me! They tended to break down in the places that disaster existed in my life. What I needed most were ways that worked even in the midst of disaster.
What I needed was faith that worked at the bottom. Courage that could exist without a network. Power that did not depend on the blessing of the world’s systems. Love that existed in spite of the odds, and not because of them. Someone who was not afraid of saying “I will be your brother or sister, and am willing to stand in the place of redemption for you, and will provide what it takes to get you back on your feet”. The ones who helped me the most were the ones who were living examples of how to handle themselves in rough places. I did not need someone to do it for me. I needed to be treated like a human in inhuman places, instead of being expected to stand in ‘safe’ places before I qualified to be a human.
The thought has crossed my mind in the past that the well-meaning attempts of those who believe that they have it ‘all together’ so often fail because so much of what they enjoy is not actually coming down from the Father of lights, but instead is there because they have been successfully playing by the rules of the world. When you go trying to spend those coins in places that only true hesed can work, the machine of disaster is likely going to spit them back out as the plug nickels they really are. Love by the world’s standards does not work in evil places, because it does not work by faith. True faith is achieved only when the pond has been dredged; but, the only way we have been given to dredge the pond is by reaching out and touching the damned, for I have become convinced that it is only there that our own depravity is truly revealed. I have become suspicious that my own salvation is wrapped up in hesed to others for precisely this reason. Reaching out to those in need is not optionable. I think we may have to become willing to learn to discard ‘safety’; as defined by the world, anyway, if we are going to be able to obey the injunction to reach out and touch. The neighbor IS the one in the ditch, but the dirty little secret of the ditch that others are in is that we are going to have to slog through our own ditch to be able to get there. As a child, I used to wonder why Pilgrim had to go through the Slough of Despond before he even got to the Wicker Gate. Now, I think I may know,
Salvation is a shocking business. The shocking points of my life were where the depravity of others met mine in naked, helpless places. Those were the places I had to learn to sink or swim, for I got out when I figured out what to do with them. Not safe at all!
I really don’t think I am trying to blast anyone’s real purity here. What I would like to do is issue an invitation. Why don’t you try sharing the good stuff that you really do have with someone who is hungry or thirsty? Looks can be deceiving, and fear is a liar. So many times I have found that the ones I thought would be the most interested in freedom; I mean the ones I thought were closest to ‘understanding’, were just the ones who were the least interested. Why? They thought they were ‘handling’ it ok already, and they could not be bothered with meeting the conditions of freedom. The ones who may actually be the hardest to persuade are the ones who think things are already bearable, or that the answers they think they have are still working for them. The truly desperate? They are the ones who may be already primed for change, as they know they have nothing to lose. There is a reason that the King sent out into the highways and byways to find guests for the feast, when His supposed friends could not be bothered. The ones who are farthest from home may be the ones who actually have the shortest distance to travel. Why not try?
Hi Laurita,
My husband is a clinical psychologist (not practicing currently) and for thirty years had that poem, “He drew a circle to shut me out…” hanging, framed, in his office. Almost everyone who entered his office over the years commented on it. FYI…the author’s name is Henry Markham. Don’t know if he’s still alive, but if so, I want to acknowledge him. The poem has obviously been around for awhile…and continues to have an impact on many.
So glad you mentioned it in your post. :-))
On a technical point, James 2:25 “confirms” that Rahab was a harlot but I have read that she was not necessarily so because of a possible misunderstanding of the Hebrew word from which the Septuagint was translated, (and from which James was probably quoting.) It is suggested that the word may also refer to a woman engaged in a retail trade (and not necessarily that of her own body).
Josephus, as his own account of the story of Rahab relates, believed she was an inn-keeper, and not a harlot. I am told the Greek word, πόρνη, is also loosely related to words that describe conveyance for the purposes of trade.
This is not pertinent to the heart of your message but do you have any comment?
The evidence that supports this view of Rahab is actually not very good. Rabbis and Josephus have other motives for making Rahab respectable, but the language basis is shaky. You can read more about all this in a technical article on Rahab, which unfortunately, I don’t have with me but will try to find it when I get home. James’ use of porne leaves little doubt about the way that first century ordinary Jews thought.
Judi, Thank you! I have wanted to know that for years. I always like to give credit. Thank you for doing it for me!
As I understand it, the Father does the drawing.
We, as “fishers of men”, help to reel them in.
“The harvest truly is plentiful, but the laborers are few.
Therefore pray the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers
into the harvest.”
As for the Judaizers, I think it is interesting to note that scripture never provided for a “conversion” process. From the very beginning at Sinai, and continuing thereafter, the moment you made the decision to follow YHWH, then you started following his instructions and basically learning them as you went along. There was no threshold level of knowledge that had to be attained. There were only a few simple basic rules that had to be followed before entering the camp.
That makes sense to me, Jordan.