Ancient Israel among the great powers. The Bible’s radical politics (part one)

Ted Grimsrud—June 10, 2025

I recently led a three-part adult Sunday School class on “The Bible’s radical politics.” This post is an expanded version of the first session. I will follow with the other two parts and then add a fourth post that reflects on lessons from these posts for politics today.

This first post will discuss ancient Israel among the great powers of the ancient near east. Israel’s entire existence in the Bible took place in the shadow of one great power or another, from Egypt on down to Rome. So, the politics of the Bible has a lot to do with navigating life in that shadow—resistance, subjection, imitation, alternative.

Then, the second post will zero in on Israel’s own attempt to be a territorial kingdom, a power in its own right. I call this, ancient Israel as a failed state—and will consider what follows after the failure. Israel’s time as a nation-state in the “promised land” was complicated, but ultimately ended in disaster—yet the peoplehood continued. What lessons came out of that experience that empowered the peoplehood to continue?

Third, I will turn to the New Testament and the story of Jesus, and his politics as told in the gospels with a glimpse at the book of Revelation. I call this “Jesus’s upside-down empire.” I will suggest that Jesus’s radical politics are best understood in terms of his continuity with the Old Testament.

I will conclude with a fourth post—not part of the original Sunday school class—that reflects on a Christian political agenda in light of the Bible’s radical politics. Most politically engaged people in the United States today recognize that we are facing crises of extraordinary difficulty and diversity. How might the Bible’s Big Story give us some perspective on navigating these crises?

A few preliminary thoughts

Before starting in on the story itself, I would like to think just a bit about the Bible. How do I approach it? I find the Bible most meaningful as a conversation partner. The stories in the Bible, and even more the big picture we get from reading all the stories together, gives me a perspective from which to engage the world.

I do not think of the Bible as a source of normative, explicit commands that I must try to follow as literally as possible. Nor do I think of it as a miraculously accurate source of historical information. On the other hand, I also do not think of it as simply ancient writings from another time and another place widely removed from us today. Rather, to me the Bible is a fascinating collection of various kinds of literature that reflects various human perspectives that nonetheless does hang together, loosely, as a coherent source for guidance and insight.

As a Christian, I read the Bible in light of the amazing story of Jesus. That story illumines what comes before and what comes after—it all centers on the call to love God and neighbor. As is clear, when we read it carefully, the Old Testament itself centers on that call. So does the rest of the New Testament that follows the gospels.

To understand Jesus, we must see him in his own social context—and in the context the longer story the Bible tells of the Hebrew people. The entire story going back to the book of Genesis has to do with the Hebrew people living amidst the various great powers of the ancient world. The ways Jesus navigated life within the Roman Empire had a lot of continuity with how the Old Testament Hebrews navigated life within their various surrounding empires.

Jesus’s message—the call to love God and neighbor—closely echoed the message of the Old Testament law (Torah), especially as seen in the prophets. This message to a large degree originated as a response to the Hebrews’ time as an enslaved people in the Egyptian Empire. God showed love to them in their liberation and then provided them with a guide for a counter-empire society.

Instead of exploiting the vulnerable, this new social order would emphasize care for the vulnerable—widows, orphans, immigrants, the poor, the infirm. Love of neighbor is a social organizing principle that contrasts with empire. I think one way to read the Old Testament is to see one of its main plot lines as the struggle between these two social philosophies: the top-down, exploitative, power-over politics of empire (in time all too often disastrously present within ancient Israel) vs. the bottom-up, compassionate, power-sharing politics of Torah’s sensibility of neighbor love.

I suggest that it is helpful and illuminating to read the story of Jesus and the story of the ancient Hebrews together. To do so will help us see that the Old Testament places peace and love of the neighbor at its center. And it will help us see the political significance of Jesus’s message in the New Testament.

Empires in the Old Testament

The first hint of the great empires in the Old Testament comes with the cryptic story in Genesis 11 about the tower of Babel. Does “Babel” actually refer to “Babylon”? Perhaps, though the meaning of the story likely does not depend upon that identification. “Babel” seems to have to do with the human quest for control and domination that characterizes all the great empires before and after Babylon. The unity that Babel seeks seems very much like the quest for primacy and unipolar power that empires seek.

By “empire,” I have in mind these key elements: territorial kingdoms or nation-states that seek for expanding power and domination, that seek to be the power at the top of the pyramid—and, I would add, that pursue the power-over beyond their territorial boundaries.

The first clearly named empire in the Bible is Egypt—which dominates the first part of the Bible’s story. The initial picture is fairly positive, actually. Genesis 37–50 talks about Joseph—the great-grandson of Abraham—and his adventures, that end up with him being the top adviser of Egypt’s leader, Pharaoh. Egypt provides a place of refuge for Joseph’s family during a time of devastating famine. However, Egypt did not act out of altruism—Joseph gave Pharaoh a shrewd plan—in exchange for the famine aid, Egypt took over the land of Joseph’s family and many others—extending the empire’s reach.

In the book of Exodus, set a few generations later, we learn that the current Pharaoh “knew not Joseph” and had enslaved the descendants of Joseph and his brothers. We read of the bitter suffering of these descendants, the “Hebrew” people. They are simply a tool in the dynamics of the empire’s domination.

Something new happens, though. The Hebrews seem to have lost most of their awareness of Abraham and Abraham’s God’s promises. They have just enough faith to cry out to the heavens in their despair. Somehow, though, the God of Abraham hears the cries. We are told that Yahweh “took notice” of the cries and remembers the promises and begins a gradual and dramatic intervention that results in the liberation of the Hebrews, their “exodus” out of Egypt.

This intervention actually proves to be the beginning of a new story in the world of empires and those they dominate. This new story offers a way out of the vicious cycles of subjugation and exploitation.

After the Hebrews cross into freedom, they spend many years traveling to their homeland. On the way, they receive training for inhabiting the promised land—most importantly the teaching (“Torah”) contained in the law codes. This teaching offers directives for a way of life that would be an alternative to Egypt’s way of life—a counter-empire community.

The heartbeat of Torah is the practice of Sabbath observance. The seventh day would be a day of rest and rejuvenation—something denied the enslaved Hebrews in Egypt. The holiness of the Sabbath always reminded the Hebrews that they were freed from empire, freed from the relentless forced labor of the empire. Torah also limited top-down power in the community, required care for vulnerable people, restricted concentrations of wealth, assured care for the land. In many other ways as well, Torah empowered self-determination for the people and set Egypt’s way of life on its head.

Israel turns away

The story does not romanticize the Hebrew people’s struggle to embody Torah. The seeds of crisis were present from the beginning. The people struggled for decades “in the wilderness” on their way to the promised land where they might create a Torah-centered community.

Over and over leaders such as Moses and Joshua taught that the people’s existence in the land would depend on their faithfulness to the social vision of Torah. They would have God’s blessing only so long as they lived as a counter-empire community. Here is one of many of those teachings: “If you transgress the covenant of the Lord your God, which he enjoined you, and go and serve other gods and bow down to them, then the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you, and you shall perish quickly from the good land that he has given you” (Joshua 23:16).

It proved to be difficult for this new territorial kingdom to remain faithful to Torah. This was tragic. The kingdom of Israel had the calling to bless all the families of the earth (Genesis 12:1-3). It could do so only by existing as a just and peaceable people, an alternative to empire.

Because of the importance of the calling to follow Torah, the on-going critiques of the kingdom’s failure to do so always carried with them a critique of the empire way. What was wrong with Israel was how Israel imitated Egypt (and the other empires). Certainly, the empires directly harmed the Hebrew people by enslaving them and waging war on them. However, perhaps even worse was how the sensibility of empire infiltrated Israel and shaped the practices of Israel’s leaders. I will focus more on the significance of the ultimate failure of the Hebrew’s territorial kingdom in the next post. Here, I just want to emphasize the source of the kingdom’s problems as the empire sensibility.

More great powers

Egypt was the first great adversary. The exodus puts it in the rearview mirror, but it remains a background presence throughout the story. At the end of the Hebrew kingdom of Judah, Egypt kills Judah’s great reformer king Josiah in battle, in effectively ending hopes that Judah could successfully become a faithful kingdom.

A second great power, the Assyrian Empire, enters and leaves the story much quicker than Egypt. The ruthless power of Assyria, as recounted in 2 Kings 17:5-23, utterly destroyed the northern Hebrew kingdom of Israel. Assyria then moved on and nearly ended Judah. However, for somewhat mysterious reasons, that attack failed, and Judah survived for a time. Ultimately, the next great power, Babylon, destroyed Judah.

Two prophetic references to Assyria underscore Israel’s antipathy. The prophetic book of Nahum joyfully proclaims the impending doom of Nineveh, the capital of Assyria. Nahum’s sharp words voice the Old Testament’s critique of empire: “Your shepherds are asleep, O king of Assyria, your nobles slumber. Your people are scattered on the mountains with no one to gather them. There is no assuaging your hurt, your wound is mortal. All who hear the news about you clap their hands over you. For whom has ever escaped your endless cruelty?” (3:18-19).

A much later prophecy, the book of Jonah, uses Israel’s hatred of Assyria to much different effect. In Jonah, Nineveh repents and is saved. This obviously fictional story makes the point that God’s mercy is extended even to Israel’s worst enemies. The book of Jonah means to critique Israel’s narrow self-focus and point to God’s love for everyone. Nineveh would have been the last place the Hebrews would ever want God’s mercy to be expressed. And it is not like the Hebrews were wrong about Nineveh being bad—Jonah’s point is all the stronger the more negative one’s assessment of the Assyrian Empire.

The third great empire that shapes ancient Israel, Babylon, defeats Assyria and then ends the Hebrew kingdom of Judah. The Babylonians destroy Judah’s great temple and much of the rest its capital, Jerusalem. They take the surviving Judean ruling elite into exile. Babylon becomes the Bible’s central metaphor for the great, ruthless empires—used as such in the New Testament long after the historical Babylon disappeared. In Revelation, “Babylon” symbolizes the Roman Empire—and more.

The final Old Testament empire is Persia—which actually is seen in a more positive light for two reasons. Persia defeated the terrible Babylonians who destroyed Judah’s Temple. And Persia allowed the exiled Judeans to return to their homeland and in time partially rebuild their Temple. Persia certainly had its many empire-like negative aspects, but these do not figure much in the Old Testament story.

Some concluding lessons

(1) One key biblical starting point for the story of God’s people, I would suggest, is that the peoplehood of ancient Israel begins in slavery. The Hebrew people were enslaved by the Egyptian Empire. Between the end of Genesis and the beginning of Exodus, the extended family becomes a people, initially traumatized in their enslavement, then through God’s call, the Bible’s community of faith.

(2) The God of the Bible, the giver and sustainer of life, calls together a people to bless all the families of the earth. This work of blessing takes the shape of God intervening in Egypt to free an enslaved people who might show the world God’s love—and make it clear that God hates empire. God’s work of healing means to overcome the curses of empire.

(3) God provides the law codes to the people shortly after their liberation in order to guide their social, political lives. These laws, also called Torah, are shaped as counter-empire directives. Rather than the exploitation of the many by the few, Torah directs the community as a whole toward empowerment, generosity, and shalom (wide-ranging justice and peace).

(4) The way of empire was not only an external threat—especially the two big ancient empires of Assyria and Babylon—but also an internal threat to turn the nation away from the way of Torah. I will focus on this in my next post—now, my point is simply the danger of turning from God’s ways and toward the ways of empire was ever present and ultimately fatal to the territorial kingdom.

(5) Finally, the dynamics of empire are central to the entire Bible—including the story of Jesus and the New Testament. The empires pose major threats to faith in the God of the exodus, the God of Jesus. The way of Torah and the way of Jesus are about God empowering an alternative politics, seeking to find ways to embody compassion, restorative justice, and wide-ranging peace.

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