Israel

Israel names both a man and a people: the new name the Lord conferred on Jacob after a night of wrestling, and the covenant nation descended from his twelve sons yet open to those not born to it. At the ford of the Jabbok, Jacob’s adversary declared, “Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed” (Genesis 32:28). The narrator links Yisra’el to the Hebrew sarah, “to strive,” and the sounds of Jacob (ya’aqob), Jabbok (yabboq), and wrestled (ye’abeq) echo one another through the scene. Popular usage often treats Israel as an ethnicity measured by descent alone. Scripture holds lineage and adoption together in deliberate tension.

Jacob at the Jabbok

Jacob came to the Jabbok as a fugitive returning home, afraid of the brother he had defrauded, and left it limping, renamed, and reconciled. The night follows the pattern of an ascent into the divine presence. Jacob is left alone at a threshold, he holds fast to a heavenly messenger “until the breaking of the day,” he will not release his hold without a blessing, and he names the place Peniel because he has “seen God face to face.” Hugh Nibley read the struggle as a ritual embrace at the veil, a reading Matthew L. Bowen has since extended. The name Israel therefore enters scripture as an endowment, conferred on one man at the close of an encounter with God, before any nation bore it.

The patriarch’s name passed to his descendants, the children of Israel, and that people was mixed from its beginning. A “mixed multitude” departed Egypt alongside the tribes, and the Law repeatedly provides for the stranger who joins the congregation. At Sinai the Lord constituted all of them a people by covenant: “if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people,” and “ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation” (Exodus 19:5-6). The condition precedes the identity. Its membership is ratified by obedience, and Rahab and Ruth later entered it by choosing its God.

Children of the Promise

The Apostle Paul confronted the question when most of his own kinsmen declined his preaching. He answered that the promise had never depended on descent alone: “For they are not all Israel, which are of Israel” (Romans 9:6). The election of Isaac over Ishmael, and of Jacob over Esau, showed that God had always distinguished the children of the flesh from the children of the promise. To the Gentile converts of Galatia he extended the principle outward: “if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Galatians 3:29). In Paul’s argument, faith confers the very ancestry the Gentiles lacked by birth, and adoption accomplishes what genealogy could never secure.

Nephi warned his own people against presuming upon their pedigree: “as many of the Gentiles as will repent are the covenant people of the Lord; and as many of the Jews as will not repent shall be cast off” (2 Nephi 30:2). Joseph Smith gave adoption a bodily dimension. In an 1839 discourse he taught that the Holy Ghost, falling upon a Gentile, will “purge out the old blood” and make that person “actually of the seed of Abraham.” Latter-day Saint patriarchs accordingly declare a tribal lineage in each blessing, whether by birth or by adoption. The Restoration thus treats belonging to Israel as a physical reality the Spirit can create, and it declines to let genealogy fix the boundaries of grace.

The Children of the Covenant

When the resurrected Savior taught the descendants of Lehi, He addressed them as heirs and named the purpose of their inheritance: “ye are of the house of Israel; and ye are of the covenant which the Father made with your fathers, saying unto Abraham: And in thy seed shall all the kindreds of the earth be blessed” (3 Nephi 20:25). Lineage, in this account, carries an assignment. Israel exists for the sake of the kindreds who are not Israel, as a priesthood exists for the sake of a congregation, and the Sinai promise of a kingdom of priests here acquires its widest scope. The scattering of the tribes, lamented by the prophets as judgment, thus carried the blood of Abraham to the peoples the covenant was meant to bless.

That assignment has sometimes been forgotten by those who claimed the name. Nineteenth-century British Israelism taught that the peoples of northern Europe descended physically from the lost tribes, and racial readings of lineage circulated among Latter-day Saints for generations before the Church, in 2013, disavowed the racial theories once offered to explain its former priesthood restriction. The name also belongs to a modern nation, founded in 1948, whose politics lie beyond the scope of this entry. Latter-day Saints distinguish the covenant house of Israel, which spans every nation, from any single state, and the Church’s Jerusalem Center operates under a long-standing pledge not to proselytize.

Genome and Graft

Consumer genetic testing has made descent newly legible. Ancestry companies now hold the genomes of tens of millions, and geneticists have traced ancient Jewish lineages through markers on the Y chromosome. A 2014 Church essay on the Book of Mormon and DNA studies acknowledged that the evidence points chiefly to Asian origins for Native Americans, while observing that the DNA of Book of Mormon peoples remains unknown. The Mormon Transhumanist Affirmation seeks the exaltation of individuals “and their anatomies” according to their own wills, and Joseph Smith’s purged blood offers a precedent for covenant identity that transforms the body. The corresponding risk is a genome read as covenant status, reviving the racial lineages that the scriptures of adoption were given to overcome.

Paul gave the tension between lineage and adoption its definitive image in the olive tree. He told Gentile believers that “thou, being a wild olive tree, wert grafted in among them, and with them partakest of the root and fatness of the olive tree,” and warned: “Boast not against the branches. But if thou boast, thou bearest not the root, but the root thee” (Romans 11:17-18). The graft and the natural branch draw their life from one root. Israel, renamed at the Jabbok and constituted at Sinai, remains such a tree. As genetics gains the power to read and eventually rewrite descent, the olive tree locates the life of the covenant people in the root that bears every branch, natural and grafted alike, and it forbids those who would engineer their own lineage the boast Paul condemned.