The Christian Identity in the Hebrew Bible

Israel has roughly 8 million Jews today. In the 1990s there were barely 4 million. All 16 million Jews currently alive are, according to the Hebrew prophets, destined to return. The question is not whether that return will happen. The question is whether the world understands what it means when it does.

The Giving Gap Is a Theology Problem

Jewish philanthropy has been the overwhelmingly dominant source of foreign funding for Israel, consistently exceeding $3 billion annually. The Jewish Federations of North America channel funds primarily through the Jewish Agency for Israel, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, and World ORT. Occasionally extraordinary private gifts emerge, such as Jan Koum’s $200 million donation to Shaare Tzedek Medical Center in Jerusalem. Those gifts are remarkable but rare.

Against this backdrop, Christian philanthropy to Israel tells a different story. Total Evangelical giving to Israel sits at roughly $350 to $450 million per year, about 10 to 12 percent of total foreign giving. That figure sounds substantial until you set it against the base. Christian philanthropy in the United States alone exceeds $145 billion annually. Evangelical giving to Israel represents a fraction of one percent of that.

The giving capacity is not the problem. The theology is.

The Divorce

Christianity began as a Jewish movement. Every document in the New Testament was written by Jews, addressed to communities shaped by Jewish Scripture. Jesus was a Jew. Paul was a Pharisee. The early church in Rome was anchored in Jewish congregations, and the two communities prayed, argued, and worshipped in close proximity.

Then Emperor Claudius expelled all Jews from Rome around 49 AD. Acts 18:2 records the moment plainly: Paul arrived in Corinth and found Aquila and Priscilla, because Claudius had ordered all the Jews to leave Rome. The church in Rome became predominantly Gentile almost overnight. When the Jews returned after Claudius died in 54 AD, they came back to a church that had already developed without them. The separation that began as a political accident became a theological identity.

The Council of Nicaea in 325 AD completed the process. The church formally severed Easter from Passover, replacing the Hebrew calendar with the Julian. Any link to the biblical feast was discarded. This was not a calendar adjustment. It was a declaration that Christianity had a different story and a different people.

What followed was supersessionism, or replacement theology. The teaching held that the Jews were cursed by God for rejecting Jesus, and that the church had replaced the Jews in the plans and purposes of God. Israel’s covenant was declared over. The promises made to Abraham now belonged exclusively to the church.

Replacement theology dominated Christian thought for more than a millennium, including in major strains of Protestantism. Even Martin Luther, in his 1543 tract On the Jews and Their Lies, claimed the destruction of Jerusalem was proof that God had permanently rejected the Jewish people. The consequences were not abstract. This theology paved the way for anti-Jewish legislation, persecution, forced conversions, ghettos, and expulsions. Many scholars agree that the Holocaust could never have happened without the centuries of Christian antisemitism rooted in this theology.

Israelis understand antisemitism as a political or racial phenomenon. Its deepest engine was theological.

The Counter-Tradition

Not all of Christianity followed this path. Beginning in 17th-century English Puritan thought, a counter-tradition emerged, one that read the Hebrew Bible’s promises to Israel as still active and still awaiting fulfillment. The decisive theological framework was dispensationalism, popularized in the 19th century by Anglo-Irish minister John Nelson Darby, which held that God’s covenant with the Jewish people was never revoked.

This tradition produced a remarkable figure whom most Israelis have never heard of. Reverend William Hechler was a devout Evangelical Christian who became Theodor Herzl’s closest Gentile ally. When Herzl published The Jewish State in 1896, Hechler read it not as a political pamphlet but as a prophetic sign. He went to Herzl’s door, and when Herzl entered his study he recorded his astonishment: every wall was lined floor to ceiling with Bibles, and the desk was covered in color-coded maps of Palestine. Hechler greeted him with a declaration: We have prepared the ground for you.

Through the Grand Duke of Baden he arranged Herzl’s meeting with Kaiser Wilhelm II, transforming him overnight from pamphleteer to statesman. Herzl called Hechler the first Christian Zionist. When Herzl died, Hechler was the only Gentile at his funeral.

Hechler’s partnership with Herzl marked a decisive shift in Christian Zionist thinking: it was the destiny of Christians to help restore the Jews to their land, not as a condition of their conversion, but because Scripture required it.

This was a theology that never divorced itself from Israel. And it is the theology that still explains why tens of millions of Americans vote, lobby, and pray for Israeli security today. Since 1948 the United States has stood by Israel in every arena, recognizing the state eleven minutes after its declaration, signing the current 10-year Memorandum of Understanding committing $3.8 billion annually in military and missile defense funding, and moving the embassy to Jerusalem in 2018. When Donald Trump announced the embassy move he was candid about the political logic: That’s for the evangelicals. Among white Evangelical Protestants, 82 percent believe God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people, and one in three puts Israel policy at the center of their electoral decision-making.

That political power was built on a theological foundation that is now eroding. A multi-year study comparing Evangelical attitudes in 2018, 2021, and 2024 found a sharp decline in support for Israel, alongside a measurable decrease in the number of Evangelicals viewing Israel in a traditional biblical context. Bible engagement and church attendance are the strongest predictors of pro-Israel sentiment, and both are declining among younger Evangelicals. When the Trump era fused Israel advocacy with partisan identity rather than theological conviction, it detached the politics from its roots. A Christianity that loses its dispensationalist grounding does not simply become neutral toward Israel. It drifts back toward the older tradition, the one that said Israel’s story is over. The antisemitic tropes reappearing in some American churches are not aberrations. They are what replacement theology looks like when it re-enters through the back door of a politically exhausted faith.

The Christian Identity in a Biblical Framework

To understand what the Christian identity actually is, you need to understand a Hebrew word that has been largely lost in translation.

The word is ger. It appears over ninety times in the Hebrew Bible and is most often rendered in English as stranger, sojourner, or foreigner. But those translations flatten a rich and specific concept. The ger is not merely a visitor passing through. The ger is the one who has chosen to dwell among Israel, to attach themselves to Israel’s God and Israel’s people, to live under Israel’s laws and participate in Israel’s life, while remaining recognizably from the nations.

The Torah is explicit in its instruction regarding the ger. Leviticus 19:34 commands: The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself. Numbers 15:15 establishes one statute for both native and ger alike. Deuteronomy 10:18-19 describes God as one who loves the sojourner, and commands Israel to do the same. The ger is not on the outside looking in. The ger is inside the covenant, under the same law, loved by the same God.

The biblical examples make this concrete. Ruth is the clearest. She was a Moabite woman who, upon the death of her Jewish husband, refused to return to her own people. Her declaration to Naomi in Ruth 1:16 is not a legal formula. It is a covenant commitment: Where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people and your God my God. Ruth did not convert in the rabbinic sense. She became a ger, a foreigner who joined herself to Israel so completely that she became an ancestor of David and, in Christian tradition, of the Messiah himself.

Rahab the Canaanite, who sheltered the Israelite spies in Jericho, said to them in Joshua 2:11: The Lord your God, he is God in the heavens above and on the earth beneath. She aligned herself with Israel at the risk of her life. She too enters the lineage of David. The pattern is consistent: the ger is not defined by ethnicity but by allegiance, by the decision to join, to dwell, to participate in the covenant life of Israel.

This is the identity that the nations have always had available to them in Scripture. And this, properly understood, is the actual Christian identity. The Christian is not a member of a separate institution that happens to share some texts with Judaism. The Christian is a ger who has attached themselves to Israel’s God, through Israel’s Messiah, on Israel’s terms.

The model is Abraham himself. Paul makes the argument plainly in Romans 4: Abraham was counted righteous by God before circumcision, on the basis of faith alone. This means that those who share Abraham’s faith share Abraham’s standing, not by replacing the Jewish people but by being included alongside them. The children of Abraham are so by faith, as Abraham received the promise in faith.

This is what Paul describes in Romans 11 with the olive tree. God did not plant a new tree. He grafted Gentile believers into the Hebrew tree. The church did not replace Israel. It became a partaker in the Abrahamic covenant alongside the remnant of Israel. Romans 11:29 states it plainly: God’s gifts and His call are irrevocable. And Paul’s warning in Romans 11:18 is addressed directly to Gentile believers who were already tempted toward arrogance: Do not be arrogant toward the branches. Remember it is not you who support the root, but the root that supports you.

The Christian who understands this does not give to Israel the way one gives to a disaster relief fund, from a safe remove. They give the way a family member invests in a family home: because it is theirs too.

The Fullness of the Gentile Biblical Identity

Zechariah 8:23 describes a scene that should be familiar to any Israeli: In those days, ten men from the nations of every tongue shall take hold of the robe of a Jew, saying, Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you. Ten men from the nations, grabbing the tzitzit of a single Jew, asking to be taught.

This was already happening during the Second Temple period. The ger of that era went up to Jerusalem for the pilgrimage festivals. Acts records that on Shavuot there were in Jerusalem devout men from every nation under heaven. They were already there because that was what a ger did: they joined Israel at the appointed times. Pentecost is only puzzling if you forget that it happened at a Jewish holiday in a Jewish city already full of Gentiles who had attached themselves to Israel’s God.

The fullness of the Gentiles in Romans 11:25 is not merely a number being reached. It is a people coming into the fullness of their identity, understanding that they are ger, that they are branches in a tree whose root is Israel, that their spiritual inheritance comes through and not around the Jewish people. When Paul writes that all Israel will be saved in the same passage, he is describing a convergence: the nations coming into their full identity as ger at the same moment Israel comes into its full restoration. These are not two separate events. They are one.

Zechariah’s image of ten men grabbing the tzitzit of a Jew is not a picture of charity or political solidarity. It is a picture of identity. The nations are not helping Israel from the outside. They are joining Israel from the inside, as ger, asking the Jew to teach them the law, to walk with them to Jerusalem, to show them what it means to live inside this covenant.

Israel’s Timeline

The Hebrew prophets made three specific promises that are visibly unfolding in our generation.

First, that the Jewish people would be returned to their land, with its biblical dimensions restored. Jeremiah 16:14-15 declares that this return from all nations would surpass even the Exodus from Egypt as the defining act of God’s faithfulness to Israel.

Second, that all of the Jewish people would return. Today roughly half of the world’s 16 million Jews live in Israel and half in the diaspora. The process is not finished.

Third, that Israel would become a great nation, a source of light and instruction for the nations. The Israel of today is not a fragile experiment. It is a global innovation hub that punches far above its weight in medicine, agriculture, cybersecurity, and technology. After the worst attack on Jewish life since the Holocaust, studies estimate that nearly half of all Israelis volunteered in the first weeks following October 7. A people that responds to existential assault with that level of cohesion is not a people whose story is approaching its end. It is a people in the middle of it.

Jeremiah 16:16 carries the imagery of fishers and hunters, those who would drive the Jewish people from every mountain and hill back toward home. The history of Jewish persecution, including its most catastrophic expression in the 20th century, has functioned as the hunter. The question is whether the nations will now function as the fisher, gently and urgently calling the Jewish people home.

Israel currently has around 8 million Jews. If all 16 million Jews alive today were to live in Israel, the country’s population would double. As Zechariah 14:16 describes: Everyone who is left of all the nations shall go up from year to year to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, and to keep the Feast of Tabernacles. Around that Israel, ten Gentiles for every Jew would come seeking to learn, to join, to participate in the appointed times.

When Identity Replaces Institution

For most of Christian history, the church positioned itself as the chosen and the Jews as the other, the rejected, the former people whose role in the story had ended. That inversion was not just theologically wrong. It was the source of centuries of violence. And it is the reason so many Christians today relate to Israel as an outside observer, a supporter of a cause rather than a participant in a covenant.

The shift that is needed is not political and it is not financial. It is identity.

When a Christian sets aside the church as a separate institution and understands that their faith in the coming of a son is the same faith as Abraham, which receives the promise and is counted righteous, they do not stand outside Israel looking in. They stand inside Israel looking forward, alongside the Jewish people, as ger, as co-heirs of the same covenant, as wild branches grafted into the same cultivated tree by the same God who made the same promise to the same man.

This is not a new theology. It is the original one, the one that existed before the Claudius expulsion, before Nicaea, before the centuries of institutional separation hardened into doctrine. The early believers in Rome did not think of themselves as members of a separate religion. They thought of themselves as participants in Israel’s story, Gentiles who had been included in something ancient and still unfolding.

That identity, when recovered, changes everything. A Christian who understands themselves as ger does not ask whether Israel is worth supporting. They ask how to live faithfully inside the covenant they are already part of. They do not watch from the garden wall when the tree they are grafted into is bearing the fruit the prophets promised.

William Hechler did not write a check and go home. He stood in the study with Herzl. He walked into the palace. He put his relationships, his reputation, and his conviction on the table and said: I am part of this. That sentence is the whole of the Christian identity, properly understood. Not I support this. Not I admire this. I am part of this.

One Covenant, One Coming Kingdom

It may look, on the surface, as though Christians and Jews are simply different. Different institutions, different practices, different conclusions about the most important question in history. And in one sense, that is true. The difference is real and should not be flattened.

But beneath the difference is something more fundamental. Both communities are waiting. Both are living inside a covenant made with Abraham, a covenant that was never revoked, that has carried a people through exile and return, through destruction and rebuilding, that is visibly unfolding in our generation in the land where it was first spoken.

Jews believe the Messiah will come. Christians believe the Messiah will return. What both communities share is the faith of Abraham himself: that God spoke a promise into history, that He keeps it, and that the full expression of that promise has not yet arrived. We are, together, a people leaning forward.

The ger does not need to resolve every theological question before joining the procession to Jerusalem. They need only to understand that the covenant is one, the root is one, and the kingdom toward which both communities are moving is one kingdom. What looks like two separate stories, told in different languages and different traditions, is the same story told from different places along the same road.

We are of the same covenant. And the world will know it when the believers of the nations come to their fulness.