When did God decide to have a Chosen People?

Between Creation and Abraham, there were nearly two thousand years of civilization without a Chosen People. When exactly did God decide to identify the Chosen People? Did He always plan on having a Chosen People? That is part of what we examine in the recent book Why Abraham?

In the first chapter of Genesis, the world was created without a Chosen People. But the Midrash says that God looked into the Torah and created the world. Given that the Torah has a dual system – seven Noahide law for everyone and 613 mitzvot for Jews – one might infer that the notion of a Chosen People was foreordained.

But, not necessarily. Maybe God’s plan was to create the world with seven mitzvot for all of mankind. Then, at a later time, God would teach the full Torah to all of humanity.

But if that were God’s plan, why did He seemingly change His mind? We can’t really comprehend the idea that God’s plans could change, but in the writings of our Sages, we see room for this idea.

The Midrash says that prior to the creation of our world, God was “Borei olamot u’Machrivan.” That means there were numerous worlds that preceded ours. God would create these worlds and destroy them. What was God doing with those worlds? Seemingly, He was dissatisfied with the results of the worlds.

Aside from the Midrashim of worlds that existed before Genesis, the Torah itself describes different situations for mankind – with God providing different rules. God created Adam and Eve and placed them in the Garden of Eden. They were told not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. The experiment that Adam and Eve would lead an idyllic life failed when they ate the forbidden fruit. That’s the first model for how humanity should live.

They are chased out of Paradise, and humanity lives ten generations until the deluge. In this second model, the descendants of Adam and Eve were to populate the world and live ethical lives (by adhering to the Noahide laws). That failed when God saw that all but Noah had degenerated. God expressed some form of regret. The Torah reports that God saw about mankind “that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continuously”. God destroys the second model with the deluge.

After the destruction, there is a third model, in which Noah’s descendants, chastened by the deluge, are expected to unite in leading ethical lives. God sees advantages over the second model. Man’s evil inclination has moderated. It is now only “evil from his youth”, rather than “only evil”. God promises never again to destroy mankind. This is a significant vow from God Who previously had created and destroyed worlds. In this third model, there are no Chosen People. Quite the contrary, there was a united population with a single objective. The third model was potentially destined to be the new permanent model. With a common language, all people were to unite in the worship of God.

The third model also did not work out. Misguided leaders took the unity and used it to attack God. That led to the Tower of Babel and the dispersion.

Reviewing the history – that God created and destroyed numerous worlds and that Genesis describes three models in the first eleven chapters (Garden of Eden, antediluvian, postdiluvian) – we see that the concept of a Chosen People was not God’s only possible plan.

At the failure of the third model, God begins to search for a Chosen People. The world migrates to a model in which the Chosen People play a unique role to ensure that God’s messages and ethical values are accepted globally. This became the fourth and final model of how God set His expectations of mankind.

According to Seder Olam, Abraham was forty-eight years old at the time of the dispersion after the Tower of Babel. He was seventy at the Covenant of the Parts and seventy-five when he left Charan. It took twenty-two years after the dispersal until the covenant with Abraham, so Abraham’s selection is roughly correlated to the dispersal.

Remarkably, Abraham’s mission apparently started even earlier. According to the Talmud, Abraham began to teach the ways of God at age fifty-two – four years after the dispersion. Immediately after the dispersion, Abraham started to pick up the pieces and guide the world to Torah. So, he was demonstrating qualifications at exactly the time when God decided to begin searching for the Chosen People.

It is interesting to look at the commentary of the Tiferes Yisrael on Ethics of the Fathers 5:2. The Mishnah relates that there were ten generations from Noah to Abraham. Since these generations angered God, Abraham received the reward of all of them. The Tiferes Yisrael explains that God’s plan had been to reward all of humanity with closeness to God (covenant, Torah, etc.). However, when they sinned, this inheritance went only to Abraham and the Jewish people. Apparently, this is a clear opinion that the decision to have a Chosen People resulted from mankind exercising their free will to sin. Had they behaved differently, all people would have been included in the covenant at some point in time.

In the fourth model there would be one nation – a worthy nation that would be a light unto the nations. This nation would be close to God by having a higher degree of religious obligation. Other nations would see this but would not be required to fulfill the larger quantity of mitzvot. Having the Chosen People observe this higher level of obligation would be a constant reminder to humanity of God and His commandments. The existence of a model nation would focus everyone on adhering, at a minimum, to the Noahide laws. People could convert to Judaism if they wished – but it was not a requirement.

There is no hard proof in the text for the causality between the evils of the Tower of Babel and the decision to have a Chosen People. But the flow of the text supports this. Chapters 10 and 11 of Genesis are the backdrop to chapter 12. The timing of Abraham’s selection and his mission were not arbitrary. After the dispersion of chapter 11, God found someone worthy – and decided it was time to start the Chosen People. Abraham’s mission was part of a larger story as God continued to refine His model for the world. Chapter 14 will demonstrate the success of this model – but that is a topic for a different post.