29._ Promise

Throughout all its history, Israel (and Juda) was always essentially "the town of the Promise". The promise of Yahveh, His Alliance, conditioned all the aspects of religious, political and social Israelite organization, and influenced in all its historical events.

It is clear that the Israelite interpretation of the Promise was not ours; how could they have understood our concepts of "trascendence", "cosmic process", "eternal life", or at least of "humanity" and "individual person"? Impossible. They only could understand it in terms of "nations", "power", "victory", "kingdom": the Promise consisted for them of which the power of Yahveh would give to the Israelite nation the total and definitive victory on all the other Earth nations, and that would restore its eternal kingdom of peace and justice.

Sometimes, almost it seemed to them that this promise was going to be fulfilled, for example during the reign of Solomon, but always it lacked much to overwhelm their hopes. More often they were terrible defeats and captivities those that put their illusions on approval; but never they decayed absolutely; until in the most desperate situations there was always a group of Israelite, a "faithful rest", that maintained unharmed its confidence in Yahveh. For them, the misfortunes had their origin in the infidelity, the sins, the injustice of the people and its authorities; the kingdom of Yahveh was delayed because it was not deserved by Israel, because this one did not fulfill its part of the Alliance. So that for its arrival was needed a moral change, a conversion from the people to the justice demanded by Yahveh. It was clear that the coming of the Kingdom required that Israel obeyed the law of Yahveh.

The laws of Israel, the orders, dispositions and norms that ordered all the scopes of the life in Israel, were interpreted like "dictations" of Yahveh, whose fulfillment formed part of the Alliance.

Thus, their history (objectively "a normal" history, as the one of other towns) was for them the history of the Promise; to come near or to move away of the moment of its fulfillment, according to their greater or smaller fidelity to Yahveh; but Yahveh, in spite of being irritated and punishing them hard by their injustices --according to their interpretation--, was always merciful and faithful to His promise; the Kingdom was always in the horizon; the Kingdom would come surely in a more or less next future. This was the sense of their history.