As noted in yesterday’s Open Forum, Ted Cruz made claims about why he supports Israel in his interview with Tucker Carlson. It is a timeworn position held by many conservative Christians in America.
The good news for OTB readers is that over the course of my life, I have both taught Sunday School to adults in Baptist Churches* and I have taught international relations at the graduate level!
Let me deal with a simplistic, but common, problem with Cruz’s position.
Let me affirm that, yes, what Cruz recites without knowing either the textual context or the meaning of the words is commonly taught in conservative churches.
Here are the verses in question, from Genesis 12:1-3.
The Lord had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s family. Go to the land I will show you.
2 “I will make you into a great nation.
And I will bless you.
I will make your name great.
You will be a blessing to others.
3 I will bless those who bless you.
I will put a curse on anyone who puts a curse on you.
All nations on earth
will be blessed because of you.”
The bolded part is what Carlson is specifically referencing as the basis of Cruz’s position. I will note that these are not the only verses about Israel that conservative Christians will point to.** However, I am fairly certain this is what Cruz and Carlson were specifically referencing.
Note that Abram becomes Abraham and has a son, Isaac. Isaac then has a son named Jacob, who is re-dubbed “Israel” in Genesis 32:28. Jacob/Israel was then father to twelve sons, who formed the Twelve Tribes of Israel. The Israelis are a people group (a nation) with a common ancestry. Or, if you prefer Klingon or Game of Thrones stylings, Jacob/Israel was the founding member of the House of Israel.
Abraham’s seed was promised the land by God in Genesis 12 as per the above. Hence, the nation (people group) descended from Israel would eventually take possession of (i.e., conquer) what would become Judea and Samaria, and is now more or less the modern state of Israel. Indeed, this text is the basis of a lot of contemporary politics in the US and in Israel itself about the region.
Now, what Cruz has heard preached from the pulpit/stated in Sunday School Class/uttered by Evangelicals is them taking Genesis 12:1-3, knowing the “nation” promised in verse 2 is made up of the descendants of Jacob/Israel, and hence making verse 3 about Israel.
As Carlson correctly notes (a painful thing to write, but truth is truth), Cruz neither knows the text or the context. He just knows the vibe and even assumes that the text says something specific that it does not say.
Indeed, I was misremembering that the text said “I will bless those who bless Israel. I will put a curse on anyone who puts a curse on Israel,” but I looked at a number of translations, and nope, it does not say that! (See here).
I may be missing something, but I am willing to think that there is a bit of a Mandela Effect going on here, based likely on ways that pastors and the like have reedited 12:3 above to substitute “Israel” for “you.”
I am going into these details to help anyone who is wondering what it is that Cruz is carrying on about, and because a lot of conservative Christians are basing their view of Israel on this bit of text (but not only this text). In addition to the basic notion, that well, if God gave the land of Canaan to the Israelites, well, who are we to argue with God? There are also their views of the End Times, which some Christians interpret as having Israel and Jerusalem playing central roles.
In short, Abraham’s seed was given the promised land by God in Genesis 12 as per the above. Hence, the nation (people group) descended from Israel would eventually take possession of (i.e., conquer) what would become Judea and Samaria and is now the modern state of Israel, more or less.
I am not claiming to be giving more than a thumbnail sketch. I am not claiming to be representing the Jewish version of this tale, and certainly not one that a historian might tell. I’m also not saying it is correct. Setting aside whatever metaphysical truth one may or may not ascribe to all of this, I am firmly of the view it is not good guidance for US Senator in terms of fomulating foreign policy and it definitely is no guide to determing the morality of Israel’s current attacks on Iran nor to whether or not the US should bomb Fordo.
Let’s turn away from the Sunday School lesson and turn to some Comparative Politics/International Politics 101.
The crux of it all is the word “nation.”
So, circa 2090 BC, when the events of Genesis 12 took place, the word “nation” was not used the same way it is used in common parlance in 2025.
If you look here at various translations of 12:2, most use the word “nation,” but many use “descendants,” while others use “a great people” instead of “a great nation.”
Nation means in this context the descendants of Abraham, and the specific interpretation is the descendants through Isaac to Jacob (Israel) to his twelve sons. ***
Put simply, a “nation” as used here is about a people group with a common ancestry. As such, Jews as an ethnic group are part of this nationality.
As such, what Genesis describes as “a nation” and what people colloquially mean when they say “nation” (like “United Nations” or “one nation under God” and so forth) aren’t the same thing. Cruz means the country of Israel, or the sovereign state of Israel, which is a government that oversees a territorially delimited space and the people that reside within those delimitations (i.e., borders).
It seems worth pointing out that what is described in Genesis, if simply taken at face value, is about all Jews descended from the twelve tribes. Not specifically just the ones living in contemporary Israel.
I would note that there are national groups, like the Kurds or various Native American tribes, that lack their own territories. I note this because when people like Cruz talk about “the nation of Israel,” they are very specifically assuming that this refers to a physical territory. But “a nation” need not mean control of specific borders.
Worse for the Cruz position, since it is based on a text that is over 4000 years old, is that the idea of sovereign states controlling specific territories delimited by clearly recognized lines on a map really only dates to 1648 and the Peace of Westphalia that came after the Thirty Years’ War.
In ~2090 BC, the notion of countries/states, the way we mean the term in more recent history, simply did not exist.
It also seems relevant to note that Israel, as a modern state, has only existed since 1948. Indeed, while the general geographical area was referred to as the Land of Israel, IIRC, in some Biblical texts. But, for most of history, that hasn’t been what the place was called. Maybe a 1000 years-ish before Christ, there was a united Kingdom of Israel, but it was later divided. In other words, and without spending a lot of time trying to parse out Biblical and historical accounts, the notion that Genesis was referring to a specific nation-state is almost impossible to establish, even if one takes Genesis 12:1-3 as definitive in any way. It requires a lot of simplistic thinking to decide that Genesis 12:3 means the post-1948 state of Israel.
So, Cruz may have learned one thing about Israel in Sunday School, but be really needs a basic international relations course to help him 1) have a better grasp of the terms he is using, and 2) have a better basis for determining what US foreign policy ought to be vis-a-vis both Israel and Iran.
The good news is that Trump has given him at least two weeks to like, you know, read a book or something.
*Without getting into a prolonged personal discussion, let me just note that taking very serious teaching Sunday School firmly placed me on the pathway of first becoming exhausted by Southern Baptist churches, and eventually led to a clear break with conservative evangelical theology.
**See, for example, some representative sample of the kinds of arguments made, such as from Greg Laurie, Why Christians Should Support Israel or from Jimmy Morales, Why Christians Should Stand with Israel. These would comport very much with Cruz’s postion.
***Note that Abraham had other descendants. See, for example, the CSM, Where Islam Diverges From Western Religions and Ishmael in Islam.
