More Inane Myths about Chosenness

“How odd of God,” the English journalist William Norman Ewer wrote, “to choose the Jews.” The oddity of the Almighty’s choice has impressed itself upon many peoples, but perhaps upon none so greatly as the chosen people itself, which has spent history explaining and understanding His choice and its consequences.

Michael Coogan, lecturer at Harvard Divinity School, director of publications at Harvard’s Museum of the Near East, and editor-in-chief of Oxford Biblical Studies Online, weighs into the conversation in his recent volume, God’s Favorites: Judaism, Christianity, and the Myth of Divine Chosenness. Coogan finds that the Jewish people’s “myth of divine chosenness,” as well as later myths found at the root of the Christian religion and the American nation, are used for political and personal gain, and have resulted in incalculable bloodshed and division of mankind. In short, Jewish chosenness has been a stain on the moral life of the West.

As a biblical scholar, Coogan believes that one must read Scripture free from assumptions supplied by faith that might blind a reader to the true meaning of the text. He not only sets himself apart from those who study the Bible wholly within the confines of religious tradition, but also from believing academic scholars who attempt to read the Bible critically; to Coogan, the latter suffer from “intellectual schizophrenia.” By contrast, Coogan deems himself capable of a truly unencumbered reading because he “left [his] swaddling clothes behind” when he abandoned the Catholic priesthood and the church in the late 1960s. In his view, one must be emancipated from tradition, faith, and the institutions that embody them in order to read the Bible properly.