chosen people, the Jewish people, as expressed in the idea that they have been chosen by God as his special people. The term implies that the Jewish people have been chosen by God to worship only him and to fulfill the mission of proclaiming his truth among all the nations of the world. This idea is a recurring theme in Jewish liturgy and is expressed in many passages of Scripture, as for example: “For you are a people holy to the Lord your God, and the Lord has chosen you to be a people of his own possession, out of all the nations that are on the face of the earth” (Deut. 14:2). The term chosen people is a free translation of the biblical terms ʿam segullah (“treasure people”) and ʿam nahallah (“heritage people”).
The idea of the chosen people has had a profound and lasting effect on the Jews because it imparted a special significance to their relationship with God. It implied a covenant between God and the people of Israel whereby Israel was to be faithful to God and obey his commandments, and God in turn was to protect and bless his faithful people. Being chosen brought to Israel not more privileges but, rather, special obligations to carry out the will of God: “Obey my voice, and I will be your God, and you shall be my people; and walk in all the way that I command you, that it may be well with you” (Jer. 7:23). Being God’s chosen people carried with it greater spiritual responsibilities and implied more demanding standards and the necessity to develop a spiritual vigour worthy of those whom God had selected to preserve and transmit his revelation to all the world.
The Old Testament contains two variant traditions as to when God selected Israel to be his chosen people; some passages imply the covenant was made when God led them out of Egypt, whereas others state that God had already chosen Israel at the time of Abraham and the other patriarchs.
Critical analysis of the Old Testament has revealed a long and complex evolution of this doctrine in the history of ancient Israel. The notion evidently originated in the basic concept of Israel’s early nationalistic religion that Yahweh was Israel’s one and only national God and that in turn Israel was God’s people and his alone. But the new concepts of world unity and of God as a universal deity that later arose in Israel during the 8th century bc conflicted with this, since God as the deity of Israel alone was obviously contradictory to the new conception of him as the creator of the universe and the God of all humanity.
In the following centuries a slow and gradual harmonization of these two conflicting principles occurred, beginning with the prophet Amos and continuing through the period of the Babylonian Exile until the chosen-people doctrine emerged from the synthesis in its fullest form in the utterances of the prophet Deutero-Isaiah. The Exilic period gave rise to the belief (as stated by Jeremiah) that it was Yahweh’s avowed purpose to eventually restore Israel to national independence and that all other nations were doomed to destruction for not recognizing Yahweh as God. After this had happened (as stated by Ezekiel), a renewed Israel purged of its sins would be restored to its homeland and would exist thereafter as the supreme nation on earth. Near the end of the Babylonian Exile, Deutero-Isaiah brought the doctrine to the climax of its evolution. This prophet emphatically denied the existence of all gods except Yahweh. He asserted that the events of history and the destinies of all nations were shaped toward the fulfillment of God’s purpose and that this purpose was to ultimately unite all humanity as one people in their acknowledgment of him as God. Israel was to be God’s instrument to accomplish this great revelation and would serve as the messenger and witness of God’s reality and law to all the other nations of the earth. The people of Israel would exemplify and teach God’s statutes to the rest of humanity and would thus help bring the entire human race to salvation. Israel would be the saviour of humanity and the national embodiment of the messiah, even if this meant suffering for Israel in the performance of its divinely appointed mission. In this way the Jewish people’s perilous historical situation was inextricably linked to their sense of religious mission and spiritual destiny, and the concept of the chosen people came to form perhaps the strongest link in the Jewish group identity.
After Deutero-Isaiah the idea of the chosen people underwent little change, all-sufficient as it already was in reconciling Jewish nationalism with belief in a universal deity. The eternal nature of the Jewish people’s covenant with God formed the bulwark of the rabbinic community’s response to the new religion of Christianity, which claimed that its believers were now the elect of God and constituted the true Israel. Because Jews believed that the Jewish people’s covenant with God was for all time, Christianity’s challenge was bound to appear obviously invalid to Jews. Similarly, the Jews interpreted their sufferings upon the loss of their homeland and throughout all the peregrinations of the Diaspora as both a consequence and a partial fulfillment of the covenant. They believed their dispersion and persecution to be in part due to their sinfulness and failure to keep God’s commands, and they viewed their sufferings as manifestations of his love, for through faithfully enduring God’s chastisement they would eventually regain his favour. The Jews interpreted their very persecution as the sign that God had indeed chosen them to carry out his purpose.
Modern Judaism has toned down the historic exaltation of the Jewish people above others in the liturgy but has retained the concept of the chosen people, stressing the prophetic idea of Judaism’s world mission. The concept that the Jewish people are a “consecrated brotherhood” destined to be purified by suffering toward the carrying out of some yet-unknown mission remains fundamental to Judaism in the 20th century. It has continued to reinforce Jewish morale, self-discipline, and religious devotion in the face of the Holocaust and other destructive impacts on world Jewry in the modern era.