Yahweh: A Tribal Deity?

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a ferociously sincere man, a person who truly impacted those who observed his life.  He defended the truth of racial equality in an era when doing so brought him death threats and disdain.  I do not mean to overlook his wonderful achievements, but in advocating for racial reconciliation in his book Strength to Love he writes something concerning: "The God of the early Old Testament days was a tribal god and the ethic was tribal" (31-32).  Let us see if the Bible truly teaches this.

Although God did formally reveal his moral laws to the Jews, the Old Testament contains numerous stories of God reaching out to non-Jews and inviting people from beyond the Jewish "tribe" to see his character and to follow him (Isaiah 56:3).  He sent the prophet Jonah to Nineveh because he cared for its inhabitants despite their wickedness, for instance.  If one examines the Old Testament, one finds that Mosaic Law repeatedly affirms the universality of human rights (Leviticus 24:22) and the evil of oppressing foreigners (Exodus 23:9, Deuteronomy 10:19), such as in the following passage: "Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt" (Exodus 22:21).  In addition to this, there are stories of Gentiles (non-Jews) embracing Jewish religion and dedicating themselves to Yahweh.  Some, like Ruth and Rahab, even joined the lineage of Christ.

Jesus never came to call human attention to any evil or incomplete goodness on Yahweh's part.  Instead, he only affirmed the moral truths that Yahweh had already revealed (Matthew 5:17).  Nothing about New Testament morality or theology is actually new; everything it teaches is present in the Old Testament in some way.  Yahweh never excluded non-Jews from his love and from justice in Mosaic Law.  The idea that Yahweh was racist, sexist, unloving, and cruel before Christ is an idea rejected in full by logic and one that totally contradicts the Bible.

The Old Testament clearly represents God as immutable, saying "'I the Lord do not change'" (Malachi 3:6).  The deity of Christian theology is not a changing God.  Yahweh never evolved from loving only one people group to loving all people; he never went from bestowing human rights upon only one group to demanding just treatment of all.  The God of the Bible--both the Old Testament and the New Testament--is a deity that does not favor one race over another, loving all people groups, for all humans bear his image (Genesis 1:26-28).

Yahweh was never just a tribal God.  All people bear some part of his likeness, and all people have the capacity for a relationship with him.  He was always the God of all men and women and offers a restorative relationship to all humans (2 Peter 3:9).  To say anything else, like MLK did, is to slander the God that Scripture presents.


Strength to Love.  King Jr., Martin Luther.  Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1963.  Print.