Agape, Israel, and the Nations: Bible and Quran Compared

Israel, the Nations, and the Covenantal Location of Agape

A Companion Study to God Is Love: Agape, Ahavah, and the Question of Divine Love in the Quran

Sidney Louis Davis Jr.

Abstract	3
Preface	3
Israel’s Commandment: Love as Covenant Response	4
The Nations Outside Sinai: Accountable but Not Covenanted	4
Through Israel, Not Around Israel	5
The Apostolic Pattern: Gentiles Given Israel’s Commandment	6
Agape as Covenant Gift, Not Natural Virtue	7
The Quran and the Nations: Law Without Covenantal Location	8
Summary Comparison	11
Conclusion	11
Questions for Study	12
Scripture Index	—

Page numbers follow the print edition. Bracketed markers such as [p. 5] show where each printed page begins.

[p. 3]

Abstract

God Is Love argued that agape, in the biblical and apostolic sense, is a Hebraic covenantal category grounded in ahavah and chesed, and that the Quran, however serious its teaching on mercy, justice, and restraint, does not generate it. This companion study takes up the question that argument leaves open: if agape belongs to Israel’s covenant, where does that leave the nations? The answer developed here is simple to state. Israel is commanded to love; the nations are invited into that love. The command to love YHWH with all the heart and the neighbor as oneself was given at Sinai to a redeemed people (Deut. 6:5; Lev. 19:18), and the nations were not parties to that covenant. They remain accountable to God’s moral order (Gen. 9:5–6; Amos 1:3–2:3; Rom. 2:14–15), and they are summoned to know and worship Israel’s God (1 Kgs. 8:41–43; Isa. 56:6–7). But the love-command reaches them through Israel, not around Israel. The apostolic writings confirm the pattern: Gentile followers of Israel’s Messiah are not given a new Gentile ethic; they are handed Israel’s own commandment, Leviticus 19:18, and brought near to the commonwealth of Israel without replacing it (Rom. 13:8–10; Gal. 5:14; Eph. 2:12, 19; Rom. 11:17–18). Read in this light, the Quran’s universal address to the nations is structurally significant. It gives the nations justice, restraint, and law directly; it claims Abraham apart from Israel (Q. 3:65–68); it turns the direction of prayer away from Jerusalem (Q. 2:142–144); and it rejects the claim of Jews and Christians to be God’s beloved (Q. 5:18). A universal message that bypasses Israel’s covenant has no covenant from which agape can be received. The Quran addresses the nations as nations; the Bible calls the nations into Israel’s love.

Preface

This study began with a short question: Israel is called to agape; are the nations? The question is not idle. If agape is, as God Is Love argued, the Greek vehicle for YHWH’s covenantal ahavah and chesed, then it has a covenantal address. It was spoken to someone, somewhere, on the basis of something God had already done. To ask whether the nations are called to agape is therefore to ask how the nations stand in relation to that address.

The method is the same as in the earlier study. Claims are tested against the wording of the Torah, the Prophets, the Writings, the Septuagint, the Apostolic Writings, and the Quran, with peshat as the controlling starting point. The New Testament is read as Second Temple Jewish literature, written by Jews and arguing about Jewish questions, and Paul is read within Judaism rather than as its critic from outside.

Two errors must be avoided along the way, and the thesis depends on avoiding both. The first is supersessionism: the claim that Israel failed in its calling to love, and that the church, as a new people, took the calling over. The second is what I [p. 4] have elsewhere called reverse supersessionism: the claim, made from inside the movement toward Israel, that Gentiles who join themselves to Israel’s God thereby become Israel, take up Sinai as though they had stood there, and displace the Jewish people as custodians of the covenant. The biblical pattern is neither. The nations are joined to Israel. They are not substituted for Israel, and they do not absorb it.

Israel’s Commandment: Love as Covenant Response

The command to love is embedded in Israel’s covenant, and it follows redemption rather than preceding it. The Shema’s command, “You shall love YHWH your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might” (Deut. 6:5), is spoken to a people already brought out of Egypt. When the child later asks what the testimonies, statutes, and judgments mean, the answer is not a moral theory but a story: “We were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt, and YHWH brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand” (Deut. 6:20–21). Love is Israel’s answer to what YHWH has done.

Deuteronomy is explicit that YHWH’s love comes first. “It was not because you were more numerous than any other people that YHWH set his love upon you and chose you . . . but because YHWH loves you and is keeping the oath he swore to your fathers” (Deut. 7:7–8). The apostolic line “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19) is Deuteronomy’s logic compressed into a sentence. The order is covenantal: divine love initiates, Israel’s love responds, and the response is commanded because it belongs to the covenant relationship.

The same love is directed outward within the covenant. Israel must love the neighbor as itself (Lev. 19:18), and it must love the stranger who lives among it as itself, “for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Lev. 19:34). Deuteronomy grounds that command in YHWH’s own character: he “loves the stranger, giving him food and clothing. Love the stranger, therefore, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Deut. 10:18–19). Two observations follow. First, YHWH’s love for the outsider is prior to Israel’s command to love him. Second, the ger in these texts meets that love by coming near to Israel. He is loved inside Israel’s camp, within Israel’s gates, under Israel’s covenant order. The pattern that governs the nations is already visible in miniature in the Torah’s treatment of the stranger.

The Septuagint renders both great commandments with the same Greek verb: agapēseis kyrion ton theon sou (Deut. 6:5) and agapēseis ton plēsion sou hōs seauton (Lev. 19:18). When the apostolic writings later speak of agape, they are not reaching for a new category. They are speaking the Greek of Israel’s own commandments.

The Nations Outside Sinai: Accountable but Not Covenanted

The Sinai covenant, with its command to love, was made with Israel. “Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my [p. 5] treasured possession among all peoples” (Exod. 19:5). Moses tells the generation in Moab that the covenant is binding on them in particular (Deut. 5:3), and the psalmist states the point plainly: “He declares his word to Jacob, his statutes and judgments to Israel. He has not dealt thus with any nation; they have not known his judgments” (Ps. 147:19–20). The nations were not parties to Sinai, and the command to love YHWH with all the heart is not addressed to them in the Hebrew Bible as a covenant stipulation.

This does not leave the nations outside moral accountability. The covenant with Noah binds all humanity to the sanctity of human life (Gen. 9:5–6). Amos opens with oracles against Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, Edom, Ammon, and Moab, and none of them is charged with breaking Torah. They are judged for threshing Gilead with iron, for selling whole populations into slavery, for pursuing a brother with the sword, for ripping open pregnant women, and for burning the bones of a king (Amos 1:3–2:3). Nineveh is called to turn from violence (Jonah 3:8). Paul, arguing within this Jewish frame, says that Gentiles who do not have the Torah “show the work of the law written on their hearts” (Rom. 2:14–15). That is a statement about accountability, not about covenant membership.

Rabbinic tradition later systematized this accountability as the Noahide commandments (t. Avodah Zarah 8:4; b. Sanhedrin 56a–b): the establishment of courts of justice, and prohibitions of blasphemy, idolatry, sexual immorality, bloodshed, theft, and eating the limb of a living animal. What is striking for the present question is what the list does not contain. It commands justice and forbids violence, but it does not command the nations to love YHWH with all the heart or to love the neighbor as oneself. In Jewish reckoning, the standard for the nations as nations is justice and restraint. Love, in the covenantal sense, belongs to the covenant.

Through Israel, Not Around Israel

The nations are not merely held accountable; they are invited. But in every text that describes the invitation, the nations come to Israel, to Zion, to the house, or to the Jew. They do not receive a parallel revelation of love where they stand.

The promise to Abraham is that “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen. 12:3), and later, “in your seed” (Gen. 22:18). Israel is constituted “a kingdom of priests” (Exod. 19:6), and a priest exists to mediate for others. Isaiah sees the nations streaming to the mountain of YHWH’s house, saying, “Come, let us go up . . . that he may teach us his ways . . . for out of Zion shall go forth Torah, and the word of YHWH from Jerusalem” (Isa. 2:2–3). The Servant is given “as a light to the nations” (Isa. 49:6), and the light shines from Israel outward.

The clearest text is Isaiah 56. The foreigners “who join themselves to YHWH, to minister to him, to love the name of YHWH (u-le’ahavah et-shem YHWH), and to be his servants . . . and who hold fast my covenant” are brought to YHWH’s holy [p. 6] mountain and made joyful in his house of prayer, “for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples” (Isa. 56:6–7). Here the Hebrew Bible explicitly names the foreigner’s love. It is ahavah, and it is exercised by joining (nilvah), by holding fast the covenant, and by coming to Jerusalem. The foreigner loves by being joined.

Solomon had already prayed for this foreigner, “who is not of your people Israel,” who comes from a far country for YHWH’s name and prays toward this house, “that all the peoples of the earth may know your name and fear you, as do your people Israel” (1 Kgs. 8:41–43). The foreigner’s prayer has a direction, and the direction is Jerusalem.

Israel’s narratives show the same movement in individual lives. Rahab “lived in the midst of Israel to this day” (Josh. 6:25). Ruth’s confession binds people and God together: “Your people shall be my people, and your God my God” (Ruth 1:16). In Persia, “many of the peoples of the land mityahadim” (Esth. 8:17), voluntarily taking up Jewish identity. Zechariah describes the eschatological form of this pattern: “Ten men from all the languages of the nations shall take hold of the garment of a Jew, saying, ‘Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you’” (Zech. 8:23). And again: “Many nations shall join themselves (nilvu) to YHWH in that day and shall be my people, and I will dwell in your midst,” while YHWH “shall inherit Judah as his portion in the holy land, and shall again choose Jerusalem” (Zech. 2:11–12 [Heb. 2:15–16]). The nations are joined, and Judah’s inheritance is not diminished.

Psalm 117 gives the whole pattern in two verses. “Praise YHWH, all nations; laud him, all peoples. For his chesed toward us is great, and the faithfulness of YHWH endures forever.” The nations praise God for the steadfast love he has shown to Israel. They do not receive a separate love; they are summoned to rejoice in Israel’s. Paul quotes the first verse of this psalm in Romans 15:11.

The Apostolic Pattern: Gentiles Given Israel’s Commandment

The apostolic writings do not reverse this pattern; they carry it out. The Jerusalem council in Acts 15 does not require Gentile followers of the Messiah to become proselytes and assume Sinai as covenant parties. It lays on them “these necessary things” (Acts 15:28–29), requirements that correspond closely to the laws Leviticus 17–18 applies to the stranger dwelling in Israel’s midst. It then adds the reason: “For from ancient generations Moses has had in every city those who proclaim him, being read in the synagogues every Sabbath” (Acts 15:21). The Gentiles are expected to keep hearing Moses. Where, then, do they hear “you shall love your neighbor as yourself”? In the synagogue, when Leviticus 19 is read.

Paul’s letters confirm that Gentiles in the Messiah are not given a Gentile love-ethic of their own. Writing to believers in Rome, many of them Gentiles, he says: “Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another [p. 7] has fulfilled the law.” He then lists commandments of the Decalogue and concludes that they are summed up in this word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Rom. 13:8–10). To the Gentile Galatians he writes the same: “The whole law is fulfilled in one word, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (Gal. 5:14). James calls Leviticus 19:18 “the royal law according to the Scripture” (Jas. 2:8). When Jesus is asked for the greatest commandment, he answers with the Shema and Leviticus 19:18, and adds that on these two commandments hang all the Torah and the Prophets (Mark 12:29–31; Matt. 22:37–40).

Even the “new commandment” of John 13:34 is interpreted within the Johannine writings as old: “Beloved, I am writing you no new commandment, but an old commandment that you had from the beginning” (1 John 2:7). What is new is its measure, “as I have loved you,” not its source. The Gentiles who enter the Messiah’s community are handed Israel’s commandment, in Israel’s words, from Israel’s Scripture.

The status Paul describes for them is precise. Before, they were “alienated from the commonwealth (politeia) of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise” (Eph. 2:12). Now they are “fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God” (Eph. 2:19). The commonwealth of Israel is not dissolved to make room for them; they are brought near to it. In Romans 11, Gentiles are wild branches grafted “among” the natural branches to share the root, with a warning attached: “Remember that you do not support the root, but the root supports you” (Rom. 11:17–18). Paul’s catena in Romans 15 includes the Septuagint of Deuteronomy 32:43: “Rejoice, O Gentiles, with his people” (Rom. 15:10). With, not as.

This argument is sometimes pressed further by citing 1 Peter 2:9–10 as proof that the church now holds Israel’s titles. The letter is addressed to “elect exiles of the diaspora” (1 Pet. 1:1), and the identity of its readers is debated. Whatever conclusion one reaches about the audience, the text borrows the language of Exodus 19:6 and Hosea 1–2; it does not announce that Israel has lost it. To share Israel’s titles by being joined to Israel is the prophetic pattern. To claim them in Israel’s place is supersessionism, and to claim them while denying the Jewish people’s continuing custodianship of them is reverse supersessionism.

There is, then, no “Gentile agape” and no separate “Jewish agape.” There is one God, one covenantal love, and one commandment. The Gentiles are called into agape by being joined to Israel through Israel’s Messiah.

Agape as Covenant Gift, Not Natural Virtue

It is sometimes said that Israel was called to agape and failed, and that the calling therefore passed to a new people empowered by the Spirit. The Hebrew Bible frames the matter differently. The Torah itself anticipates Israel’s weakness and answers it with a promise addressed to Israel: “YHWH your God will circumcise [p. 8] your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love YHWH your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live” (Deut. 30:6). The Shema’s command becomes, in the same book, the Shema’s promise. God will give the love he commands.

The prophets repeat the promise, and they repeat its address. The new covenant is made “with the house of Israel and the house of Judah,” with Torah written on the heart (Jer. 31:31–33). The new heart and new spirit are given to a people gathered from the nations back to their own land (Ezek. 36:24–27). Israel’s failures are real in the narrative, but they are met by YHWH’s chesed, which does not depart even when mountains do (Isa. 54:10). The covenant does not pass to someone else when Israel falters. God keeps it.

The apostolic witness follows this order. The Spirit is poured out first in Jerusalem, at Shavuot, on Israel (Acts 2), and only afterward on Cornelius and his household (Acts 10:44–48), to the astonishment of the Jewish believers who saw it. When Paul says that “the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit” (Rom. 5:5), he is describing the fulfillment of Deuteronomy 30 and Jeremiah 31. The Gentiles receive this gift as partakers (Rom. 11:17) in what was promised to Israel. That is why agape is not a natural virtue available to the nations by reason. It is the covenant love of Israel’s God, commanded to Israel, promised to Israel, and shared with the nations who are joined to Israel.

Nor does this make Torah the opposite of love. The love-command is Torah’s own summary, and the promised gift is love for Torah’s God. The contrast between a law that cannot be kept and a love that replaces it is a later theological construction, not the argument of Deuteronomy, Jeremiah, or Paul.

The Quran and the Nations: Law Without Covenantal Location

With this pattern in view, the observation that Islam is a religion “for the nations” can be stated precisely, and in the Quran’s own terms. The Quran describes its messenger as sent “to all mankind” (Q. 34:28) and has him say, “O mankind, I am the Messenger of Allah to you all” (Q. 7:158). He is sent “only as a mercy to the worlds” (Q. 21:107). The Quran’s address is universal. It speaks to the nations as nations.

What it gives them corresponds closely to what the Hebrew Bible and Jewish tradition require of the nations outside the covenant: justice, restraint, and better conduct. Believers must not let hatred of a people move them to injustice (Q. 5:8); they must not transgress in fighting (Q. 2:190); they may answer evil with what is better (Q. 41:34); and they are not forbidden from kindness and fairness toward those who have not fought them (Q. 60:8). These are serious moral commands, and they should be acknowledged as such. But, as God Is Love showed, they do not amount to the command to love the enemy in an active, self-giving, covenantal [p. 9] sense, and Quranic divine love (hubb) is tied to obedience and withheld from the disbeliever (Q. 3:31–32).

The Quranic ethic teaches affection bounded by belief. “You will not find a people who believe in Allah and the Last Day having affection for those who oppose Allah and his Messenger, even if they were their fathers or their sons or their brothers or their kindred” (Q. 58:22). Believers are told not to take God’s enemies and their own as allies, “offering them affection” (Q. 60:1). And Abraham is set forth as the model: “There has been for you an excellent example in Abraham and those with him, when they said to their people . . . ‘Between us and you there has appeared enmity and hatred forever until you believe in Allah alone’” (Q. 60:4). The same surah opens the possibility that God may yet place affection between believers and their enemies (Q. 60:7), and it permits kindness toward the non-hostile (Q. 60:8). But the governing pattern is reciprocal: affection follows belief. The Torah, by contrast, commands Israel to return an enemy’s straying ox and to help an enemy’s fallen donkey (Exod. 23:4–5), and Proverbs commands feeding the hungry enemy (Prov. 25:21), a line Paul repeats to Gentile readers in Rome (Rom. 12:20).

The decisive difference, however, is structural rather than ethical. In the Hebrew Bible the nations come to Israel. In the Quran, the nations are brought to Abraham directly, and Abraham is detached from Israel. “O People of the Book, why do you argue about Abraham, when the Torah and the Gospel were not revealed until after him? . . . Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian, but he was one inclining toward truth, a Muslim” (Q. 3:65–67). “Indeed, the people most worthy of Abraham are those who followed him and this Prophet” (Q. 3:68). The Quran acknowledges that the Children of Israel were favored “over the worlds” (Q. 2:47, 122), but it rejects the claim that election means belovedness: “The Jews and the Christians say, ‘We are the children of Allah and his beloved.’ Say, ‘Then why does he punish you for your sins? Rather, you are human beings from among those he has created’” (Q. 5:18). The claim of Deuteronomy 7:7–8, that YHWH set his love on Israel because he loved them and swore an oath, is precisely the claim the Quran denies.

The geography follows the theology. Isaiah, Solomon, and Zechariah direct the nations to Jerusalem. The Quran relocates Abraham’s house: Abraham and Ishmael raise the foundations of the House in Mecca (Q. 2:125–127), and “the first House established for mankind was that at Bakka” (Q. 3:96). The direction of prayer itself is turned from Jerusalem to the Sacred Mosque (Q. 2:142–144). The foreigner of 1 Kings 8 prays toward the house in Jerusalem; the nations addressed by the Quran are turned away from it.

Here the argument of God Is Love about revelation and the argument of this study about covenant meet. A message delivered by an angel can be carried to anyone, [p. 10] anywhere, as a discrete communication from heaven (Q. 2:97; 26:193–194). Covenant love cannot be carried that way, because it is located. It belongs to a people YHWH chose, a land he swore, a house where he set his name, and a Messiah of the house of David. The nations do not receive agape as information delivered to them where they are. They receive it by being brought near to the place, the people, and the covenant in which it was disclosed. A universal law that reaches the nations apart from Israel has no covenant from which agape can be received. In that precise sense, the Quran’s framework bears the structural marks of reverse supersessionism: it claims Israel’s patriarch and Israel’s scriptural heritage while denying the Jewish people’s standing as the beloved and elect custodians of that heritage.

None of this is a claim about the capacity of individual Muslims for kindness, sacrifice, or love, which is evident and should be honored. The claim concerns the categories of the text. The Quran addresses the nations as nations and gives them law, justice, and mercy. The Bible addresses the nations as those who may be joined to Israel, and gives them Israel’s love.

[p. 11]

Summary Comparison

	Israel	The Nations in Scripture	The Nations in the Quran
Covenant standing	Party to Sinai (Exod. 19:5; Ps. 147:19–20)	Outside Sinai; joined to Israel (Isa. 56:6; Eph. 2:12, 19)	Addressed directly as mankind (Q. 34:28; 7:158)
Love-command	Commanded (Deut. 6:5; Lev. 19:18)	Received as Israel’s commandment (Rom. 13:8–10; Gal. 5:14)	Justice and restraint; affection bounded by belief (Q. 5:8; 58:22)
Moral accountability	Through Torah	Through Noahic order and conscience (Gen. 9:5–6; Rom. 2:14–15)	Through Quranic law and guidance
Source of love	YHWH’s prior love and oath (Deut. 7:7–8)	Israel’s promised gift, shared (Deut. 30:6; Rom. 5:5)	Divine love conditional on obedience (Q. 3:31–32)
Relation to Israel	Israel itself	With his people, not as (Rom. 15:10; 11:18)	Abraham claimed apart from Israel (Q. 3:65–68; 5:18)
Direction of worship	Zion	Toward the house in Jerusalem (1 Kgs. 8:41–43; Isa. 2:3)	Turned from Jerusalem to Mecca (Q. 2:142–144; 3:96)
The enemy	Help his animal; feed him (Exod. 23:4–5; Prov. 25:21)	Love and pray for him (Matt. 5:44; Rom. 12:20)	Justice; kindness to the non-hostile (Q. 5:8; 60:8)

Conclusion

Israel is commanded to love. The command is covenantal: it answers YHWH’s prior love, it is spoken at Sinai to a redeemed people, and it is promised as a gift when the heart is circumcised and the Torah written within. The nations are not given that command as nations. They are held to justice and restraint, and they are invited to know, fear, and worship Israel’s God. When they answer that invitation, the Scriptures describe them joining themselves to YHWH, loving his name, [p. 12] holding fast his covenant, and coming to his house in Jerusalem. The apostolic writings carry that pattern forward. Gentiles in the Messiah are handed Israel’s commandment in Israel’s words, and they rejoice with his people, not as his people and not in place of them.

That is why the observation that Islam is a religion for the nations is correct, and why it matters. The Quran addresses the nations directly, gives them law, justice, and mercy, and brings them to Abraham by a road that bypasses Israel. What it cannot give them is agape, because agape is not a universal principle delivered to the nations where they stand. It is the covenant love of the God of Israel, received by those who are joined to Israel. Israel is commanded to love; the nations are invited into that love; and the door into it is Israel’s Messiah, not a message that goes around Israel.

Questions for Study

Deuteronomy 10:18–19 grounds the command to love the stranger in YHWH’s own love for him. How does the location of the ger within Israel’s camp shape the way the nations receive divine love?
The Noahide commandments require justice but do not command love. What does that omission suggest about how Jewish tradition understood the difference between the nations and Israel?
Isaiah 56:6 describes foreigners who “love the name of YHWH.” What actions does the text attach to that love, and where does it place them?
Why does Paul give Gentile readers Leviticus 19:18 rather than a new ethical principle (Rom. 13:8–10; Gal. 5:14)? What does Acts 15:21 contribute to the answer?
How do Quran 3:65–68 and 5:18 relate to Deuteronomy 7:7–8? What is at stake in the claim that election is an expression of divine love?
How does the distinction between supersessionism and reverse supersessionism help clarify what it means for Gentiles to be “joined to” Israel?

— End —