Was God Insane to Choose the Jews?

Out of two hundred and fifty nationalities, why did God choose the Jews? It is one of the most extraordinary claims in the history of religion — that the Creator of galaxies, the architect of DNA and gravity, personally selected a small tribe of herders in the hills of Canaan as his “chosen people.” The hubris is astonishing. The absurdity is cosmic. A God of the universe who plays ethnic favorites is not divine; he is tribal. He behaves not like a creator but like a local chieftain in the sky.

Every ancient people believed its god loved it best. The Egyptians had Amun-Ra, the Babylonians had Marduk, the Moabites had Chemosh, the Greeks had Zeus. Each imagined divine favoritism because it gave their tribe moral authority and psychological comfort. The Jews merely elevated this tribal fantasy to metaphysical grandeur. They universalized a parochial dream. They took a local deity and proclaimed him universal — but only through them. Yahweh was cosmic, but his covenant was exclusive. The contradiction was hidden behind the rhetoric of holiness.

The phrase “chosen people” was not revelation; it was political genius. In a world of empires and enslavement, a persecuted minority needed self-importance to survive. The Jews inverted humiliation into superiority: if they suffered, it must be because they were chosen for a divine purpose. Thus persecution became proof of election. It was the perfect theology of endurance. Every misfortune confirmed the myth. If they prospered, it was God’s favor; if they suffered, it was God’s test. Either way, history was about them.

But to universal reason, the claim is madness. If God created all peoples, why would he reveal himself to one? Why not to the Chinese, who were building empires while Abraham still wandered? Why not to the Indians, whose sages were writing the Upanishads — texts of sublime philosophy that explore consciousness without invoking a jealous tribal deity? Why not to the Greeks, whose reason would lay the foundation of science and democracy? Why bypass Africa, cradle of humanity itself? The selective revelation looks less like divine plan and more like provincial myth-making.

The genius of Jewish theology was not in discovering universal truth but in inventing a narrative of divine favoritism that could outlast defeat. That invention then infected the world. Christianity took the same logic and declared itself the “new Israel.” Islam followed, claiming Muhammad as the final prophet and the Arabs as the latest chosen instrument of the same God. The virus of chosenness metastasized. The monotheisms competed not to liberate humanity but to monopolize salvation. The universal God became a sectarian accountant, tallying who was in or out of his celestial club.

Was God crazy? No. The people who made him in their image were. They projected their tribal insecurity onto the infinite. They built a cosmic hierarchy that mirrored their own social hierarchy. The prophets thundered that all nations would bow before Zion, that Gentiles would bring tribute to Jerusalem. This was not revelation; it was political literature, written by exiles dreaming of return and power. The Bible is not the diary of God; it is the diary of a nation talking to itself, mistaking its echo for eternity.

Yet the idea worked. “Chosen people” theology gave moral cohesion to a scattered diaspora. It allowed survival through millennia of exile. But survival theology is not truth. It is strategy. The price of that strategy was universal arrogance. Western civilization inherited it wholesale. The Enlightenment secularized it into the myth of “chosen nations” — manifest destiny, exceptionalism, the civilizing mission. The modern West merely replaced Yahweh with progress and continued the same old boast: we are chosen to rule, to enlighten, to save. God’s tribal ego mutated into the ego of empire.

A truly universal God would have no chosen nation. A truly rational universe would have no sacred ethnicity. To believe otherwise is to turn the cosmos into a provincial courtroom where one people pleads special status before an imaginary judge. The only moral position for a thinking being is rebellion against that conceit. Humanity’s task is not to be chosen but to choose reason over myth, equality over election, and compassion over divine nepotism. The real revelation is not in Sinai’s thunder but in the quiet recognition that intelligence itself is our only covenant.

Religion, when stripped of its poetry, is politics with incense. The doctrine of election was ancient Israel’s geopolitics disguised as theology. And if that is true, then the “God who chose the Jews” is not crazy; he is human — a mirror of human vanity raised to infinite power. The problem is not God’s mind but ours.

Christianity was born as a rebellion against the exclusivity of Jewish chosenness, yet it ended by amplifying it. Jesus universalized what Moses monopolized. The tribal covenant became a global franchise. “There is neither Jew nor Greek,” said Paul — but there was still the believer and the damned. The innovation was not humility but expansion: one God for all, but one Church to mediate him. The ethnic monopoly became an institutional monopoly. The theology of election became the bureaucracy of salvation.

The brilliance of Christian theology lay in its missionary energy. Unlike Judaism, it did not wait for the world to recognize it; it sent apostles to conquer it. The message was universal in claim but imperial in method. Conversion became conquest by persuasion — and later, by sword. The Roman Empire baptized itself and called its empire divine will. The cross replaced the eagle, but the arrogance remained: we, not they, are chosen. The difference was only in scale. The Jewish God had chosen one tribe; the Christian God chose the planet, but only under Roman management.

Islam repeated the same pattern, cloaking Arab ambition in revelation. The Qur’an acknowledged Jewish and Christian prophets but claimed their messages had been corrupted. Now, finally, the truth was perfected — in Arabic. The chosen people became the chosen language. The tribal desert became the center of the world. The Prophet’s wars were described as divine justice, his victories as proof of chosenness. The Caliphs inherited not just political but cosmic authority. And just as the Jews saw themselves as the elect of Yahweh, Muslims saw themselves as the elect of Allah, the latest and final heirs to God’s eternal favoritism.

The irony is breathtaking. Three faiths claiming one God, each proclaiming itself his definitive interpreter. They share the same metaphysical DNA: one truth, one book, one path, one chosen identity. Each accuses the others of corruption while preserving the same structure of exclusivity. The human race, divided by geography, language, and history, now found itself divided by revelation — the most dangerous of all divisions because it declared dissent not error but sin. To reject the covenant was not to differ; it was to damn oneself eternally.

The political consequences were catastrophic. Monotheism became monopoly. From Crusades to jihads, from inquisitions to pogroms, theology provided the divine warrant for domination. The arrogance of being “chosen” justified everything. Colonizers arrived with the Bible in hand, declaring that they brought light to heathen darkness. The victims were lectured on salvation while their cultures were annihilated. Even secular modernity inherited this disease. The language of chosenness was reborn as exceptionalism, manifest destiny, civilizing mission. The missionary’s cassock was replaced by the diplomat’s suit. The sermon became the summit communiqué.

America, the self-proclaimed “city upon a hill,” is the most recent mutation of the same psychology. The Puritans saw themselves as the new Israel, escaping Egypt (England), crossing the Red Sea (the Atlantic), and entering the Promised Land (New England). Every expansionist act — genocide of natives, annexation of territories, global interventions — was justified as divine election dressed in democratic clothing. “God bless America” became the modern Shema: the ritual invocation of chosenness before every war, every campaign, every lie.

Even the secular mind did not escape. The Enlightenment dethroned God but enthroned Reason with the same exclusivist pride. Europe believed itself chosen not by Yahweh but by Progress. The missionary became the scientist; the gospel became technology. Colonialism marched under the banner of “modernity” rather than “Messiah,” but the logic was identical: we are the bearers of light, they are the benighted. The French called it the mission civilisatrice. The British called it the white man’s burden. The Americans called it freedom. It was all the same sermon, translated into the vocabulary of secular salvation.

What began as a tribal self-flattery in the desert evolved into the planetary arrogance of empire. The entire Abrahamic civilization, whether religious or secular, inherited the same psychic template: a chosen agent delivering divine or historical truth to an unchosen world. Even Marxism, for all its materialism, carried traces of this infection. The proletariat became the chosen class, the vanguard party the new clergy, history the new god. The forms changed, the metaphysics remained: salvation through election, paradise through exclusivity, apocalypse for the unbelievers.

The rational mind must ask: if the cosmos is vast and impartial, why should truth need chosen intermediaries at all? Why must revelation come in Hebrew, Greek, or Arabic — languages spoken by less than a fraction of a fraction of humanity? Why should salvation depend on geography? Why should divine wisdom be monopolized by one lineage, one text, one confession? Either God was incompetent at communication, or humans were competent at propaganda. The reasonable conclusion is obvious.

The alternative to chosenness is universality without privilege — reason, compassion, inquiry. Buddhism and Stoicism came closer to that spirit. The Buddha never claimed divine election; he offered a method, not a covenant. Anyone could test it, regardless of caste or tribe. Greek philosophy did the same: Socrates, not Moses, inaugurated universal ethics without revelation. The tragedy is that these rational and humanist currents were eventually drowned by the flood of Abrahamic monotheism, which substituted obedience for investigation and identity for truth.

To ask whether God was crazy is to mistake symptom for cause. The problem is not divine madness but human insecurity. We invent a father in the sky to validate our childish need to feel special. The doctrine of election is the theology of narcissism. It is the cosmic version of “my tribe is better than yours.” Humanity will remain mentally provincial as long as it worships that vanity. The real act of faith is not believing we are chosen; it is believing we are not.

When reason replaces revelation, the world becomes one. There is no Jew, no Christian, no Muslim, no chosen or rejected — only thinking beings sharing a common cosmic predicament. The only covenant worth keeping is with truth itself. And truth has no chosen people.

The idea of the chosen people did not die with prophecy; it reincarnated as politics. Modern Zionism is not merely a national movement — it is theology reborn as territory. The dream of divine election was translated into the language of sovereignty. The old covenant became a border fence. The land once promised by God was now demanded by tanks. What began as a myth of chosenness became a military project justified by historical trauma. Israel’s brilliance is that it secularized chosenness without discarding it. It no longer needs Yahweh to claim privilege; it needs memory and weaponry. Its justification remains theological even when expressed in secular vocabulary: we suffered uniquely, therefore we deserve uniquely.

That is the final paradox of chosenness — it begins as superiority, survives as victimhood, and ends as entitlement. A people once enslaved by Pharaoh now guards Gaza with divine sanction. The psychology is identical to that of empires they once resisted: history’s special people acting under special rules. Their suffering is real, but their myth of exceptionalism is dangerous, because it turns pain into license. To critique their theology is called antisemitism; to question their politics is called heresy. Thus the old moral immunity of “God’s elect” reappears in the moral immunity of “history’s victims.” Sacred suffering becomes a diplomatic weapon.

But the disease is not Jewish alone. Christian America inherited it with even greater power. The world’s most militarized democracy still speaks the language of divine selection. Every war is framed as moral destiny. Every election sermonizes about God’s blessing on the republic. Presidents quote scripture, soldiers pray for victory, and bombs are dropped with biblical confidence. It is not religion but nationalism that now wears the halo. The “city upon a hill” has become a fortress armed to the teeth, preaching freedom from aircraft carriers. What was once salvation through Christ is now salvation through democracy — still missionary, still self-righteous, still chosen.

Islamic civilizations follow the same logic in reverse. The idea of a global ummah, a single community of believers, is the political twin of Christian universalism. Its radicals merely stripped away modern hypocrisy and said aloud what the others implied: we are the chosen who must rule. From Wahhabism to the Islamic State, the script is unbroken. Chosenness, when militarized, produces apocalypse. The Caliphate is just election with a flag. It is the same metaphysical virus that infected Judaism and Christianity — now mutated into its most literal form: domination as devotion.

Secular ideologies were supposed to cure this madness. They didn’t. Nationalism replaced God with flag and scripture with constitution, but kept the same pathology. Every modern state imagines itself exceptional. The French Republic called itself the universal nation; the Soviets claimed to represent the inevitable march of history; America calls itself indispensable; China now declares itself the civilization to which the world must return. Behind every empire stands a theology, even when it calls itself atheist. Behind every flag, a subconscious echo: we are chosen.

This is why the modern world, for all its technology, remains pre-rational. Humanity escaped the Bronze Age but not its delusions. The cosmic narcissism of the desert still governs our politics. The religions of monotheism built empires of faith; the ideologies of modernity built empires of reason; but both used the same emotional grammar — privilege, destiny, mission. The rationalist must therefore go further than disbelief; he must abolish chosenness itself. Atheism is not enough. One must also de-tribalize truth.

The only true universality is Rational Humanism — the recognition that reason, empathy, and inquiry are not the property of any tribe. The Buddha offered it in compassion, Socrates in dialectic, Marx in critique, Einstein in wonder. None claimed divine election. They built no churches, promised no chosen status, founded no heavenly monopolies. Their greatness came from rejection, not inheritance. The measure of a civilization is not how favored it feels but how freely it questions its own myths. In that sense, the Jews who mattered most — Spinoza, Marx, Freud, Einstein, Chomsky — were not chosen by God but by reason, and they repaid that election by dismantling the very theology that produced them.

It is tragic and poetic: the greatest Jewish minds liberated humanity not by defending Judaism but by escaping it. Spinoza was excommunicated for thinking; Marx dismantled the God of money; Freud secularized sin into psychology; Einstein replaced Genesis with relativity. Each rejected chosenness and became universal. Their genius was the refutation of divine favoritism. They proved that greatness does not descend from covenant but from courage — the courage to think beyond tribe.

The modern world must learn that lesson or perish from its opposite. Nations intoxicated by chosenness will always see others as threats. Religions addicted to exclusivity will always sanctify violence. And individuals who believe themselves divinely favored will always trample those they deem inferior. The apocalypse will not come from God’s wrath but from our vanity. Civilization will end not in fire from heaven but in arrogance from earth.

The antidote is humility before reason. A rational universe does not play favorites. It rewards intelligence, curiosity, and compassion wherever they appear — in Jewish prophets or Japanese scientists, in Indian philosophers or African poets. Truth does not recognize passports. It has no covenant, no promised land, no exclusive priests. The cosmos is not a synagogue, church, or mosque. It is a laboratory, and the only chosen people are those who choose to think.

So, was God crazy? No. God was a metaphor for human pride. The crazy ones are those who keep worshiping their reflection in the sky.

Citations

1. Hebrew Bible: Deuteronomy 7:6; Amos 3:2.
2. Enuma Elish, tablet VI.
3. Moabite Stone (Mesha Stele, 9th century BCE).
4. Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upanishad 4.4; Chāndogya Upanishad 6.8–16.
5. Herodotus, Histories II–IV.
6. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (1939).
7. Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (1949).
8. Max Weber, Ancient Judaism (1917).
9. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (1983).
10. Hans Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (1951).
11. Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise (1670).
12. Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question” (1843).
13. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930).
14. Albert Einstein, “Religion and Science,” New York Times Magazine (1930).
15. Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians (1983).