Romans 11:26
And so all Israel shall be saved: as it is written, There shall come out of Sion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob:
And so all Israel shall be saved,.... Meaning not the mystical spiritual Israel of God, consisting both of Jews and Gentiles, who shall appear to be saved in the Lord with an everlasting salvation, when all God's elect among the latter are gathered in, which is the sense many give into; but the people of the Jews, the generality of them, the body of that nation, called "the fulness" of them, Romans 11:12, and relates to the latter day, when a nation of them shall be born again at once; when, their number being as the sand of the sea, they shall come up out of the lands where they are dispersed, and appoint them one head, Christ, and great shall be the day of Jezreel; when they as a body, even the far greater part of them that shall be in being, shall return and seek the Lord their God, and David their King; shall acknowledge Jesus to be the true Messiah, and shall look to him, believe on him, and be saved by him from wrath to come. There is a common saying among them {c}, abh Mlwel qlx Mhl vy larvy lk, "all Israel shall have a part", or "portion in the world to come"; and in support of this they usually produce the passage in Isaiah 60:21: "thy people also shall be all righteous": yea, they even go so far as to say {d},
"that hell fire will have no power over the transgressors of Israel;''
fancying, that every individual person of their nation will be saved; though they sometimes except such who deny the resurrection of the dead, and that the law is from heaven, or is an epicure, and he that reads foreign books, or is an enchanter, or pronounces the ineffable name: but the apostle is not to be understood with such a latitude; he refers to the last times, and to a very general conversion of them to the Messiah:
as it is written, Isaiah 59:20:
There shall come out of Zion the Deliverer: the words of the prophet are, "and the Redeemer shall come to Zion": by the Redeemer, or Deliverer, words of the same signification, is meant the Messiah, as the Jews {e} themselves own, and apply this passage to him; who is the "Goel", or near kinsman of his people, to whom the right of their redemption belongs as man; and who as God was able to effect it, and, as God-man and Mediator, was every way qualified for it, and has obtained it for them: and whereas, in the prophet Isaiah, he is said to "come to", and by the apostle, "out of Zion", this may be reconciled by observing, that the servile letter l sometimes signifies "from", as well as to, when it is put in the room of m; of which instances may be given, as Exodus 16:1 compared with
2 Chronicles 11:4. Besides, the Messiah was to come out of Zion, as well as to come to it, according to Psalms 14:7; so that the apostle fitly expresses the faith and expectation of the old Jewish church in this citation:
and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob; in the prophet it is, "and unto them that turn from transgression in Jacob", Isaiah 59:20. The apostle follows the translation of the Septuagint, and which is favoured by the Chaldee paraphrase, which runs thus; "the Redeemer shall come to Zion, and to turn the rebellious ones of the house of Jacob to the law"; so that the Jew {f} has no reason to charge the apostle with a perversion of the prophet's words, when they are cited so agreeably to their own Targumist: and the sense of them relates not to what Christ did on the cross, when the iniquities of his people were laid on him, and he bore them, and removed them all in one day from them; but to what he will do to the Jews in the latter day, in consequence thereof; he will convince them of their ungodliness, give them repentance for it and remission of it.
{c} Misn. Sanhedrin c. 11. sect. 1.
{d} T. Bab. Erubin, fol. 19. 1. & Chagiga, fol. 27. 1.
{e} Aben Ezra in loc. T. Bab. Sanhedrin, fol. 98. 1.
{f} R. Isaac, Chizzuk Emuna, par. 2. c. 81.