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pleased God to make. 44 It is essential to the understanding of Jewish history to grasp the importance the Jews have always attached to God’s unrestricted ownership of creation. Many Jewish beliefs are designed to dramatize this central fact. The notion of an elect people was part of God’s purpose to stress his possession of all created things. Abraham was a crucial figure in this demonstration. The Jewish sages taught: ‘Five possessions has the Holy One, blessed be He, made especially his own. These are: the Torah, Heaven and earth, Abraham, Israel and the Holy Sanctuary.’ 45 The sages believed that God gave generously of his creation, but retained (as it were) the freehold of everything and a special, possessive relationship with selected elements. Thus we find:
 
    The Holy One, blessed be He, created days, and took to Himself the Sabbath; He created the months, and took to Himself the festivals; He created the years, and chose for Himself the Sabbatical Year; He created the Sabbatical years, and chose for Himself the Jubilee Year; He created the nations, and chose for Himself Israel…. He created the lands, and took to Himself the Land of Israel as a heave-offering from all the other lands, as it is written: ‘The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof.’ 46
     
    The election of Abraham and his descendants for a special role in God’s providence, and the donation of the land, are inseparable in the Biblical presentation of history. Moreover, both gifts are leasehold, not freehold: the Jews are chosen, the land is theirs, by grace and favour, always revocable. Abraham is both a real example and a perpetual symbol of a certain fragility and anxiety in Jewish possession. He is a ‘stranger and sojourner’ and remains one even after God’s election, even after he has elaborately purchased the Cave of Machpelah. This uncertainty of ownership is transferred to all his descendants: as the Bible repeatedly reminds us. Thus God tells the Israelites: ‘And the land is not to be sold in perpetuity, for all land is Mine, because you are strangers and sojourners before me’; or again, the people confess: ‘For we are strangers before you, and sojourners like all our forefathers’; and the Psalms have David the King say: ‘I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were.’ 47
    All the same, the promise of the land to Abraham is very specific and it comes in the oldest stratum of the Bible: ‘To your descendants I give this land from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites and the Jebusites.’ 48 There is some confusion about the frontiers, since in a later passage God promises only a portion of the larger gift: ‘And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan.’ 49 On the other hand, this latter gift is to be ‘a perpetual possession’. The implication, here and in later passages, is that the election of Israel can never be revoked, though it can be suspended by human disobedience. As the Lord’s promise is irrevocable, the land will ultimately revert to Israel even if she loses it for a time. 50 The notion of the Promised Land is peculiar to Israelite religion and, for the Israelites and the Jews later, it was the most important single element in it. It is significant that the Jews made the five early books of the Bible, the Pentateuch, into the core of their Torah or belief, because they dealt with the Law, the promise of the land, and its fulfilment. The later books, despite all their brilliance and comprehensibility, never acquired the same centralsignificance. They are not so much revelation as a commentary upon it, dominated by the theme of the promise fulfilled. 51 It is the land that matters most.
    If Abraham established these fundamentals, it