Vital Sparks: Isaac Watts and the Envious Jews

In the 1991 edition of The Sacred Harp, there is a song we do not love to sing: STAFFORD, 78. It does have a pretty little fuging tune by Daniel Read, but its words, by Isaac Watts, are problematic to many:

See what a living stone
The builders did refuse,
Yet God hath built His Church thereon,
In spite of env’ous Jews.

Most people bump up against this song, considering it antisemitic, and most people will choose not to lead or sing it. It has already been announced, informally, that the text to STAFFORD will be changed in the 2025 edition of The Sacred Harp.

But I have been wondering for some time about Watts’s attitude towards Jews, and what Watts means in this particular verse.

Get ready for a deep dive.

Let’s start by looking at this poem. It comes from Watt’s Psalms of David, Imitated in the Language of the New Testament, specifically Psalm 118, verses 22-26. In the King James version, this is:

²²  The stone which the builders refused
is become the head stone of the corner.
²³  This is the Lord’s doing;
it is marvellous in our eyes.
²⁴  This is the day which the Lord hath made;
we will rejoice and be glad in it.

²⁵  Save now, I beseech thee, O Lord:
O Lord, I beseech thee, send now prosperity.
²⁶  Blessed be he that cometh in the name of the Lord:
we have blessed you out of the house of the Lord.

This is one of the so-called Hallel psalms, a “fixed part of the [ancient] Jewish cycle of autumn feasts and Passover[1],” and it took on an especially Messianic role in the writings of the New Testament, which applies the initial rejection of the stone to becoming the cornerstone to the death and resurrection of Jesus. The gospels quote this psalm as the acclamation cry of the crowds as Jesus enters Jerusalem as the humble king and descendant of David, and this psalm has been used in Palm Sunday celebrations from the early days of the church until today. “The N(ew) T(estament) identifies Jesus as ‘the one who comes in the name of the Lord[2]’.”

In the New Testament recounting of the last week of Jesus’s life, there are three or four groups identified as having rejected Jesus as the Messiah: the Jewish religious leaders, especially Herod and the Sanhedrin,; the secular Roman leaders (in particular, Pontius Pilate); the crowd of Jews to whom Pilate turns in order to avoid his own choices; and the Roman soldiers who carry out the execution. The only supporters are the Jewish followers of Jesus, who are powerless to change the course of what happens, but who act as witnesses to his death, prepare him for burial, and witness his resurrection. This especially includes the Jewish women among his followers, John “the beloved disciple”, and two Jewish leaders who are secret supporters (Nicodemus and Joseph). Most of his closest Jewish disciples flee, deny they know him, or, in Judas’s case, actively bring about his death by betraying him. His only supporters are Jewish, his “rejectors” were a mix of Jews and Romans.

In none of the accounts are any of the Jews said to be acting out of envy. I am not completely sure, but I think Watts is here referring to a passage in Paul’s letter to the church at Rome (made up of both Gentile and Jewish followers of Jesus), where he states that he hopes his own “office” of preaching the gospel to Gentiles will provoke to emulation them which are my flesh, that is, make his fellow Jews envious of God’s gospel in spreading to the Gentiles. It’s also possible Watts is using “envy” in Samuel Johnson’s minor sense of “malice, malignity” in general as opposed to the specific “pain felt and malignity conceived at the sight of excellence or happiness[3].”

Watts’s poem is, of course, more than one verse. The second verse continues:

The scribe and angry priest
Reject thine only Son;
Yet on this Rock shall Zion rest,
As the chief corner-stone.

Watts, in this version, focuses on the Jewish leaders (“the scribe and angry priest”). His long meter version is more general, however:

Lo! What a glorious corner-stone
The Jewish builders did refuse;
But God has built his church thereon,
In spite of envy and the Jews.

One might understand that last phrase having envy apply to all the people who rejected Jesus (both Gentile and Jews). In fact, Watts often turns notes that both the Jews and the Gentiles of his time rejected Jesus. For example, in his Short View of Scripture History he cites Acts 4:26, 27: “when Herod and Pontius Pilate, and the people, both Gentiles and Jews, all rose up against Jesus of Nazareth, and put him to death” as a fulfilment of Psalm 2: “Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?”

In Watts’s sermon, None Excluded from Hope[4], preached on Romans 1: 16[5], he stresses the failure of both Jews and Gentiles of the past, as well as those of his present age, to follow Jesus, and also believes the way is still open to both Jews and Gentiles.

Watts (as I wrote in my previous essay) was more than a hymn lyricist: he was a pastor, theologian, philosopher, and logician. I think it is fair to say that his general outlook was one of “reason within the bounds of religion,” in Nicholas Wolterstoff’s expression[6]. That is, Watts constrained his logical and theological work by what he understood the Christian scriptures to say. His outlook was deeply formed by his Dissenter background—that is, by his protestant, free-church understandings, and well as by the general understanding of Christian thought in the protestant and more specially reformed traditions.

Within this background, Watts views the Christian movement as successionist in nature. That is, God’s work in the world has passed through several stages, each succeeding the previous one. In fact, Watts wrote an entire book on this topic[7], his Harmony of Religion. In this work, he describes six “dispensations:” from the creation of Adam to humanity’s fall; from Adam to Noah, from Noah to Abraham, from Abraham to Moses, from Moses to Christ, and the current Christian dispensation. This is to be followed by a Last Judgment. When Watts talks about Jews, he is almost always viewing them through this lens; in particular the “Abrahamical” and “Mosaical” dispensations.

So, this, then, controls so much of Watts’s attitude towards Jews: they are people in and of the past, whose covenant with God has been succeeded by the coming of Christ and the Christian dispensation. What does this mean, in practical terms, for how he interacts with the Jews of his own time?

It is remarkable that contemporary Jews are essentially absent from the writings of Isaac Watts. He barely writes of them at all. Part of this is because of the state of Jewry in England during his lifetime. The Jews had been expelled from England in 1290 by Edward I, and it wasn’t until the mid 1650’s (that is, just two decades before Watts’s birth) that Jews were allowed to return. They were allowed to return for a variety of economic and socio-religious reasons, but there were not many Jews in London during Watts’s lifetime. Watts’s sermon, None Excluded from Hope, is the only reference I could find in his writing to contemporary Jews at all. He is both harsh and gentle with them:

When we see one and another of the Jewish nation in this great city, and think of their blindness and their zeal for the idle traditions of their teachers, and observe their ignorant rage against our blessed Saviour: when we behold the vain superstitions of their worship, the thick darkness that hangs upon them under the brightest beams of gospel-light, and their wide distance from salvation we should let our eyes affect our hearts, and drop a tear of compassion upon their souls.

Despite Watts’s tear of compassion, these are uncomfortable words for us to read.

We still might contrast Watts to other attitudes taken by Christian leaders. Martin Luther thought all Jewish buildings and holy books should be destroyed, all rabbis should be forbidden from teaching children, and Jews could (and probably should) be expelled from Christian countries. We see none of this in Watts: Jews have a special positive relationship with God, and, like the Gentiles, are not excluded from hope. Unlike many, including Oliver Cromwell, he didn’t view the Jews as useful as a target for conversion that would presage the second coming of Christ. He never repeats the horrific blood libel. For Watts, Jews, like Gentiles, need the gospel of Christ. But, for the most part, “the Jews” for Watts are a historical people, existing only in the past.

This is all the more remarkable because the church where Watts preached was essentially on the same block as the synagogues in London. In 1708, Isaac Watts moved the meeting house of his growing congregation a few miles from its location on Mark Lane to St Mary Axe Street, where it would remain for the rest of his life. It was a short distance to the Great Synagogue, the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue (which still is in use as a synagogue), and the Bury Street Synagogue.

Watts’s phrase, “in spite of envious Jews” honestly has no place in our songbook, and it is a good thing that the text will be removed from the new edition. Watts would be the first to admit his own imperfections, even as he strove for a reasonable but passionate Christian life. When I see Watts’s failure here, I drop a tear of compassion for his soul, but I also want to interrogate my own failures.

Long have I sat beneath the sound
Of Thy salvation, Lord,
And still how weak my faith is found
And knowledge of Thy word.

How cold and feeble is my love,
How negligent my fears!
How long my hopes of joys above,
How few affections there!

Show my forgetful feet the way
That leads to joys on high,
Where knowledge grows without decay,
And love shall never die.

[1] Waltner, James H.2006. Psalms, Believers Church Bible Commentary, Herald Press.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Envy, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/views/search.php?term=envy, Accessed April, 2025.

[4] I have transcribed it here. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kj1wIkz1_rCNuRwPV83PZ-m88fWmxHZr73vxc48vBIc/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.m7mrt04018hl

[5] Romans 1: 16. The Gospel of Christ, it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth, to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.

[6] Wolterstoff, Nicholas, 1984. Reason Within the Bounds of Religion, 2^nd Edition, Eerdmans.

[7] Watts, Isaac, 1742. The Harmony of All the Religions Which God Ever Prescribed. The edition I used is on Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_the-harmony-of-all-the-r_watts-isaac_1742