Vital Sparks: Isaac Watts and the Envious Jews (Revised)

Note: I received some excellent comments on my essay, and this has prompted me to rewrite the essay. I hope it is clearer.

My inquiry started with a song in the 1991 edition of The Sacred Harp: STAFFORD, 78. It has 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.

Many people bump up against this song, considering it antisemitic to sing, and so many 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[1].

This essay is not about whether we should or should not retain these words in the 2025 edition, or whether we should sing these words.

Here’s what it is about: 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 Watts’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[2],” and it took on a Messianic role in the writings of the New Testament, which applies the rejected stone 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[3]’.”

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 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.

There are two places in the passion narrative where envy is used,[4] in the gospels of Matthew and Mark. Pilate offers to “release unto the people a prisoner,” and offers them Jesus. But the people, stirred up by the Jewish leadership, want a man named Barabbas released instead. Mark’s gospel describes the leadership as “the elders and scribes and the whole council,” specifically noting “the chief priests had delivered (Jesus to Pilate) for envy.” In Matthew, the leadership is called “all the chief priests and elders of the people,” and Pilate “knew that for envy they had delivered him.” From the context, it appears that the Jewish leadership is envious that the number of Jesus’s followers is increasing. This envy is specifically predicated of the Jewish leadership.

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 focuses on the Jewish leaders (“the scribe and angry priest”), following the gospel account closely here. He identifies the leaders as those who fulfill the role of the rejecting builders of Psalm 118[5].

However, 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 fulfillment of Psalm 2: “Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?”

In Watts’s sermon, None Excluded from Hope[6], preached on Romans 1: 16[7], 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[8]. 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, as well as by the general understanding of Christian thought in the protestant and more specifically 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[9], 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 then 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 1650s (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 me to read. I am discomforted, not by Watts’s belief that the hope for Jews and Gentiles alike is found in Jesus Christ, but his use of dismissive words like idle traditions, ignorant rage, and vain superstitions. These seem unworthy of a truth-seeking person such as Watts, and a sign of a profound ignorance of Jewish beliefs and practices.

Still, we should 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[10]. 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 in close proximity to 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 is still in use as a synagogue), and the Bury Street Synagogue.

So, in brief: Watts thought both Jews and Gentiles required salvation through Jesus Christ, and that the plain reading of the gospel passages implicated the Jewish religious leadership in the death of Christ. The coming of Christ opened up a new chapter in God’s relationship to the world, and what became the Christian church succeeded the time of the Jews. For the most part, Watts only considered Jews as a people of the past. Despite literally worshipping within blocks of the synagogues of London, he didn’t seem to have much of an opinion, positive or negative, towards Jews in London or other contemporaneous Jews. He pitied them, when he thought about them at all, but did not incite hate against them.  

That’s the end of the essay, but I actually do want to write about whether “in spite of envious Jews” has a place in our songbooks, that is, a song we can sing with good intent and without doing harm.

I don’t think so, and it is a good thing that the text will be removed from the new edition. Watts intended it to refer to the Jewish leadership, but it takes a long while to get to that reading, especially for modern singers, given the long and tragic history of Christian persecution of the Jews. What might have been merely descriptive or mildly unnuanced for Watts becomes ill-intentioned and harmful in the shadow of the Holocaust.

Further, I think it was at least a dangerous line to sing when Watts wrote it, given how easy it has been to conflate the Jewish leadership who had a part in Jesus’s death with the Jewish people at all times and places. It ignores his Jewish followers and disciples, and ignores the Gentile Romans who carried out the actual execution. Sometimes, the constraints of poetry cause a poet to fail to describe the whole truth.

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: “show my forgetful feet the way that leads to joys on high, where knowledge grows without decay, and love shall never die.”

[1] The 2012 Cooper edition of The Sacred Harp has a related song, THE LIVING STONE. It is an arrangement of STAFFORD by W.C. Givens. It retained the verse discussed here, but added a second verse as well.

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

[3] Ibid.

[4] In the previous version of this essay, I wrote: 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.” This was incorrect and an embarrassing error!

[5] I find it interesting that a member of the Jesus leadership, Nicodemus, comes to Jesus’s defense and helps prepare his body for burial in John’s gospel.

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

[7] 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.

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

[9] 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 

[10] “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” might apply here, but given Watts’s extensive writings, it’s likely that if he held these beliefs, he would have expressed them in one form or another.