God's Peoples: Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster

by Donald Harman Akenson

To see the Voortrekker monument in Pretoria is to recognize at once that it was built to humble the observer. With walls as thick as parts of the Maginot Line, and ambushments that would do credit to a medieval fortress, this South African national museum would serve equally as well as a defensive outpost. What mentality would create such an imposing structure? We can find the same outlook half a world away in the fortified homesteads that Ulster-Scots...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0773509402
• ISBN13: 9780773509405
• Release Date: October 1992
• Publisher: McGill-Queens University Press
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A layman view

As a child of the Scotch Irish diaspora, I am finding this book riveting. The thesis presented here carefully demonstrates the powerful and ongoing impact of the Hebrew Scripture, particularly the covenanting of God's "Chosen People," on peoples who read and take seriously (even literally) the several thousand year old constructs of the ancient Hebrew tribe of Israel. Most of my pondering about the "why" of customs and belief systems of my own almost entirely Scotch Irish family find articulation in this amazing book. Four hundred years after Calvin and over 200 since the last of my family left Ulster, the power of the covenant lingers still. I wish Dr. Akenson could consider exploring the town of Due West, South Carolina, and Erskine College, to find the very strong threads of this culture alive and well in the United States.

God's Peoples reviewed by a "God's Person"

D.H. Akenson has masterfully taken a complex subject, that being the Old Testament, along with South African, Irish, and Jewish histories, and has put it together in a very compelling thesis. It is well organized in sections dealing with the origins of the particular covenants, a section on the covenant and the state, and a section of the covenant in recent times. The book is very hard to read for the layman, but for the informed he has done a great service. The only weaknesses I find is that he does not do present enough analysises of the differences within the covenanted peoples, especially as certain factions differed on the application of the covenant.