Both the Chosen beasts of Narnia and the Chosen people of God are commanded to distance themselves from the ways of the Unchosen. In Narnia, Aslan warned the Chosen beasts at the very beginning as we have seen in the last few posts. In the Bible, the Children of Israel are consistently warned in ways such as the following verse from this week's Torah reading, "You shall not copy the practices of the land of Egypt where you dwelt, or of the land of Canaan to which I am taking you; nor shall you follow their laws (Leviticus 18:3)."
In addition, the Chosen have a positive obligation towards the unchosen. In Narnia the beasts are to "cherish" the dumb animals. Though there are no outlined methods as to how to cherish the Unchosen beasts, I have always assumed that it means to care for them in the way that (good) people in our world care for their pets. The Bible is far more enterprising and commands the Children of Israel to be a, "Kingdom of Priests and a Holy people, (Exodus 19:6)." This requires the Children of Israel to teach, minister, and guide the Unchosen in the ways of the true God.
The need for a Kingdom of Priests in the Bible arises from the expulsion of Adam from the Garden of Eden. Original man sinned and his descendants began to worship idols and steal, bringing about the Deluge. God saved Noah and his family from the Deluge in an attempt to reset humanity. That didn't seem to work either as demonstrated from in the infamous incident of the Tower of Babel.
At that point humanity self divides into 70 nations each with their own language and (presumably) culture. To redeem humanity to its formerly pristine ways, humanity now needed a Chosen Nation. A nation that would teach and guide. Throughout the Bible God spends a lot of time forging that nation, as Lewis himself notes, "[God] selected one particular people and spent several centuries hammering into their heads the sort of God He was —that there was only one of Him and that He cared about right conduct. (Mere Christianity).” And though there are glimpses of the proper function of such a nation such as in the time of Solomon (highlighted by the pilgrimage of the Queen of Sheba), and the prophetic visions of Isaiah and others, as a whole the experience has yet to succeed.
But we try...
Do the Chosen Narnians have a parallel calling? Are they, too, ordered to act as Kingdom of Priests for the Giants to the North, the Calormens to the South, and the inhabited Islands of the Eastern Sea?
Frankly, I don't know the answer.
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