When Nathanael called Jesus “King of Ἰσραήλ” (Israēl), he named more than a piece of geography. Israēl is the Greek spelling of the name the Hebrew Scriptures give to the whole people of God — the nation descended from the patriarch, the people God claimed and carried and called out of slavery. And in those Scriptures, that nation has a startling title of its own. Israel, as a corporate body, is called God’s son.

This is one of the senses of “son of God” that an honest reading has to keep in view, because the breadth of the phrase is part of what makes it so easy to mishear. When God sends Moses to Pharaoh, the message is: “Israel is my firstborn son… let my son go, so he may worship me.” The nation, collectively, is God’s firstborn. And the prophet Hosea, looking back at the exodus, hears God say, “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.” My son — the people. Israel is God’s son, his firstborn, the people he loved and led.

That corporate sonship sits underneath the royal sonship we hear in Nathanael’s and Martha’s confessions. The king of Israel was God’s son partly because he stood for the nation that was God’s son. The one represented the many. The Messiah, in some readings, gathers up the sonship of all Israel into himself — so that “Son of God,” even as a royal title, carries the whole people inside it. The king is the nation’s representative; the nation is God’s firstborn; the title reaches in both directions at once.

So “son of God,” in the Scriptures Nathanael and Martha grew up on, was a flexible, relational term. It could name a heavenly being of God’s court. It could name the Davidic king, God’s adopted royal son. And it could name Israēl itself — the whole people, God’s firstborn nation. None of these, in their first home, was a statement about a being who shares the very substance of God. The phrase named relationship, election, office, representation.

So when you meet Israēl in “King of Israel,” hear the depth in the name. It isn’t just the territory a king would rule. It’s the firstborn son of God — the people for whose sake the king himself was called a son. To be the king of Israel was to stand at the head of God’s own son, the nation he had called out of Egypt and never stopped claiming.