The Bible in the Israel-Palestine Conflict, Chapter 2: Enemies

Why Did God Create Ancient Israel and Protect Them from Opponents?

Bronze Egyptian sword circa 1279 - 1213 BCE. Now in the Louvre Museum’s Department of Egyptian Antiquities. Photo credit: Unknown | Department of Egyptian Antiquities of the Louvre | Wikimedia.

The Importance of Pre-Messianic Israel:  Why Israel At All?

Modern observers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict often wonder if the very notion of a chosen people is one of the most mischievous, troublesome ideas of history.  It is somewhat understandable that modern critics regard the Hebrew Bible as simply a pretext for seizing land by warfare.  Indeed, while Orthodox, Conservative, and Reformed branches of Judaism maintain that the Jewish people are God’s chosen people, Reconstructionist Judaism, founded by Rabbi Mordecai M. Kaplan in the mid-20th century as an effort to honor the historical Israel and yet “modernize” Judaism, does not.  This raises serious doubts and questions about not just the identity of the Jewish people, but the Bible itself.  What can we say, then, about the trustworthiness of the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament?  And why did God need an “Israel” at all? 

Broadly speaking, Judaism teaches that the role God envisioned for the Jewish people is to partner with Him to repair the world - in Hebrew, tikkun olam.  The inflection point of the Book of Genesis occurs in Genesis 12 when God calls Abram into a partnership using the language of the original creation blessing and fruitfulness.  This indicates in literary form that God will work with Abram to undo the sin of Adam, a beginning point for God to renew the garden blessing to the world, as the Genesis Rabbah, a later rabbinical commentary composed 300 - 500 CE, says.[1]  Abram and Sarai then serve as a kind of renewed Adam and Eve.

One testament to the impact of Judaism on the rest of the world is our intellectual indebtedness to the Hebrew Bible.  It is immense.  Arguably the mere fact of its existence in literary form is due in part to ancient Israel settling in, and sharing, a land.  Historians Paul Johnson and Thomas Cahill point out that the world receives from the Hebrew Bible the notions of human dignity, equality before the law, sabbath rest, a divine-human partnership, and the very idea of a happy ending story where good triumphs over evil.[2]  Anthropologist and literary scholar Rene Girard points out how the Hebrew Bible began to expose the psychological mechanism of social scapegoating, which is the inversion and exposure of myth.[3]  Legal scholar Bernard M. Levinson notes that Jewish principles of governance provided the model for a separation of political powers.[4]  Rabbinical scholar and minister Warren Goldstein explains how Jewish Law extends rights and protection to women, the judicially accused, and other vulnerable people.[5]  Rabbi Joshua A. Berman argues that the Pentateuch articulates an egalitarian ideal in theology, politics, economics, and use of technologies of communication.[6]  Anthropologist David Graeber points out the uniqueness of Jewish Law’s debt jubilee and protections from indebtedness.[7]  Biblical literary scholars Mari Joerstad and Sandra Richter appreciate the Hebrew Bible for its ecological vision and ethics.[8]  The Hebrew Bible is the product of a sustained interaction between a people, their environment, and their God, who had a concern for all creation, nonhuman and human. 

In addition, Christians affirm that Jesus of Nazareth required a human community in which to be born.  In this sense, there is a uniquely Christian explanation for the defense of ancient biblical Israel - one that connects the universal scope of the Christian message to the particular scope of Jewishness; Christian universalism is built on Jewish particularism.  For Jesus to be fully human, and provide the redemption of human nature, Jesus needed to be fully and truly human.  So, Jesus needed a human mother in a human family in a human community in a particular land.  Moreover, Jesus needed to learn his vocation in a human way:  with a documented historical record, and a diagnosis of the spiritual problem which he was to resolve.  He also needed human partners to partner with him in his mission, which relied on their conviction and their confidence in Scripture, too.  Hence, Christians affirm in principle that God had a rationale to create, and covenant with, a chosen people for this purpose.  Israel was this chosen people.

Jesus took upon himself the roles of Israel and king of Israel, which is reflected in Jesus pointedly bearing the titles, “beloved son” and “chosen one.”  In the biblical narrative, God had implicitly used the role of Adam as “son of God” (Luke 3:38), the son of God who inherited the garden land from God, as the basis for calling Israel “son of God” (Exodus 4:22; Romans 9:6), the son of God who would inherit the new garden land.  God called the people of Israel “chosen” to bear a vocation and carry out certain responsibilities connected to God’s commandments (Exodus 19:5; Deuteronomy 4:32 - 40; 7:5 - 8; Isaiah 41:8 - 9; Amos 3:2).  Jesus gathered these roles and titles to himself starting at his baptism, when God’s voice uttered the words of the coronation psalm of the Davidic kings:  “You are my son, today I have begotten you” (Psalm 2:7), where sonship in this context refers to receiving “the nations” as an inheritance from God, and “begotten” refers to “enthronement” and the anointing for it.  These titles were also linked to Jesus through Isaiah’s servant vision, where God spoke through Isaiah’s prophecy, “Here is my servant, whom I have chosen, my beloved, with whom my soul is well pleased.  I will put my Spirit upon him, and he will proclaim justice to the gentiles.” (Isaiah 42:1; Matthew 12:17 - 18)  When Jesus was transfigured on the mountain, God repeated these titles, “This is My Son, My Beloved” (Matthew 17:5), “My Chosen One” (Luke 9:35).

Jesus bore these titles of Israel and the king of Israel in connecting with bearing the stories of Israel and the king of Israel, to retell them faithfully and avoid their failures, on their behalf.  Like Israel, Jesus went through water (Matthew 3:13 - 17), then into the wilderness to face temptation (Matthew 4:1 - 11), then came to a mountain to both receive and speak God’s commandments (Matthew 5:1 - 7:29).  This bears all the marks of Israel’s origin story:  going through the water of the Red Sea, then into the wilderness to face temptation, then to a mountain to both receive and speak God’s commandments.  But it also bears the marks of David’s origin story.  Like David, Jesus was anointed to be king (Matthew 3:13 - 17; 1 Samuel 16), then went to do battle with a giant foe (Matthew 4:1 - 11; 1 Samuel 17), then slowly and steadily gathered Israelites around himself while being pursued by the hostile reigning powers (Matthew 4:12 - 25; 8:1 - 9:35; 1 Samuel 18 - 31).  More can be said of this retelling of stories, and its significance, but that is sufficient, I hope, to make the connection.

How else could Jesus grow up to understand his vocation, if not for Israel?  Israel was necessary for Jesus to be fully and truly human.  Christians, then, must affirm that ancient Israel had a positive role in history, as recipients and custodians of God’s commandments and covenant (e.g. Romans 7:14 - 8:4).  Though Jesus alone succeeded where Israel could not, Israel tried what the gentiles would not.  For this, gentile Christians owe the Jewish tradition a debt of gratitude, at a minimum.  

Pre-Messianic Israel as Microcosm of Humanity

There are more topics that are important to address, because even if the above is true, the questions of who benefited and who paid costs are still important. 

Who were the people of Israel?  Whereas today, “Jewishness” is partially a genetic ethnicity via descent through a Jewish mother, and “Israeli” a matter of some political debate, biblical Israel was a multi-ethnic faith.  Ancient Israel was a microcosm of all humanity who lived in a covenant relation with God.  Yes, there is a genetic, genealogical component that anchored the community because of God’s promise of children and the responsibilities God gave parents to their children, but the community was not limited to genetics.  Ancient Israel expressed God’s invitation to the gentiles to join by faith-allegiance.  This is important to clarify because not only can people misappropriate the biblical story, they can also project the wrong ideas back into the biblical text.

For example, Genesis 37 - 50 highlights the brothers Judah and Joseph, who both learn the divine lesson that they are to bless gentiles.  With the exception of Joseph, who married an Egyptian woman, all of the sons of Jacob married Canaanite women.  At the time of the Exodus from Egypt, a time of great conflict between Israel and Egypt, “a mixed multitude” from Egypt accompanied Israel during the Exodus (Exodus 12:38) and ostensibly became part of Israel through circumcision (Exodus 12:43 – 49).  One of the only two faithful servants of Moses was Caleb the son of Jephunneh, who was identified with the tribe of Judah but was ethnically a Kenizzite, one of the Canaanite tribes (Numbers 32:12; Genesis 15:19)!  The Canaanite Rahab and her whole household joined Israel during the conquest of Canaan (Joshua 6:17 – 25).  One of the Canaanite peoples, the Hivites of Gibeon, joined Israel, shared in Israel’s vocation by becoming servants of the sanctuary, and enjoyed divine protection from other Canaanite assailants (Joshua 9 - 11).  God promised to incorporate Edomite peoples under the kingship of David (Amos 9:11 - 12), which included Amalekites in principle, since Amalek was a grandson of Esau (Genesis 36:12), and this statement of Amos was explicitly understood by the followers of Jesus as inclusive of all gentile peoples (Acts 15:15 - 17). 

Tony Maalouf observes that, in Scripture, Ishmaelites and Arabs also became part of Israel under the Sinai covenant.  Maalouf points out that God’s relationship with Hagar and Ishmael is quite remarkable and positive (Genesis 16; 21).  And while there were “two brief periods of conflicts” between these peoples (Judges 6 - 8; 1 Chronicles 5:9 - 22), the remainder of the biblical history attests to an integration.  For example:

Two of Ishmael’s tribes, MIbsam and Mishma, apparently merged under the tribe of Simeon (1 Chronicles 4:25).  Biblical Arabs, like Obil the Ishmaelite and Jaziz the Hagarite, participated in David’s cabinet rule (1 Chronicles 27:30 - 31).  Also David’s sister married Jether the Ishmaelite, whose son Amasa was appointed by David as the leader of Israel’s army supposed to replace Joab (cf. 2 Samuel 20:4 - 13; 1 Chronicles 2:17).  During Solomon’s rule, while many vassal kingdoms paid him tributes, all the kings of the Arabs visited Israel, offering gifts of gold to the king of Israel as friendly nations rather do (Psalm 72:10, 15; 1 Kings 10:15; 2 Chronicles 9:14).[9] 

Thus, Israel was not merely an ethnic or racial people.  They were a multi-ethnic faith, bound together by covenant commitment to God’s promises while they co-existed in the land.  This impacts the next topic.

How to Understand God Taking Human Life in Scripture

In the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament, there are many instances of violence done by God and/or his people, both to the Israelites and the surrounding nations.  How should we understand this written history?  Can it serve as a living example for the present?  It may seem difficult to square these events with the idea that God’s goal is our healing and restoration, but it is helpful to keep in mind the points above, and the points below.

In the Jewish community, Orthodox Jews have maintained a belief in the immortality of the soul and an eventual personal resurrection from the dead when the messianic redemption occurs in the future.  They deduce this from a smattering of biblical texts.[10]  The dead descend to the grave, or Sheol (Numbers 16:33; Psalm 6:6; Isaiah 38:18).  Apparently individual souls with personal memories continue to exist beyond the death of the body, as attested by the unique incident of the ghost or soul of Samuel speaking with the living; the story does little to answer the questions we might ask about it, however, and both Jewish law and Samuel’s ghost condemn any attempts to repeat the experiment (Leviticus 19:31; 20:6, 27; Deuteronomy 18:11; 1 Samuel 28:15; Isaiah 13:19).  At the same time, Scripture also glimpses an alternative to death:  Enoch “walked with God, and he was not; for God took him” (Genesis 5:24); Elijah rode a chariot of fire to the heavens (2 Kings 2:11).  While Isaiah and Ezekiel refer to Israel’s restoration as a resurrection from the dead (Isaiah 26:9; Ezekiel 37:1 - 14), it is possible that they are using resurrection as a metaphor for the corporate continuation of the people of Israel.  Daniel is the first to unambiguously declare a personal resurrection of the dead of all individuals (Daniel 12:2).  In light of Daniel, perhaps more confidence might be put on the theory that Job also looked ahead to the personal resurrection of the dead.  Job declares something that is difficult to translate from Hebrew, but it could mean, “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold, and not another” (Job 19:25 - 27).  All this rests upon the Jewish view of God’s goodness and His declaration that the creation is “good, good, very good” (Genesis 1).  God does not retreat from His commitment to the physical world and humanity. Although the Conservative and Reformed Jewish traditions are not unanimous about what all this means, the data seems to logically point to personal, bodily resurrection - in which case, there is some unknown future decision to be made by people and/or God.

Christian tradition strongly asserts that the dead were presented with that choice by Jesus, who descended to the dead to encompass all of human experience, who was resurrected from the dead into a new mode of physical, embodied existence and invited them to come along with him.  For when Jesus died, he visited Sheol, the realm of the dead, to awaken all those who died before he died and present himself to them (1 Peter 4:6; 3:18 - 20), even those who fought against Israel.  Christian tradition has said this uniformly.[11]  The Apostles’ Creed and Nicene Creed contain the phrase “he descended to the dead” enshrined this meaning to “Holy Saturday,” the day between Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday, for 1500 years.  The Orthodox and Catholic faithful celebrated this teaching in magnificent iconographic artwork depicting Jesus trampling down the gates of Hades and pulling Adam and Eve up from the tombs. 

John Calvin, to bolster his theory of penal substitutionary atonement, was the first theologian to say that Jesus’ descent to the dead was not to offer salvation but instead to absorb divine retribution, and not on Saturday but on Friday while he was on the cross, which completely changed its meaning.[12]  To the extent that Protestants are confused about the meaning of 1 Peter 3 - 4 and Jesus’ descent to the dead, they owe their confusion to the alternative explanation John Calvin provided.

Once New Testament data is included, a Christian reading of the warfare stories of Israel and other special divine actions necessarily requires simultaneous awareness of the choice Jesus would later present to people who died.  When God defended Israel, since the gentile attacks on Israel included both other-harm towards Israel and also self-harm on the part of the gentiles, He placed assailants into a type of coma.  When God defended Israel’s covenantal purpose from dissidents within, He placed them into the same condition.  When people died, whether by “natural causes” or because God took their lives through special action, death was not the end for them.  Even Moses, who died prematurely because God was angry with him (Deuteronomy 4:21 - 24), returned to earth to see Jesus and be seen by Jesus’ disciples (Matthew 17:1 - 13).  God was displeased with the entire first generation of Israelites who came out of Egypt, and prolonged the wilderness wandering so they would die in the wilderness; they had to help undo the harm they had done to their children’s faith, so the second generation could have faith in God to enter the garden land, but the first generation died in the wilderness nevertheless (Numbers 13 - 14; Deuteronomy 1:19 - 4:14).

In fact, Christian tradition understands Israel’s vocation as organically connected to Jesus’, in the same way that Moses’ role was connected to Jesus.  For Jesus to come as a Jew under the Sinai covenant, God needed to actively protect his people, at least at critical times.  If ancient Israel, prior to Jesus, had been destroyed or derailed by external or internal causes, then God’s plan for redemption would be potentially lost or deeply set back.  Thus, in principle, God needed to protect ancient Israel.  This is how we understand God protecting the Israelites from the Amalekites and the Canaanites, for example - though the details about that history are very important; on those details, see below.

Thus, on human existence beyond mortality and death, what does the Bible say about what the Bible said?  The assertion is that each person still needed to make a decision to receive Jesus or not.  We are not certain about each person’s free will choice; perhaps this decision was the summation of choices they made in life rather than a new, independent choice only influenced by past choices, so there is some uncertainty about what this moment means when contextualized into people’s lives.  Regardless, when Christians read about God protecting Israel in the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament, we must see that God’s actions are comparable to a doctor inducing a coma in patients - patients who are intent on harming themselves and others - until a cure for their sickness can be developed.  Death by special divine action and death by natural causes are simply death; and death by natural causes is the result of God sending Adam and Eve out of the garden so that we would not eat from the tree of life while in a corrupted state, and then make human evil immortal.  God, out of love, wanted to send Jesus to share in our fallen human nature, that we might share in his healed human nature, and mortality outside the garden was part of God’s overall response of restoration.

God’s creation of Israel was also a further step in His restoration, as was His protection of Israel.  God’s special protection of ancient Israel should be understood not as divine retributive justice per se, which requires only that guilty people suffer to compensate God for the obedience He was deprived of, but as divine restorative justice instead.  How so?  Each person still had the opportunity to choose Jesus and participate in undoing the harm they caused to their own human nature and human relations.  Thus, God’s actions were restorative in both motivation and effect.  For even when God took some people’s lives in an active sense, God was protecting their last possible choice:  whether to eventually choose Jesus or not.

In the Christian understanding, then, God’s protection of Israel prior to Jesus, even by warfare, has confessional value (Hebrews 3:16 - 19; 4:8 - 11; 11:28 - 34), even though it does not remain normative for ethics.  The reason for this?  Because once Jesus came, ancient Israel’s main goal was accomplished.  What remained was its witness of exile as a theological category; more on this below.  What of warfare as an ongoing challenge?  From a Christian perspective, self-defense may or may not be argued on the basis of human worth and dignity, depending on one’s beliefs about pacifism, just war theory, and the like.  But for Christians, neither the Jewish community today nor the Christian community today have a theological basis for war simply on the basis of their faith per se, and not for a claim to land.

Not Genocide, But Only Limited Battles

Anglo-American settlers of North America quoted Deuteronomy and Joshua in a genocidal effort against Native Americans, claiming that they put themselves into the place of ancient Israel entering the promised land and killing off Canaanites and Amalekites.  Because of that fact, we read that back into the Bible.  We either accuse God of commissioning genocide, or we are nervous that He did.  That impression is incorrect.  The Hebrew Bible / Old Testament did not commission genocide. 

We must examine the battle stories of ancient Israel to dispel mistaken beliefs about them, especially the accusation of genocide.  A chief consideration is the relationship between Israelites and Canaanites.  What of the battles between them recorded in the biblical text?  Based on archaeological evidence from the late Bronze Age, the period in question, Jericho and Ai were not cities where civilians lived.  They were military fortresses.[13]  In fact, Jericho was the fortress that guarded the junction of three roads that went to Jerusalem, Bethel, and Orpah.  Those were government and military centers which did not have civilians living there.  The Amarna Letters – letters exchanged between Egyptian pharaohs and Canaanite leaders and others – show that citadel cities or fortresses like Jerusalem and Shechem, during this time, were separate from the general population.[14]

If this is true, then why were Rahab and her household (Joshua 2) there in a fortress?  Rahab was an innkeeper (not necessarily a prostitute as is commonly thought, though that is also possible).  Messengers and travelers needed a place to stay, and these fortress cities had inns to house them.  The Code of Hammurabi refers to these inns as vulnerable to spies and conspirators:  “If conspirators meet in the house of a [female] tavern-keeper, and these conspirators are not captured and delivered to the court, the tavern-keeper shall be put to death.”[15]  These inns were so notorious for being used by spies and conspirators that the Hittites of Turkey and northern Syria prohibited the building of an inn or tavern near city walls.[16]  This fits the biblical record, where two Israelite spies take refuge in Rahab’s inn, and climb down the city wall. 

What About “Women and Children, Young and Old”?  Hyperbolic Expression 

Yet, doesn’t the biblical narrator encourage us to believe that even Canaanite children were killed by the advancing Israelite army?  After all, Joshua 6:21 reads, “Both man and woman, young and old.”  Actually, no:  This is hyperbolic language used to describe military victory and invoke confidence in the strength of one’s army.  It was very common in the Ancient Near East. 

We should be able to appreciate heightened, hyperbolic language because when we watch sporting events today, we use very exaggerated language:  “We killed them; we crushed them; we annihilated them; we wiped the floor with them.”  But of course, we do not mean that we literally took their lives or made a comeback totally impossible.  If we use this language for sports, how much more would we expect earlier people to use it to rally fighting men for military battles and to celebrate victories?  In military records all over the Ancient Near East, the same type of language prevails.  Here is a sampling:

●      Egypt’s Tuthmosis III (later fifteenth century) boasted that “the numerous army of Mitanni was overthrown within the hour, annihilated totally like those (now) not existent.”  In fact, Mitanni’s forces lived on to fight in the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries BC.

●      Hittite king Mursilli II (who ruled from 1322 – 1295 BC) recorded making “Mt. Asharpaya empty (of humanity)” and the “mountains of Tarikarimu empty (of humanity).”

●      The Bulletin of Ramses II tells of Egypt’s less-than-spectacular victories in Syria (around 1274 BC).  Nevertheless, he announces that he slew “the entire force” of the Hittites, indeed “all the chiefs of all the countries.” disregarding the “millions of foreigners,” which he considered “chaff.”

●      In the Merneptah Stele (ca. 1230 BC), Rameses II’s son Merneptah announced, “Israel is wasted, his seed is not,” another premature declaration.

●      Ashurnasirpal of Assyria (1050 – 1031 BC) detailed in stone, in one of his temple reliefs, his burning, mutilating, and hanging of captives, including boys and girls.

●      Moab’s king Mesha (840/830 BC) bragged that the Northern Kingdom of “Israel has utterly perished for always,” which was over a century premature.  The Assyrians devastated Israel in 722 BC.  Also, when Mesha described his victory over two Israelite towns, he boasted of killing women and girls.

●      The Assyrian ruler Sennacherib (701 – 681 BC) used similar hyperbole:  “The soldiers of Hirimme, dangerous enemies, I cut down with the sword; and not one escaped.”

Scholars believe that the language of the Old Testament conforms to this pattern.  Saying “both man and woman, young and old” is a hyperbolic way of talking about victory even when women and children were nowhere in sight and were never involved.  All of the other evidence we have strongly suggests that Joshua actually killed only fighting men.

As was standard rhetorical practice in their cultural context, the biblical narrators used these exaggerated military victory sayings.  Below are some examples.  Notice that in the left hand column, the hyperbolic language is used to describe what, to a modern day reader who is unaware of past cultural idioms, reads like total, show-no-mercy, take-no-prisoners victories over the Canaanites.  However, notice that in the right hand column, the very same biblical narrators refer to the ongoing presence of Canaanites.  This shows that even the human authors of Scripture understood their own language in a hyperbolic way.

Evidence of Ongoing Canaanite Presence

12 Now then, give me this hill country [Hebron] about which the LORD spoke on that day, for you heard on that day that Anakim were there, with great fortified cities; perhaps the LORD will be with me, and I will drive them out as the LORD has spoken.’  (Joshua 14:12; cf. 15:12 – 15)

12 For if you ever go back and cling to the rest of these nations, these which remain among you, and intermarry with them, so that you associate with them and they with you, 13 know with certainty that the LORD your God will not continue to drive these nations out from before you; but they will be a snare and a trap to you, and a whip on your sides and thorns in your eyes, until you perish from off this good land which the LORD your God has given you. (Joshua 23:12 - 13)

Exaggerated Military Victory Language

36 Then Joshua went up with all Israel from Eglon to Hebron; they assaulted it 37 and took it and struck it with the edge of the sword, and its king and its towns and every person in it; he left no one remaining, just as he had done to Eglon, and utterly destroyed it with every person in it. (Joshua 10:36 - 37)

22 There were no Anakim left in the land of the sons of Israel; only in Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdod some remained. (Joshua 11:22)

40 Thus Joshua struck all the land, the hill country and the Negev and the lowland and the slopes and all their kings. He left no survivor, but he utterly destroyed all who breathed, just as the LORD, the God of Israel, had commanded.  41 Joshua struck them from Kadesh-barnea even as far as Gaza, and all the country of Goshen even as far as Gibeon.  42 Joshua captured all these kings and their lands at one time, because the LORD, the God of Israel, fought for Israel. (Joshua 10:40 - 42)

 What is true for Joshua is true for Moses.  It’s important to consider Moses because he was the human strategist who gave Joshua direction.  In Deuteronomy 7, Moses says, in hyperbolic language, “You shall utterly destroy them.”  Then, in the next breath, he speaks of the ongoing presence of Canaanites, warning them about intermarriage, etc.

Evidence of Ongoing Canaanite Presence

3 Furthermore, you shall not intermarry with them; you shall not give your daughters to their sons, nor shall you take their daughters for your sons.  4 For they will turn your sons away from following Me to serve other gods; then the anger of the LORD will be kindled against you and He will quickly destroy you.  5 But thus you shall do to them: you shall tear down their altars, and smash their sacred pillars, and hew down their Asherim, and burn their graven images with fire. (Deuteronomy 7:3 - 5)

Exaggerated Military Victory Language

1 When the LORD your God brings you into the land where you are entering to possess it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and stronger than you, 2 and when the LORD your God delivers them before you and you defeat them, then you shall utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them and show no favor to them. (Deuteronomy 7:1 - 2)

From the outset, then, Moses envisioned a slow, gradual process of co-existence with the Canaanites, including receiving Canaanite converts (see below).  Neither God nor Moses commanded a total, “genocidal” war to eradicate the whole population of Canaanites:  “I will drive them out before you little by little, until you become fruitful and take possession of the land.” (Exodus 23:30)  In fact, Moses envisioned the Canaanites leaving houses, vineyards, cisterns, trees, and lands strangely intact (Deuteronomy 6:10 - 11).  The only way this would have happened is if the Canaanites had been already somewhat depopulated to begin with, and then either abandoned their dwellings or joined Israel outright. 

So Joshua’s action reflects Moses’ intention, and the Book of Joshua is at pains to point this out.  It bears repeating that Joshua is portrayed as the most faithful reader and interpreter of Moses:  “This book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth; you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to act in accordance with all that is written in it” (Joshua 1:8).  Four times in a very dense summary passage of Joshua’s military victories, the phrase “just as Moses the servant of the LORD had commanded,” or an equivalent phrase, occurs (Joshua 11:12, 15, 20, 23).  Joshua never engaged in actual “complete annihilation” because Moses never intended that in the first place.  Notice that Joshua’s enemies were not civilians, but military enemies led by “kings” stationed in cities (Joshua 11:5, 10 - 23).  And by the time of King Solomon, there were still Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and Jebusites remaining in the land, co-existing with Israel (2 Chronicles 8:7).  Joshua serves as the canonical interpreter of Moses’ words and the meaning conveyed by them.  If there was any doubt that Moses understood his own words this way, Joshua removes them.

More biblical evidence against the total genocide theory can be seen in three places.  First, in the Midianite-Israelite battles, only Midianite fighting men were killed initially, which seems to reflect the standard understanding of battle; women and children were spared and taken captive (Numbers 31:7 - 12).  Female Midianite seductresses were later killed, too.  But this circumstance was credited to the fact that mature Midianite women had heeded Balaam’s advice and knowingly caused Israelite men to sin and break the Sinai covenant and bring the covenantal wrath of God upon Israel (Numbers 31:13 - 18).  Notably, Moses ordered the military leaders to spare Midianite females who had not slept with Israelite men.  Some of those were assigned to work with the Levites, and presumably to intermarry with them, and to assist in the care of the tabernacle sanctuary (Numbers 31:41 - 47). 

Second, the law concerning female captives of war assumes that captives are spared and taken and even, on occasion, freed (Deuteronomy 21:10 - 14), despite the language of “utter destruction” previously given.  The combination of narrative and case law indicates that Israel regularly followed “ordinary” conventions of war involving male combatants only. 

Third, the later Book of Kings recalls a battle between Israel and Edom with hyperbolic language that is immediately qualified in the very next verse.

14 Then the Lord raised up an adversary against Solomon, Hadad the Edomite; he was of the royal house in Edom. 15 For when David was destroying Edom and Joab the commander of the army went up to bury the dead, he killed every male in Edom 16 (for Joab and all Israel remained there six months until he had eliminated every male in Edom), 15 but Hadad fled to Egypt with some Edomites who were servants of his father. He was a young boy at that time. (1 Kings 11:14 - 17) 

Notably, the narrator saw no contradiction between saying that David’s general, Joab, “killed every male in Edom” and immediately noting an exception:  Hadad and presumably others in a party of nobles who fled to Egypt.  Also, contra the total genocide theory, the biblical narrator could say that “David was destroying Edom” by killing only the men, not the women and children.  The same figures of speech are used on other occasions:  the narrator, when describing how “the whole house of Ahab shall perish,” meant “every male person” (2 Kings 9:8); when saying that the king of Aram “had destroyed [Israel] and made them like dust at threshing,” meant there remained “not more than fifty horsemen and ten chariots and 10,000 footmen” (2 Kings 13:7); and when saying that God sent gentile armies under Nebuchadnezzar “against Judah to destroy it” (2 Kings 24:2), obviously meant defeat, but not death to all.  The hyperbolic language of Kings matches that of the Pentateuch.

The Midianites will not be heard from again, but it is significant that the type of warfare Israel was commissioned to do and then did involved sparing the innocent, taking them captives, and incorporating them into Israel.  However, Moses commanded Joshua “to utterly wipe out” the Amalekite, which grammatically is the doubling of the Hebrew word machah, done for emphasis and stress.  But first, we need to observe a theological point about community and the incorporation of enemies.

The Bigger Story on “Enemies”

Another important factor in reading, or for that matter quoting from, the battle stories of the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament concerns the openness of Israel to peacemaking and conversion.  The old adage attributed to multiple sources holds true here:  The best way to kill your enemies is to make them your friends.  In Scripture, God is portrayed as doing this.  When a gentile converted into Israel, his or her past identity as a gentile, and usually an enemy of Israel, came to an end.  Two data points in the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament and two from the New Testament suffice to illustrate the pattern and its significance.

First, the literary high point of the Book of Joshua is neither the victories over Jericho and Ai (Joshua 1 - 8) nor the apportioning of the land (Joshua 12 - 24).  It is the conversion of a particular group:  the Hivites of Gibeon (Joshua 9 - 11).  This story occupies the center of the narrative. 

The Gibeonites’ conversion, such as it was, qualified as a substitute for their destruction.  God and Moses commanded Israel to make no covenants with the Hivites, who were among the seven nations under such a ban (Deuteronomy 7:2).  The Hivites of Gibeon, however, deceived Joshua and the Israelites about their identity, but swore to a covenant in the name of “the LORD, the God of Israel.”  When the truth was revealed, Joshua prioritized the covenant over the previous ban.  And when the kings of other city-states attacked Gibeon, God instructed Joshua to defend the Gibeonites, culminating in the defeat of Hazor.  The Gibeonites became hewers of wood and carriers of water for Israel and for the altar of Israel’s sanctuary.  Thematically, from a Christian perspective, this comes close to how the gentiles in Christ Jesus would become servants of God’s sanctuary (Ephesians 2:11 - 22), co-heirs with Jews in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 3:6).  If the Gibeonites at the time accepted circumcision, which is unknown, then they became fully Israelite.  Regardless, the narrative of Joshua indicates that their peace treaty and/or conversion were an acceptable substitute for their destruction.  It is significant that the biblical texts never go in the other direction:  They never accept destruction as a substitute for conversion.

Second, the same principle of conversion substituting for destruction occurs with the Edomites, the descendants of Esau, in Amos and Obadiah.  Both prophets prophesied the destruction of Edom, with Amos seemingly referring to the Amalekites (Exodus 17:8 - 16) under the banner of his grandfather Esau-Edom:   

Thus says the Lord: For three transgressions of Edom, and for four, I will not revoke the punishment, because he pursued his brother with the sword and cast off all pity; he maintained his anger perpetually and kept his wrath forever. (Amos 1:11)

There shall be no survivor of the house of Esau (Obadiah 1:18). 

However, the apparent destruction of the Edomites is qualified by the prophecy of Amos 9:11 - 12, which qualifies Amos 1:11 and is placed immediately before Obadiah: 

On that day I will raise up the booth of David that is fallen and repair its breaches and raise up its ruins and rebuild it as in the days of old, in order that they may possess the remnant of Edom and all the nations who are called by my name, says the Lord who does this. (Amos 9:11 - 12) 

This is notable because what Amos himself said would not be revoked (Amos 1:11) becomes continuous with becoming the “possession” of the “booth of David.”  In the messianic era, God will repair the fallen kingly line of David, and the Davidic king will “possess” the remnant of Edom along with other nations (e.g. Psalm 2:8).

Biblical scholar John H. Sailhamer studies compositional seams and other literary features of the books of the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament.  He points out that the placement of Amos and Obadiah together, as part of what is considered to be the singular “Book of the Twelve Minor Prophets,” contains one such compositional seam:  the destiny of the Edomites.  Amos’ vision of Edom concludes the prophecy of Amos, and Obadiah’s poem is placed immediately afterwards on the seam of the topic of “Edom.”[17]  Sailhamer notes, “At this point we should recall that the Book of Amos is followed in the canonical sequence by the Book of Obadiah… Israel's possession of Edom is taken as a sign of Edom’s (humanity’s) membership in God’s Kingdom… Viewed contextually with the Book of Amos, the Book of Obadiah sheds much light on the imagery of Amos 9:12, Israel's possession of the remnant of Edom in the days of the restored Davidic Kingdom.”[18]

Third, the New Testament, to describe conversion to Christ Jesus, draws upon and connects both the language of ending hostility towards God and the language of death and resurrection.  This observation and the one below, while directly relevant to Christians, should still be of interest to Jews because of its rootedness in the Hebrew texts.  Paul does this, for example, in Romans 5:1 - 6:11 and Colossians 1:19 - 2:15, and to some degree 1 Corinthians 10:1 - 13 and 12:1 - 2, with 5:1 - 13 in the background.  This semantic and conceptual linkage comes from the prior pattern in the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament.  How does God kill his enemies?  By making them His friends - in the messianic king, Jesus. 

Fourth, Luke narrates that the earliest council of Christian leaders, which was held in Jerusalem, understood and deployed Amos 9:11 - 12 as an explanation of the mission to the gentiles (Acts 15:15 - 17).  This connection is reinforced not just by Jesus’ claim to be the son of David who restored the “fallen booth” of the Davidic line, but also the role of Esau, father of the Edomites, as brother of Jacob, father of the Israelites.  Also, the apostles seem to be using a pun in the style of Jewish midrash:  In Hebrew, “Edom” has the same consonants as “Adam.”  To the Council of Jerusalem, the Edomites represent all gentile humanity in principle.

Biblical scholar Kenneth E. Bailey calls attention to this fact, as well as its connection to the apostle Paul and his ministry in Corinth.  Paul was present at the Council of Jerusalem, which occurred about 49 - 50 AD, went to Corinth in 51 AD, spent eighteen months there, and wrote 1 Corinthians around 53 AD from Ephesus.  Bailey argues compellingly that Paul deliberately structures 1 Corinthians around the Book of Amos and uses literary features from it.[19]  Germane to the topic at hand is that Paul, in 1 Corinthians, says that gentile Christians are no longer gentiles (1 Corinthians 12:1 - 2) and inherit Israel’s story, a story which includes Israel’s wilderness wandering and struggle against their gentile opponents at that time (1 Corinthians 10:1 - 13).  In other words, Paul considers these Christians of gentile background fully “descendants of Abraham,” too.  The later “descendants of Abraham” who enter into that status in and through Jesus and by his Spirit share in the inheritance of Abraham’s descendants through participation in Jesus, which is already understood as encompassing the whole world.  Paul’s framework for gentile inclusion in Jesus is continuous with the use of Genesis 15:18 already established by the Pentateuch and Isaiah.  Again, if anything, God’s early promise to Abraham (Genesis 12:1 - 3 and 15:18) concerning “his descendants” and their inheritance is analogous to a human will written before all the children are born.  Just because more children enter into the picture after the will was written does not mean that they should be read out of the will.

The rhetoric of Christian theologian Peter Leithart is particularly problematic in light of this inner-biblical connection between Amos 9, Acts 15, and 1 Corinthians.  When Leithart argues that Hamas and others are like the Amalekites of old on account of their military tactics, he overlooks and downplays the fact that the Amalekites were descendants of Edom, encompassed by messianic promise, and invited into it.  If Amos-Obadiah said that the messianic king would possess the Edomites, and if no less a Christian authority than the Council of Jerusalem assigned the Edomites, and all of gentile humanity, to Messiah Jesus under the banner of Amos 9:11 - 12, then we must conclude that Leithart’s reading of the Bible, put gently, is piecemeal and does not reflect a canonical sensibility.  Put bluntly, Leithart’s thought runs contrary to the first gathered council of all the apostles.  Leithart undercuts true Christian witness to the scope of Jesus’ love, compromises the mission of Jesus, and undermines the authority of the apostles.

This literary pattern in Scripture where gentile inclusion substitutes for destruction indicates a fact that complements the patterns I noted earlier.  As I argued above, God needed a covenant community as His human partner to undo the fall’s damage on human nature because of His loving commitment to human partnership.  While God needed to defend that community’s presence in the holy land at times, when God took human life, both through “natural causes” and special action, both inside Israel and outside it, He was not consigning people to hell, but placing them in a type of coma until Jesus offered himself to them.  Therefore, God’s justice towards those gentiles, taken as both individuals and communities bearing the same name over time, was restorative, not retributive.  Moreover, God’s goal throughout can be seen as calling for more participation and membership, not less, especially through the role of the messianic king of the Jews, the greatest Son of David. 

With these understandings, we are now prepared to assess the invocation of Amalekites against Hamas, especially that of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.  We must first carefully examine the biblical account of this conflict.

Even the Amalekites?  Yes, Even Them

Moses and later biblical writers used the same hyperbolic language about the Amalekites as they did for the Canaanites.  The Amalekites were portrayed by the Bible as a nomadic nation that seems to have dominated the Sinai peninsula, along with the northern part of the modern desert of et-Tih (Numbers 13:29; 14:25) and southern Palestine with the Canaanites (Genesis 14:7).  Their eponymous ancestor, Amalek, was the grandson of Esau, the brother of Jacob.  His father was Eliphaz, firstborn son of Esau; his mother was Timna, the concubine of Eliphaz (Genesis 36:12, 15).  Some rabbis assert that the name “Amalek” means “those who lick,” presumably blood, suggesting an association to wild dogs,[20] and Christian bishop Augustine of Hippo claimed that the name Amalek meant “a sinful people,”[21] but otherwise the name’s etymological meaning is unknown.

The Amalekites occupy an enduringly negative place in Jewish thought.  When God first brought Israel out of Egypt, the Amalekites were the first to attack them in this vulnerable state (Exodus 17:8 - 16), killing stragglers (Deuteronomy 25:18).  For this ruthless act, the Pentateuch records, “The LORD said to Moses, ‘I will utterly blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven’ … And Moses said, ‘...The Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation.’” (Exodus 17:14 - 16).  And in his parting words, Moses commands this:

17 Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey out of Egypt, 18 how he attacked you on the way, when you were faint and weary, and struck down all who lagged behind you; he did not fear God. 19 Therefore when the Lord your God has given you rest from all your enemies on every hand, in the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess, you shall blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; do not forget. (Deuteronomy 25:17 - 19)

 Jewish and Christian interpreters have puzzled over the fact that the Pentateuch instructs people to both remember Amalek forever and blot out the remembrance of Amalek even though it is now enshrined in Scripture itself.  The post-biblical tradition that emerges from this is noteworthy, and I will consider these expressions, below. 

Of interest is the fact that the Pentateuch puts into the mouth of Balaam the seer a prophecy of the “star [that] shall come out of Jacob, a scepter from Israel” considered to be a Messianic prophecy, and how that “star” will, with varying literary expressions, defeat his foes.  He will “crush the foreheads of Moab and the heads of all the Shethites,” make Edom “a possession,” “destroy the survivors of Ir,” and cause Amalek to “perish forever” (Numbers 24:15 - 20).

During the period of the judges, when the Israelites co-existed with other nations and frequently adopted their ways and worship, God “used” those other nations to attack and pressure Israel to worship Him again.  The Amalekites appear as mercenaries who help other leaders and peoples attack Israel.  Eglon, king of Moab recruits Ammonites and Amalekites to subdue the Israelites for eighteen years (Judges 3:13); in turn, the Israelites cried out to God and God raised up Ehud the judge to kill King Eglon and free the Israelites from Moab. 

Later, the Amalekites assisted the Midianites in harassing Israel and destroying their crops in Gaza, impoverishing them (Judges 6:1 - 6).  God called Gideon to be a judge and deliverer.  In describing the battle, the narrator notably uses hyperbolic expression for its magnitude:  “Then all the Midianites and the Amalekites and the people of the east came together” (Judges 6:33, italics mine), demonstrating once again that the authors of Scripture were in the regular habit of using hyperbolic expressions for battles.

These habits of speech and narration pertain to the story of Agag, king of the Amalekites.  The prophet Samuel commanded King Saul with the same hyperbolic language Moses gave about the seven Canaanite nations:

2 Thus says the Lord of hosts: I will punish the Amalekites for what they did in opposing the Israelites when they came up out of Egypt. 3 Now go and attack Amalek and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey. (1 Samuel 15:2 - 3). 

Significantly, the narrator asserts that King Saul was victorious over the Amalekites, and uses hyperbolic expression to describe it: 

7 Saul defeated the Amalekites, from Havilah as far as Shur, which is east of Egypt. 8 He took King Agag of the Amalekites alive but utterly destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword.  9 Saul and the people spared Agag and the best of the sheep and of the cattle and of the fatted calves, and the lambs, and all that was valuable and would not utterly destroy them; all that was despised and worthless they utterly destroyed. (1 Samuel 15:7 - 9) 

All this sounds like a centuries-long feud and a grisly vendetta.  But, as with the Canaanites, the underlying meaning conveyed by those words was quite different.  Although the Jewish commentator Rashi (1040 - 1105) would later suggest that the ban on livestock was because the Amalekites were sorcerers who could transform themselves into animals,[22] the simpler explanation is that this ban eliminated a materialistic motivation both collectively and individually.  The ban on taking wealth in the form of livestock and goods carried over from the days of Joshua (Joshua 7:1 - 26).

Regarding people, if we take the narrator’s language as if this were a modern military headcount report, then there should be no Amalekites left, including Amalekite women.  However, King Agag’s mother might have survived.  So did a very large fighting force which later provoked a crisis for David (1 Samuel 30).  We infer the possibility of Agag’s mother surviving because just before the prophet Samuel himself executed King Agag, Samuel said to him, “As your sword has made women childless, so your mother shall be childless among women” (1 Samuel 15:33). 

Was the prophet Samuel using hyperbolic poetry rather than stating historical fact?  After all, how would Samuel know whether Agag’s mother was alive or dead, or had no other children?  As a comparison point, Jeremiah poetically deployed the figure of the bereaved mother:  Rachel as a mother weeping for her children evoked the tragedy of Israel going into the Babylonian exile (Jeremiah 31:15).  Possibly, Samuel’s last words to King Agag were literary and not literal.  But our basis for considering this possibility stands or falls on the evidence that the figure of a bereaved mother was a known literary convention.  Meaning, we need a comparison point in addition to reasonable inferences about how literary expressions work.

However, the bite of Samuel’s statement rests on King Agag previously leaving Israelite mothers alive but bereaved of mature male children.  In other words, apparently both sides respected conventional limits in war.  Limits in war are strongly suggested by another Amalekite-Israelite battle involving a large Amalekite force narrated in 1 Samuel 30 (see below).  Such limits are also strongly suggested by other biblical evidence I previously considered:  the Midianite-Israelite battles where only Midianite fighting men were killed, although female seductresses were killed later, unusually, for a specific and uncommon reason (Numbers 31:7 - 18); the law concerning female captives of war (Deuteronomy 21:10 - 14) despite the “utter destruction” directive (Deuteronomy 7:1 - 2) attests to women, and presumably children, being spared as a matter of course; the actual unfolding of the Canaanite-Israelite battles (Joshua 2 - 8) attest to military men in military fortresses being the focal point; the Gibeonite treaty and incorporation (Joshua 9 - 11) attests to “utter destruction” being a hyperbolic expression inclusive of the destruction of hostility but not people; and the narrator of the Book of Joshua ascribing to the character Joshua the authoritative, canonical interpretation of Moses’ prior commands, where Joshua interprets ordinary “victory” and not “total genocide” to be the meaning underlying the hyperbolic “utter destruction” phrase. 

Could this mean that only Amalekite male warriors were killed in 1 Samuel 15, despite “utter destruction” being the directive?  Absolutely.  For the prophet Samuel seems to have been operating on the same premise and seems to have spoken in a way that reflects that.  And what is important here is that Samuel as a character was the very same person who gave the command to “utterly destroy all… both man and woman.”  Yet Samuel the prophet gives the strong impression that Agag’s mother survived, and may have even been there as a prisoner of war right there to witness the events.  And, the very same narrator who composed or redacted the Book of Samuel and reports in narrator’s voice that Saul “utterly destroyed all the people” excepting King Agag, also suggests that King Agag’s mother lived on bereaved while also showing without doubt that a large fighting force continued.  Apparently, neither the character Samuel nor the biblical narrator nor the final editor of the Book of Samuel saw a contradiction in these statements.  That is consistent with all the biblical data to this point.

In fact, as mentioned above, some years later, a large force of Amalekites carried off a fairly sophisticated attack that indicated large numbers and logically required it.  An Amalekite force attacked both Philistines and Israelites on the southern border of Philistine and Judean territories.  Those Amakelites invaded the Judean areas of the Negev and Ziklag, burning the town of Ziklag and carrying its people into captivity (1 Samuel 30:1 - 2).  David led a response and was victorious.  But the Amalekite numbers must have been significant,  David’s original fighting force tallied six hundred men (1 Samuel 30:9).  That fact is also important here, because it means that the Amalekites’ original force must have been much larger to corral and kidnap women, children, livestock, and goods corresponding to a force of six hundred fighting men.

Moreover, the biblical narrator points out divine assistance on two counts, and the fact that God limits David’s campaign is very significant to both estimating the size of the Amalekite force, and also interpreting past divine directives.  First, divine assistance is found in the fact that David consulted God in prayer, and God limited the campaign’s objective to rescuing the Israelites, not complete destruction of the Amalekites (1 Samuel 30:7 - 8).  Rescue is a markedly different goal than death to the last man, literally.  Second, divine assistance is evident in the battle’s outcome:  “David attacked them from twilight until the evening of the next day.  Not one of them escaped, except four hundred young men, who mounted camels and fled.” (1 Samuel 30:17)  David defeated the Amalekites quite roundly with a force of only four hundred men (1 Samuel 30:10).  And if a force of four hundred Amalekite warriors escaped on camels, then the narration surely indicates that four hundred was a small percentage of their original fighting force (1 Samuel 30:18).  By these clues, narrated in non-hyperbolic fashion, the narrator of Samuel tells readers that the Amalekite force was quite a bit larger than that, not too long after Saul supposedly meted out “utter destruction” to the Amalekites in 1 Samuel 15, a phrase we can now only interpret as hyperbolic.

Another incident involving David is significant.  One more Amalekite man professed to a mercy killing of King Saul at Saul’s request, and David ordered another to slay him, not because he was an Amalekite, but because he killed the anointed king (2 Samuel 1:5 - 10; cf. 4:5 - 12).  David presumably understood what Samuel had said about defeating the Amalekites, and what Moses had said before that.  But David’s goal at Ziklag was not death to all Amalekites, only rescue of the people, animals, and goods taken captive, which was a directive from God given in prayer (1 Samuel 30:7 - 8).  And David’s goal at Saul’s death was not death to all Amalekites per se, but honoring Saul’s role as king, notably despite Saul’s own request for a quick death.  David’s role as canonical interpreter of past directives is very important here, just as Joshua’s role as canonical interpreter of Moses’ past directives is important, just as Moses’ role as canonical interpreter of his own words.  From an inner-biblical or canonical standpoint, it is quite decisive.

Subsequently, the biblical record on the Amalekites indicates their survival for some centuries.  The Book of Chronicles asserts that, in the days of King Hezekiah, some three hundred years after David, five hundred men of the tribe of Simeon “destroyed the remnant of the Amalekites who had escaped” (1 Chronicles 4:43).  Some interpreters read this statement as the Amalekites becoming extinct and passing into memory.  This, too, may or may not have been hyperbolic.  For yet again, in the Book of Esther, the villainous Haman was called an “Agagite” (Esther 3:1) meaning a descendant of Amalekite King Agag from 1 Samuel 15.  While some interpreters view “Agagite” as an association based on shared hostility rather than a genealogy, Targum Sheni and Josephus held that Haman was a genealogical descendant of King Agag, and therefore an Amalekite.[23]  The matter remains uncertain, given the fondness of the human authors of Scripture for hyperbolic language for military battles.  But if Haman was a descendant of Agag, then he would be the last Amalekite noted in Scripture, and Esther defeating him would be a bit like Jael defeating Sisera in Judges 4.  If Haman was an ideological descendant of Agag, then he would be the first such opponent in Israel’s new exilic condition.  I will say more about the importance of Esther in the next chapter.

What Does the Bible Say About What the Bible Said?  Again

The Amalekite-Israelite encounters in 1 Samuel 30, 2 Samuel 1, 1 Chronicles 4, and possibly Esther 3 all have a bearing on how we interpret the prophet Samuel’s last words to King Agag about leaving his mother bereaved of children in 1 Samuel 15.  Consider again how we as readers of this text weigh these options as we interpret Samuel’s last words to Agag.  If one is inclined to think that King Agag’s mother was simply a figure of speech and not “bare” historical fact, then one must also consider the language of “utter destruction” to be quite firmly established as literary hyperbole rather than “bare” historical fact.  For there is far more literary evidence inside and outside the Bible to indicate that “utter destruction” does not mean an all out, no holds barred, genocide without mercy.  The preponderance of evidence is quite decisive.  Now, perhaps we might decide that both King Agag’s mother and the directive of “utter destruction” are literary and not literal expressions.  That would be one way to approach these questions, though I am more inclined to view Agag’s bereaved mother as literal and the military victory directive as literary.  But it would be quite unjustifiable to argue that King Agag’s mother is a literary figure of speech, while insisting that “utter destruction” is literal. 

All the evidence taken together indicates that both Amalekites and Israelites observed ordinary conventions of war - meaning, women and children were not actually killed in battle.  In fact, if women and children non-combatants were routinely incorporated into Israel, which of course raises other questions and concerns that are important but cannot be addressed here, then the rhetorical and figurative force of “utter destruction” of an enemy has more lexical range than simply “death by combat.”  The ancient Israelite audience understood other ordinary conventions of behavior that limited their actions and shaped how they heard hyperbolic speech about victory.  A resounding victory can be had by military means, but perhaps an even more resounding victory can be had by incorporation.  If we today urge the modern Israeli government to exercise restraint towards the Palestinian civilian population so as to not radicalize them into Hamas’ hardened anti-Israel position, it does matter that we perceive the same basic goal represented in the biblical narrative. Enemies can be “utterly destroyed” by destroying the reason for their hostility, and making them into friends.

For purposes of understanding the importance of methodology in Bible reading, Bible quoting, and biblical interpretation, however, the point is clear:  Warfare commands, categorically, in the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament are another example of the importance of inner-biblical or canonical interpretation.  How did the Bible interpret itself?  Or, what does the Bible say about what the Bible said?  Concerning Canaanites, Joshua recognized the hyperbolic language of Moses’ instruction but understood Moses’ true meaning.  Concerning Amalekites, the prophet Samuel certainly understood his own hyperbolic language and his own meaning, as did David and the subsequent biblical narrators.  They give every indication of hearing a meaning under the phrase “utter destruction” different from how we moderns hear it.  Note that these conclusions can be reached even before considering Jesus and the New Testament as authoritative. 

Many assume that only with the inclusion of Jesus does the Bible move from “the enemy without” to “the enemy within.”  In fact, there is already a convergence of themes happening in the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament between Israel and Israel’s enemies before Jesus enters the scene.  Moses told the people of Israel that exile is certain; the only question was when it will happen (Deuteronomy 27 - 28); an internal heart-level problem must be resolved within the Israelites (Deuteronomy 10:16; 30:6).  Joshua told the people that they will not be able to serve God (Joshua 24:19 - 22).  In the Book of Psalms, David prayed for God to deliver him from his enemies (Psalm 3), then realized that he was also God’s enemy, at least at times (Psalm 32, 51; cf. 2 Samuel 11 - 12).  Jeremiah and Ezekiel told Israel that they have hearts with a sin-script written on them (Jeremiah 17:1 - 10) and that needs God to write over it (Jeremiah 31:31 - 34), and that their hearts were hardened like stone and needs a responsive heart of flesh instead (Ezekiel 11:18; 36:26 - 36).  Israel is Israel’s enemy.  One can almost say vice versa:  Israel’s enemy is almost Israel.  That includes the Amalekites. 

Indeed, Rabbi Shai Held, in a contemporary article called “The Enemy Within” for My Jewish Learning, makes a critical observation about Moses’ words in Deuteronomy 25:18:

But if we read closely, we come upon a magnificent textual ambiguity (which is clear in the Hebrew, but difficult to capture in translation). In describing the scenario under which Amalek attacks Israel, the text tells us that one of the parties “did not fear God” (velo yerei e-lohim).

This phrase is usually… taken to refer to Amalek: Amalek is undeterred by fear of God, so it allows itself acts of unspeakable savagery. But it can just as easily be understood to refer to Israel; it is Israel who fails to fear God in our story. How so? If Amalek is able to attack the stragglers in the rear, then somehow the weak and exhausted have been left vulnerable and exposed.

The Jewish people have just experienced the Exodus, the fundamental lesson of which is to love and protect the vulnerable–and here is a segment of the people left totally unprotected and exposed to violent danger. So neither Amalek nor Israel seems to truly fear God: The one because it attacks the weak, the other because it fails to protect them.

[...]

Self-awareness, even and perhaps especially of our darker sides, is the key to our freedom; to bring the monster into view is no longer to be enslaved by it. Thus, we are commanded to blot out the kind of evil inhumanity that Amalek represents. How? By remaining constantly aware–no matter how unpleasant–of the Amalekite possibilities inherent in each of us. Thus, the Hasidic master Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev tells us that we must all struggle with the “bad part called Amalek which lies hidden in our heart.” Rather than kill other people, we are beckoned to struggle with the deepest ugliness than lies within us.[24]

Held’s observation about Deuteronomy 25:18 is critically important.  The story of the Amalekite attack (Exodus 17:8 - 16) is preceded by the Israelites’ panic about water and quarreling with Moses and God (Exodus 17:1 - 7).  And in that story, God told Moses, “Go on ahead of the people” to strike the rock and bring forth water from it.  If Moses went ahead of the people to supply water for them, then the impression Held has about some vulnerable people being left behind unprotected is entirely justified.  Those who could move forward did.  They “cut in line,” so to speak, because of their lack of faith. 

Furthermore, the Amalekites attacked Israel for the same reasons that serpents attacked Israel later.  The episode in Exodus 17 has a narrative mirror image and doubling in Numbers 20 - 21.  This narrative doubling reinforces the cause-effect link between quarreling and being attacked.  A preliminary note about the relationship between Exodus 1 - 18 and Numbers 1 - 36:  The mirroring and doubling is a structural component of the Pentateuch narrative.  In Exodus 1 - 18, Israel journeys from Egypt through the wilderness to Mount Sinai.  In Numbers 1 - 36, Israel journeys from Mount Sinai through the wilderness to the promised garden land, twice - once with the first generation who failed (Numbers 13 - 14), and once more by the second generation who would succeed (Numbers 33:50 - 36:13).[25]  Numbers 1 - 36 parallels and doubles events in Exodus 1 - 18 because the second generation of Israelites has to take the place of their parents, learning the same lessons but choosing more faithfully.

That several narrative elements in Exodus 17, therefore, are mirrored and doubled in Numbers 20 - 21 strongly suggests that Israel’s sin of quarreling about water and food led to them being attacked.  The Israelites “quarreled” (Exodus 17:7) with Moses about water; Moses struck a rock and God poured forth water.  They “quarreled” about water and food again (Numbers 20:3), and God wanted Moses to draw forth water from another rock by speaking to it, although Moses struck it.  Soon after that, Israel spoke against Moses and God one more time, even complaining about the manna (Numbers 21:5).  The fact that they spoke against God in Numbers 21:5 as opposed to calling out to him in faith seems to be influenced by Moses’ personal failure to speak to God via the rock because they were denied an opportunity to see Moses, as their role model, simply speak to God.  Be that as it may, in response, God sent venomous serpents to attack the Israelites as a judgment.  This serpents’ attack paralleled the Amalekites’ attack, lending more support to Held’s thesis.

God’s provision for Israel’s victory were similar between the two stories, giving more credence to the parallel and to Held’s argument about the true significance of the Amalekites.  When the Amalekites attacked, Moses sat on a stone and lifted his arms with his staff to give Israel military victory over them (Exodus 17:9 - 13).  The second episode is similar to the first.  When the serpents attacked, Moses lifted the bronze serpent on the pole as a healing victory over the serpents’ venom (Numbers 21:6 - 9). 

Even Moses’ unique staff is separated from Moses’ role and God’s work in a way that connects the stories.  In Exodus 17:6, Moses struck the rock with his staff; in Numbers 20:8, he was supposed to hold his staff and speak to the rock without striking it; in Numbers 21:8, he used a common “pole” instead of his staff.  Why was that narrative development important from a spiritual standpoint?  Because Israel had to learn that Moses’ staff was not magical in itself (compare 2 Kings 18:4).  Moses would die soon, like Miriam (Numbers 20:1) and Aaron (Numbers 20:20 - 29) had just died.  Israel had to mourn their unique leaders and receive the more common people and institutions that would replace them.  Although these stories differ in this curious detail, the differences show without a doubt that the stories are connected.  God wanted to separate Moses’ staff and even Moses the man from His own miraculous power for the sake of the second generation of Israelites.

More can be said, but we have enough material to link the Amalekite attack in Exodus 17 and the serpents’ attack in Numbers 21 to show us the significance of the former.  Amalek’s attack was God’s response to Israel’s faithless grumbling about food and water, and the implied sin of the strong leaving behind the weak out of their faithless greed for water.  Rabbi Held’s careful reading of Deuteronomy 25:18 is correct.

The resolution of the Israelite-Amalekite conflict, then, is not external, but internal.  The conflict must resolve in a struggle with the enemy within both the Israelites and the Amalekites.  In fact, I believe that tracing this interpretive path through the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament is important for its own sake to suggest how Jesus of Nazareth would have learned, weighed, and understood all this material in a human process of learning; I do not at all believe that the teaching of Jesus and the apostles simply appear out of nowhere to supplant the vision and ethics of the Sinai covenant on the basis of Jesus’ claim to divinity, as if the human mind of Jesus did not depend on the Scripture he inherited.  And the seemingly contradictory commands to wipe out the memory of Amalek but not forget Amalek can be resolved by wiping out one’s own tendency to leave stragglers behind, or other impacts of sin, but not forgetting the sin per se or its effects.

Since I am a Christian, I consider the material and conclusions above sufficient to deny that “genocide” was God’s intent towards the Amalekites for history, and to deny that hell was His intent towards them for eternity.  However, since I seek to both confirm my interpretations and also engage Jewish thought on its own terms, I will explore the Jewish tradition that developed from the Hebrew Bible.

Does the Jewish post-biblical tradition give evidence of “the Amalek within”?  Yes.  The Talmud does.  The Talmud is considered to be the authoritative collection of writings for Judaism for centuries, which includes (1) the written Scripture, (2) the Mishnah or oral Torah put to writing around 200 CE, and (3) commentary called the Gemara written around 400 - 500 CE.  In the Talmud, the “seed of Amalek” is an internal disposition:   

Never will the throne of God - the Lord of Truth, Justice, and Love - be fully established until the seed of Amalek - the principle of hatred and wrongdoing - be destroyed forever.[26] 

This talmudic insight commissions each person to engage in an internal struggle. 

The Talmud also says that Sennacherib, king of Assyria from 705 - 681 BCE, “scrambled all the nations and settled other nations” in the places once occupied by others.[27]  The rabbi associated with this remark, Rabbi Yehoshua, cites Isaiah 10:13 as his authority.  This Talmudic principle, involving the prophecy of Isaiah and directly addressing a question about Ammonites, implies that the descendants of Amalek are no longer an entity or are intermarried with other peoples so as to be extinct.

One of the best observers of Scripture in the Jewish tradition, the medieval Sephardic sage Maimonides (1138 - 1204), offered that the “seed of Amalek” had not yet been wiped out but otherwise confirmed all the points I asserted above. Maimonides said that Israel’s primary vocation was not to physically put to death all Amalekites but to receive converts from all nations, including Amalekites.[28]  He said treaty-making was sufficient for “destroying” an enemy; he said that the commandment to destroy Amalek could be satisfied by Amalekites peacefully accepting the “seven laws of Noah” and paying a tribute tax to the Jewish kingdom.[29]  Maimonides’ position is consistent with both the Talmudic statement - that Amalek is a disposition - and also Scripture - most of all, the precedent-making stories of the Gibeonites in Joshua 9 - 11 making a treaty with Joshua, and the innocent among the Midianites being incorporated into Israel in Numbers 31:41 - 47.  In his Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides explains that the command to wipe out Amalek isn’t an expression of hatred for an ethnicity, but based on “removing Amalek-like behavior from the world.”[30]  Maimonides agrees that Amalek is an inward human disposition in each person that needs to be destroyed by each person.  That conviction is also central to Jesus and Christian teaching.  Maimonides’ comments bear a remarkable resemblance to the numerous passages in the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament on how gentiles might pledge themselves to the Davidic king and become his “possession.”  Of all the Jewish positions that I have encountered on the Amalek question, Maimonides’ position most explicitly parallels the Christian understanding of gentiles coming to Jesus of Nazareth as the Messianic Heir of David, using Psalms 2, 72,  and 110, Isaiah 9, 11, and 42, Micah 5, Zechariah 9, and so forth. 

In Appendix A, I will explore more layers of the Jewish tradition’s interpretive strata, i.e. the Mishnah and Talmud and some of what followed, on the topic of the Amalekites.  The tradition that emerged also shows that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s use of the “Amalekites” as a trope is inappropriate.

Netanyahu’s Use of “Amalekites”

By contrast, consider the rhetoric of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Reformed theologian Peter Leithart, noted above, about “Amalekites.”  They argue that the modern State of Israel should pursue Hamas, a group estimated to be 30,000 - 40,000 men, like the Amalekites of old, for Hamas’ brutal attack on Israeli citizens on October 7, 2023. They deploy this trope from the Bible as a justification for pursuing a policy of full extermination of Hamas, which is not what the biblical text meant.  Netanyahu said this while carpet-bombing northern Gaza, jeopardizing over two hundred hostages and inflicting massive civilian casualties and displacement on the 2.2 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, 47 percent of whom are children, and making an enormous swath of Gaza uninhabitable. 

When criticized, Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders responded by blaming Hamas for using children as human shields.  However, Gaza has a population density as high as Hong Kong because it was designed as such by the very policies of the State of Israel since 1948.  Israel fully contains the Palestinians of Gaza. 

Even more damaging for Netanyahu is the fact that the Israeli Prime Minister long funded Hamas as a rival group to the Palestinian Authority, so that Hamas’ activities in Gaza would disrupt a peaceful two-state solution while he supported illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.  After October 7th, Israeli newspapers Times of Israel[31] and Haaretz[32]published scathing criticisms of Netanyahu’s decades-long policy: a policy that many commentators called the “Netanyahu-Hamas alliance.”[33]  American journalist Scott Horton, providing telling quotations from Netanyahu and his government officials over the course of years, said “Netanyahu’s Support for Hamas Backfired.”[34]

Netanyahu’s security failures then took on even more bitter prominence, given this past record:  Netanyahu prioritized protecting the illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank, even when Egypt’s security forces warned him of an impending Hamas attack three days before October 7, and when his own intelligence services surely knew about Hamas preparations.  Some 80 percent of Israeli citizens believe that Netanyahu failed and should resign.[35] 

Nevertheless, Netanyahu has clung to power as Prime Minister, striking an ironic and troubling similarity to the biblical King Saul, who also wanted to remain in power after toying with the life of King Agag and then offering to kill him when challenged.  Seen in this light, Netanyahu’s appropriation of the biblical “Amalekites” for this purpose is highly self-serving, dubious, inappropriate, and yet strangely confessional and self-revealing.

Most troublingly, Netanyahu’s rhetoric serves to appeal to his right-wing political base and deflect attention from an alternative strategy for counterterrorism.  What else could Israel do?  Zach Beauchamp, senior correspondent at Vox, writes:

I put this question to anyone I could think of: a large group ranging from retired Israeli officers to Palestinian intellectuals to counterterrorism experts to scholars of the ethics and law of war. I read everything I could find on the topic, scouring reporting and the academic literature for better ideas.

The answer that emerged was deceptively simple: make the right choice where America made the wrong one. Israel should launch a targeted counterrorism operation aimed at Hamas leadership and the fighters directly involved in the October 7 attack, one that focuses on minimizing both civilian casualties and the scope of ground operations in Gaza.

“Go in for a few weeks or less, trying to find Hamas leaders and destroying tunnels, weapons caches, etc,” says Dan Byman, a professor at Georgetown who studies Israeli counterterrorism.[36]

In other words, counterterrorism experts argue that Israel should pursue a highly focused campaign targeting top Hamas leaders.  Such a strategy would hold Hamas’ leaders morally accountable in principle, introduce pressure and disarray into the terrorist organization itself, and disincentivize people from taking up those leadership roles or otherwise joining the organization.  That is the strategy the U.S. pursued when pursuing Osama bin Laden personally into his compound in Pakistan, for example, and other al-Qaeda leaders subsequently, with considerable success.  Highly focused campaigns cause minimal damage to innocent civilians, and therefore help drain away popular support for the terrorist organization while laying a long-term groundwork for peace.  Beauchamp continues: 

But this counterterrorism approach must be paired with a broader political outreach designed to address the root causes of Hamas’ support.

In her book How Terrorism Ends, Carnegie Mellon professor Audrey Kurth Cronin examined roughly 460 terrorist groups to figure out what caused their collapse. She found that pure repression — trying to crush them with military force — rarely works. And in the few cases that it does, like in Sri Lanka’s long campaign against the Tamil Tigers, it tends to require an unthinkable level of sustained and indiscriminate violence.

“Israel, as a democracy, is extremely ill-suited for the long-term repression approach to counterterrorism,” she told me.

That means, once the current war ends, Israel needs to begin addressing the root causes of Hamas support. That starts with rolling back its de facto annexation of the West Bank — making life better there to show Palestinians that cooperation, not conflict, is the pathway toward a better future, and that Israel can be a reliable partner in that future. Absent this political outreach, the most counterterrorism can do is buy Israel some time at the cost of Palestinian life.[37]

Unfortunately, Netanyahu rejects that direction.  Not only would that policy change concerning the West Bank settlements be an admission of failure for him and his party, the Likud Party, he would be out of office and have to face the existing corruption charges against him as a private citizen. 

Yet if these counterterrorism experts are correct, then Netanyahu appears to be acting out of a strong personal motivation to pursue a military response that will not lead to peace.  For his military response is, arguably, simply a continuation of the divide-and-conquer policy that he has carried out towards the Palestinian communities of Gaza and the West Bank to date.  Rather than acknowledge and absorb some of Israeli citizens’ political ire over October 7th by resigning, Netanyahu is attempting to deflect Israeli political outrage away from his own responsibility for October 7th and onto Hamas using the “Amalekites” moniker, while all ordinary Gazans are considered either potential Hamas recruits, or victims of Hamas alone, or simply unfortunate bystanders and casualties of war.  This is the real strategic and moral danger involved while Netanyahu sits at the helm and equates Hamas with the Amalekites.  The Palestinians pay with their lives, while Israelis, who because of U.S. support have the fourth most powerful military in the world, develop a body politic that is increasingly fearful, traumatized, retributive, and militarized.  In 2017, Christian ethicist David P. Gushee wrote that he was persuaded by American and Israeli Jews that “Israel as a whole has grown accustomed to a permanent military occupation of another people, which is altering her character as a people and risking the abandonment of her founding commitment to partition the land with the Palestinians.”[38]  Gushee’s words about how war shapes and changes the moral character of people, relations, media, politics, and other institutions, are important.

Footnotes

[1] Genesis Rabbah 14.6.

[2] Johnson, Paul. A History of the Jews. New York, NY: Harper and Row. 1987. Cahill, Thomas. The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels. New York, NY: Anchor Books | Random House. 1999.

[3] Girard, René. Translated by Freccero, Yvonne. The Scapegoat. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1989.

[4] Levinson, Bernard M. “The First Constitution: Rethinking the Origins of Rule of Law and Separation of Powers in the Laws of Deuteronomy.” Cardozo Law Review. Volume 27. February 2006. 1880-1882.

[5] Goldstein, Warren. Defending the Human Spirit: Jewish Law’s Vision for a Moral Society. Jerusalem: Feldheim Publishers. 2006.

[6] Berman, Joshua A. Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

[7] Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing. Updated edition 2021.

[8] Joerstad, Mari. The Hebrew Bible and Environmental Ethics: Humans, Nonhumans, and the Living Landscape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2019.  Richter, Sandra. Stewards of Eden: What Scripture Says About the Environment and Why It Matters. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. 2020.

[9] Maalouf, Tony. “The Holy Land and the Larger Family of Abraham.”  Edited by Cannon, Mae Elise. A Land Full of God: Christian Perspectives on the Holy Land. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishing. 2017. 61.

[10] Telushkin, Joseph. Jewish Literacy. New York, NY: William Morrow and Company. 1991. Reprinted in “Afterlife in Judaism.” Encyclopaedia Judaica. The Gale Group. 2008. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/afterlife.

[11] Alfeyev, Metropolitan Hilarion. Christ the Conqueror of Hell: The Descent into Hades from an Orthodox Perspective. Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. 2009. For a condensed version, see also Arakaki, Robert. “Evidence for Christ’s Descent Into Hell.” Orthodox-Reformed Bridge, April 6, 2018.  https://orthodoxbridge.com/2018/04/06/evidence-christs-descent-hell/. 

[12] John R.W. Stott discusses the anomalies in John Calvin’s logic.  See Stott, John R.W. The Cross of Christ. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. 1986. 81.

[13] Hess, Richard S. “The Jericho and Ai of the Book of Joshua.”  Hess, Richard S., et.al., editors. Critical Issues in Early Israelite History. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. 2008. 29 – 30.

[14] Copan, Paul.  Is God a Moral Monster?  Making Sense of the Old Testament God. Downers’ Grove, IL:  InterVarsity Press. 2011. 176.  Copan notes, “Again, all the archaeological evidence indicates that no civilian populations existed at Jericho, Ai, and other cities mentioned in Joshua… According to the best calculations from Canaanite inscriptions and other archaeological evidence (i.e. no artifacts or ‘prestige’ ceramics indicating wealth/social status, as one would expect in general population centers), Jericho was a small settlement of probably one hundred or fewer soldiers.  This is why all of Israel could circle it seven times and then do battle against it on the same day.”

[15] Hess, Richard S. Joshua. Edited by Wiseman, D.J. Tyndale Old Testament Commentary 6. Downers’ Grove, IL:  InterVarsity Press. 1996. 91 – 92.

[16] Weinfeld, Moshe. The Promise of the Land:  The Inheritance of the Land of Canaan by the Israelites. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 1993. 141 – 143.

[17] Sailhamer, John H. Introduction to Old Testament Theology: A Canonical Approach. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. 1995. 250 - 252.

[18] Ibid 251.

[19] Bailey, Kenneth E. Paul Through Mediterranean Eyes:  Cultural Studies in 1 Corinthians. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. 2011. 500 - 508.

[20] Patterson, David. A Genealogy of Evil: Anti-Semitism from Nazism to Islamic Jihad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2011. 43, 244.

[21] Augustine of Hippo. On the Trinity 4.15.20.

[22] Rashi, Commentary on Samuel. The Rubin Edition. 93

[23] Hirsch, Emil, M. Seligsohn, and Solomon Schechter. “Haman the Agagite.” Edited by Singer, et al. The Jewish Encyclopedia. Volume 6. New York, NY: Funk & Wagnalls. 1906. 189 - 190. https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/7124-haman-the-agagite.

[24] Held, Rabbi Shai. “The Enemy Within.” My Jewish Learning.  Date unknown.  https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-evil-within/

[25] See notes by Nagasawa, Mako A. “The Chiastic Structure of Numbers and the Recapitulation of Exodus 1 - 18.” Available here:  www.anastasiscenter.org/bible-torah-numbers.

[26] Pesiḳ., l.c., and Targum Yerushalmi I. and II. to Ex. l.c.

[27] Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 28a:6 - 8.

[28] Maimonides, Hilkhot Issurei Bia 12:17

[29] Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Melachim uMilchamot 6:1 and 6:6-7.  Hilkhot Issurei Bia 12:17.

[30] Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed 3.41.  Cited by Yankelowitz, Shmuley. “Genocide in the Torah.” My Jewish Learning. Date unknown. https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/genocide-in-the-torah/

[31] Schneider, Tal. “For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces.” Times of Israel. October 8, 2023. https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/

[32] Shumsky, Dmitri. “Why Did Netanyahu Want to Strengthen Hamas?” Haaretz. October 11, 2023. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-10-11/ty-article/.premium/netanyahu-needed-a-strong-hamas/0000018b-1e9f-d47b-a7fb-bfdfd8f30000. Raz, Adam. “A Brief History of the Netanyahu-Hamas Alliance.” Haaretz. October 20, 2023. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-10-20/ty-article-opinion/.premium/a-brief-history-of-the-netanyahu-hamas-alliance/0000018b-47d9-d242-abef-57ff1be90000

[33] See footnotes above.  Many other news outlets used this language.

[34] Scott Horton and Connor Freeman. “Netanyahu’s Support for Hamas Backfired.”  Antiwar.com.  October 27, 2023.  https://original.antiwar.com/scott/2023/10/27/netanyahus-support-for-hamas-backfired-2/.  See interview by Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, “Flashback:  How Bibi Empowered Hamas.”  Breaking Points.  December 4, 2023.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbSgAiFk3zw. 

[35] Jerusalem Post Staff. “Israelis blame gov’t for Hamas massacre, say Netanyahu must resign - poll.” The Jerusalem Post. October 12, 2023. https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-767880.

[36] Beauchamp, Zack. “What Israel should do now.” Vox. October 20, 2023. https://www.vox.com/2023/10/20/23919946/israel-hamas-war-gaza-palestine-ground-invasion-strategy.

[37] Beauchamp, Zack. “What Israel should do now.” Vox. October 20, 2023. https://www.vox.com/2023/10/20/23919946/israel-hamas-war-gaza-palestine-ground-invasion-strategy.

[38] Gushee, David P.  “Christian Just Peacemaking and Israel-Palestine: A Quick and Dirty Historical Account of What We Are Calling Israel-Palestine.”  Edited by Cannon, Mae Elise. A Land Full of God: Christian Perspectives on the Holy Land. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishing. 2017. 128.