When Prime Minister Netanyahu expressed his disdain for international law and his contempt for the leadership of the United Nations, he implicitly recalled an ancient tradition of the origins of Israel. He asserted that Modern Israel was not formed in 1948 by the United Nations, but by the Israeli war against the Arabs, in the settled region of Palestine, the Nakba (disaster). The very mention of the word Palestine had become an ideological affront to Israel.
Netanyahu’s claim implicitly summoned up the delivery of the Promised Land to Israel by conquest in the name of God. The ancient scriptures emit a cacophony of warlike threats against God’s enemies. As Greg Barns informs us (P&I 26.10.2024), an Israeli lieutenant colonel recently reminded his troops of God’s command to King Saul: ‘Go now, fall upon the Amalekites, destroy them, spare no one… put them all to death, men and women, children and babes in arms, herds and flocks, camels and donkeys’ (1 Samuel 15. 3). It is an excessively long stretch to cite a bloodthirsty piece of tribal folklore to justify modern war crimes.
Just as modern Israel emerged after the unspeakable horror of the Holocaust, so ancient Israel recoiled from a legendary mass imprisonment as slaves in Egypt. Egypt was a land of tormentors and Palestine was occupied by infidels.
Israel’s God (Yahweh) had a twofold personality: he was the benign creator of the world and the loving saviour of his people. Yet he was easily offended and had a tendency to smite his enemies. God sent judges against the infidels, who were ridiculed in the literature. The Moabite king, Eglon, was a very fat man. After tricking the king, the judge Ehud plunged a two-edged sword into his belly, and the fat closed over the hilt (Judges 3. 15-23). Sisera, the commander of King Jabin’s army of Canaanite Hazor, met a gory end. A young Kenite woman, Jael, seduced him into her tent, and as he slept she hammered a tent peg through his brain. The Book of Judges goes on to recount many Israelite victories and reveals cases of apostasy by the people of Yahweh.
The diverging characteristics of God are reflected in the ancient tradition, not least in the book of Judges itself. The philosopher, Martin Buber, lauded Judges as Israel’s equal of Plato’s Republic. It described the small villages and encampments of the Israelites as ruled by judges, who were each called by God to a particular mission, and who later returned to civilian life. They repudiated dynasties and represented the antithesis of corrupt monarchies and tyrannies. The villages themselves were probably indigenous, but seized by a religion different from the pagan cities of the Canaanites and Philistines, the Mediterranean Sea People who had settled in Gaza. Inhabitants of the Canaanite cities were likely descendants of migrants from the territory of Israel’s modern deadly enemy, Iran.
Along with the example of limited rule, the Israelites also bequeathed to the world a fine example of the rule of law. The Ten Commandments, of course, are a symbolic beacon of lawfulness around the world. The books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy supply detailed instruction for obedience to carefully crafted applications of the law.
Much beyond teachings of the law, ancient Israel gave us the prophets. Sometimes law and prophecy coalesced, as for example in Deuteronomy 16 and 24, where care for the poor is enjoined. Yet the repetitive cry of the prophets was a wail against injustice. In a land of extreme poverty and no such thing as public welfare, the prophets lamented for the ‘widow and the fatherless’ – the very type of desperate insecurity. They railed against exploitation by the landed aristocracy against the poor and weak. As Amos famously thundered: ‘let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!‘ (Amos 5. 24). They all joined in this theme: Hosea, Micah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, were followed by many of the Psalms.
As the magisterial Jewish scholar, Abraham Heschel declaimed: ‘To us a single act of injustice – cheating in business, exploitation of the poor – is slight; to the prophets, a disaster. To us injustice is injurious to the welfare of the people; to the prophets it is a death blow to existence: to us, an episode; to them, a catastrophe, a threat to the world… To prophets even a minor injustice assumes cosmic proportions.’
Oh where are these prophets today?