Netanyahu likes to recall Amalek

 

 

“Jews traditionally hear the story of the Amalek ambush and God’s decree

that they be eliminated on the Shabbat service before the holiday of Purim.

[Professor] Shanes said it is perhaps the most important of all Torah readings”. 

 Noah Lanard

  

The Biblical story of Amalek evoked by Netanyahu - ABC listen

 

In one of the most controversial cases to come before the International Court of Justice, South Africa has accused Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Israel strongly rejects the claim as a "blood libel."

 

In its argument, South Africa points to a violent story in the Hebrew Bible, in which God commands the Israelites to wipe out the people of Amalek. It’s a story Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has evoked since the attack by Hamas on October 7. Why is this ancient story powerful in modern Israel – and a key part of the court case? 

 

Professor Atalia Omer specialises in Jewish and Israeli history and politics at the University of Notre Dame in the US. 

 

Program: The Biblical story of Amalek evoked by Netanyahu

 

Source:ABC Radio National|Program:The Religion and Ethics Report

Wed 24 Jan 2024 at 4:00pmWednesday 24 Jan 2024 at 4:00pm

 

The Spirit of Amalek and the War on Israel - ICEJ

 

There is an ancient hatred – even a demonic spirit – at work which shares these exact aspirations. It manifested itself repeatedly through the descendants of Amalek, and eventually infected many other peoples as well. This vicious Spirit of Amalek arose once more on October 7^th. Rabbinic literature presents Amalek as the arch enemy of the Jewish people. Today, we call it violent antisemitism. 

 

Noah Lanard, for his part, will warn of (2023):

The Dangerous History Behind Netanyahu’s Amalek Rhetoric – Mother Jones

 

The Dangerous History Behind Netanyahu’s Amalek Rhetoric

 

His recent biblical reference has long been used by the Israeli far right to justify killing Palestinians.

 

On Saturday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israelis were united in their fight against Hamas, whom he described as an enemy of incomparable cruelty. “They are committed to completely eliminating this evil from the world,”

 

Netanyahu said in Hebrew. He then added: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.”

 

There are more than 23,000 verses in the Old Testament. The ones Netanyahu turned to, as Israeli forces launched their ground invasion in Gaza, are among its most violent—and have a long history of being used by Jews on the far right to justify killing Palestinians.

 

As others quickly pointed out, God commands King Saul in the first Book of Samuel to kill every person in Amalek, a rival nation to ancient Israel. “This is what the Lord Almighty says,” the prophet Samuel tells Saul. “‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt.

 

Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’”

 

Forty-seven percent of Israeli Jews said in a poll conducted last month that Israel should “not at all” consider the “suffering of the civilian Palestinian population in Gaza” in the next phase of fighting.

 

The Amalek reference is one of many comments by Israeli leaders that serve to help justify a devastating response to the brutal Hamas attack on October 7 that took the lives of more than 1,400 people in Israel. A member of the Knesset has called for a second Nakba, in reference to the expulsion of Palestinians that Israel carried out in its 1948 war with Arab neighbors. A military spokesperson said about Israel’s initial airstrikes that “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”

 

More than 9,000 people in Gaza have now been killed, including more than 3,700 children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

 

“Saul’s failure to kill every Amalekite posed

an existential threat to the Jewish people”.

 

A spokesperson for UNICEF now says that Gaza is a “graveyard for thousands of children” and a “living hell for everyone else.” Forty-seven percent of Israeli Jews said in a poll conducted last month that Israel should “not at all” consider the “suffering of the civilian Palestinian population in Gaza” in the next phase of fighting.

Casting the enemy as Amalek reinforces that attitude.

 

Joshua Shanes, a professor of Jewish Studies at the College of Charleston, explained that the biblical animosity toward the Amalekites stems from what is described as the merciless ambush they launched against vulnerable Israelites making their way to the promised land. The attack leads God to tell Moses to wipe out Amalek. Hundreds of years later, Saul nearly fulfills the command by killing all Amalekite men, women, and children. But he spares their king, who keeps his people barely alive by having a child. Many more generations later, one of his descendants, the villain Haman, goes on to develop a plot to kill all the Jews living in exile under a Persian ruler. The lesson, when read literally, is clear: Saul’s failure to kill every Amalekite posed an existential threat to the Jewish people.

 

Jews traditionally hear the story of the Amalek ambush and God’s decree that they be eliminated on the Shabbat service before the holiday of Purim. Shanes said it is perhaps the most important of all Torah readings. 

 

Rabbi Jill Jacobs—the head of T’ruah, a rabbinical human rights organziation—said that rabbis generally agree that Amalek no longer exists, and that references to it do not provide a morally acceptable justification for attacking anyone. “The overwhelming history of Jewish interpretation is to interpret it metaphorically,” Jacobs said, explaining that one common approach is to see it as a call to stamp out evil inclinations within ourselves.

 

Rabbi Jill Jacobs said that rabbis generally agree that Amalek no longer exists, and that references to it do not provide a justification for attacking anyone.

Nevertheless, Jacobs said that it remains common for Israeli extremists to view Palestinians as modern-day Amalekites. In 1980, the Rabbi Israel Hess wrote an article that used the story of Amalek to justify wiping out Palestinians. Its title has been translated as “Genocide: A Commandment of the Torah,” as well as “The Mitzvah of Genocide in the Torah.”

 

In his 1997 book, The Vanishing American Jew, celebrity attorney and Harvard professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz made a point of expressing his disgust about the article and the idea that Palestine was Amalek. He asked, “How can anyone distinguish this incitement to murder from similar incitements by Muslim fundamentalists who quote the Koran as authority for genocide against Jews?”

 

The Brooklyn-born extremist Baruch Goldstein also saw Palestine as Amalek. In 1994, he slaughtered 29 Muslims praying at a mosque in Hebron, a city in the occupied West Bank that is sacred to Jews and Muslims. Goldstein carried out the massacre on Purim, one week after he would have heard the biblical retelling of the command to wipe out a rival nation. As the journalist Peter Beinart and others have written, the timing was not a coincidence.   

 

Goldstein’s grave has become a pilgrimage site for the Israeli far right. His tomb says he died of “clean hands and pure heart.” Goldstein’s admirers have included Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s current minister of national security. For Purim, a holiday on which Jews sometimes wear costumes, Ben-Gvir dressed as Goldstein on multiple occasions in his youth. He kept a picture of Goldstein in his living room until 2020. He has an extensive criminal record that includes convictions for supporting a terrorist organization and inciting racism.

 

Shanes said that it was “incredibly dangerous and irresponsible and deliberate” for Netanyahu to invoke Amalek, given the ongoing war and [how it] is understood by the far right. He added that calling the enemy Amalek will make it more difficult for people who try to defend the position that Israel is not “involved in a crime against humanity or a genocidal act.”

 

Beinart, an Orthodox Jew who previously edited the New Republic and now writes on Substack, expressed similar concern.

 

“The wisdom of rabbinic tradition was to declare that we no longer know who Amalek is because that restrains the genocidal plain meaning of the Biblical text,” he wrote in email. “So in claiming that he knows who Amalek is, [Netanyahu] is undoing the moral scaffolding created by Jewish tradition and asserting a Biblical literalism that is alien to the Judaism of the last two thousand years and, given the military power at his disposal, is frankly terrifying.”

 

Jacobs stressed that Netanyahu saying Amalek does not mean that Israel is carrying out genocide. She said that while Hamas and Israel have committed war crimes, Israel’s actions do not meet the international standard of genocide. “It’s not a term that should be thrown around casually at all,” she explained, particularly against a people that have experienced genocide. Instead, Jacobs sees Netanyahu, who she described as “totally right-wing and incompetent,” referring to Amalek as yet another case of him “being irresponsible and inciting.” (Netanyahu has previously compared the prospect of a nuclear Iran to Amalek.)

 

Harvard professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz told me this week that he supported Netanyahu “100 percent” to the extent that the prime minister was equating Hamas with Amalek.

 

In a brief phone call, Dershowitz told me this week that he supported Netanyahu “100 percent” to the extent that the prime minister was equating Hamas with Amalek. When I mentioned the command to kill Amalekite women and children, Dershowitz responded, “There are other parts of the Bible that say the opposite; that you can’t even destroy a fruit tree.” That is true, but Netanyahu did not cite those parts of the Bible. Instead, he turned to something that the far right has long used as a justification for genocide during a war in which some argue Israel is committing genocide. (On Thursday, a group of United Nations experts said that Palestinians are at “grave risk of genocide.”)

 

Shanes was not convinced by Dershowitz’s defense that Hamas is Amalek.

 

For one, he said, Amalek is clearly described as a nation, not a political party. “If someone says, ‘I just mean the bad members of the Palestinians. I mean Hamas…,’ that’s not the effect it has in the body politic,” Shanes said. “The effect it has is, We have to wipe these people out.”

 

 

The American archaeologist and the French Dominican

 

 

by

 Damien F. Mackey

  

 

A famous name for his authentication of the Dead Sea Scrolls,

[Albright] can be a most fascinating study. Although a conventional scholar,

schooled in a system of chronology and archaeology that disallows its exponents from being able to demonstrate the historicity of the Bible – and imbued also with

the erroneous, pre-archaeological JEDP Documentary Theory – professor Albright yet had the ability occasionally to burst through the seams of that suffocating system and to produce some very insightful new observations.

 

 

 

Introduction

 

The nation of ancient Egypt, which had been so biblically prominent when Abram came to Canaan (c. 1900 BC), who was then forced to go to Egypt to survive a famine, and which completely dominated the biblical landscape during the long years of (Jacob) Joseph and Moses, will fade right out of the Bible now, for centuries, after the devastating Plagues, with Pharaoh Neferhotep’s seed destroyed, his army drowned (whether or not he himself had also died), and the invasion of Egypt and long occupation thereof by the Hyksos foreigners.

 

Joseph, but even more so Moses, had turned out to be quite complicated studies, not because of a lack of evidential material (which certainly used to be the case for me), but because of an excess of it, their long lives spanning, as they did, conventional Egyptian kingdoms and dynasties.

 

Thus it has taken an extended time for us to extricate ourselves from the land of Egypt, so as to follow the path of the MBI Israelites as they trek towards the Promised Land.

 

Indeed, Moses would learn that it was easier to take the Israelites out of the heart of Egypt than it was to take the hearts of Israel out of Egypt.

 

Anyway, here are we now standing on dry, if rather rocky and barren (moonscape) ground, ready to trace the Exodus Israelites archaeologically, to the Holy Mountain, and through the desert into Transjordania, and then across the River Jordan into the Promised Land.

 

There, the Israelites led by Joshua (Moses since having departed) will wreak havoc upon many of the old Canaanite cities and dwellings – a fact that ought to make the archaeology of it all very easy and obvious to pinpoint.

 

And so it is.

Unfortunately, however, a terrible mis-dating of the history and the archaeology of the Promised Land by the ‘experts’ has led to conclusions that can be described only as diabolical, sowing complete and utter confusion, and causing many people to doubt the historicity of the Old Testament.

 

Our American archaeologist and the French Dominican had a leading part to play in this.

 

Professor Foxwell Albright and

Fr. Louis-Hugues Vincent (OP)

 

William Foxwell Albright

 

A famous name for his authentication of the Dead Sea Scrolls, he can be a most fascinating study.

 

Although a conventional scholar, schooled in a system of chronology and archaeology that disallows its exponents from being able to demonstrate the historicity of the Bible – and imbued also with the erroneous, pre-archaeological JEDP Documentary Theory – professor Albright yet had the ability occasionally to burst through the seams of that suffocating system and to produce some very insightful new observations.

 

This may be explained partly as being due to his conservative Christian upbringing (Evangelist Methodist), according to which he was taught to revere the Bible as the Word of God.

 

And so we get some inspiring statements by W.F. Albright, which will turn out to be quite ironic given the damage that he also managed to do to biblical archaeology.

 

One outstanding example of W. F. Albright’s upsetting of the pattern of early dynastic history was his groundbreaking view – relevant to Abram – that Egypt’s first dynastic ruler, the famous Menes (traditionally thought to have been the Pharaoh of Abram), was conquered by the mighty Akkadian king, Naram-Sin.

 

Why this is so bold and striking for a conventional scholar is that, whereas Naram-Sin 

is considered to have reigned in the 2200’s BC, the reign of Menes is regarded as being the very beginning of Egyptian dynastic history, fixed at c. 3100 BC.

 

Yet here was W.F. Albright insisting that the Mannu dannu, Menes ‘the Great’, whom Naram-Sin claimed to have conquered, was the Menes typically dated nearly a millennium earlier: Menes and Narâm-Sin | Semantic Scholar

“… In a Babylonian chronicle … we read '(Naram-Sin) who went to Magan, and vanquished (not 'captured') [Mannu, the mighty], king of Magan'.”

 

This was most radical, indeed!

 

As an event contemporaneous with Abram – Menes being his Pharaoh and Naram-Sin being his northern contemporary, “Amraphel of Shinar” (Genesis 14:1) – the whole package needs to be re-dated even lower, to c. 1900 BC.

 

Now, this is only one example (albeit the most dramatic one) amongst several that I could give of Foxwell Albright’s uncanny ability (the Fox) to think outside the box.

 

Anyway, I had just completed an article listing the insights of W.F. Albright, more recently revised as:

 

William Foxwell Albright a conventional fox with insight ‘outside the box’

 

(2) William Foxwell Albright a conventional fox with insight 'outside the box'

 

when a fellow-Australian, an archaeologist, dampened my enthusiasm about him with this e-mail. She wrote:

 

….

Hi Damien. I am just coming up to the Balaam material in my thesis-writing, so this is welcome. I have had my sympathy for Albright considerably reduced, however, to find he was among those present at the secret meeting in Jerusalem in 1922 that 'fixed' the wrong dates to the archaeological eras ... Fr Pere Vincent's initiative, but Albright was complicit. ….

 

The Australian archaeologist has since corrected the original description, “secret meeting in Jerusalem”, by clarifying that it was not actually “secret”.

 

Mathilde Sigalas will recount how W. F. Albright came to be in Jerusalem in 1922, there connecting with “a French scholar from the École biblique, Father Louis-Hugues Vincent”: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-55540-5_10

 

Between Diplomacy and Science: British Mandate Palestine and Its International Network of Archaeological Organisations, 1918–1938

 

….

The collaboration was also effective in terms of archaeological methodology at the beginning of the 1920s. The Presidents of the BSAJ, John Garstang (1920–1926), and of ASOR, William F. Albright (1920–1929/1933–1936), joined by a French scholar from the École biblique, Father Louis-Hugues Vincent, reflected together on a new dating method to classify antiquities. … This classification was designated as that of the “Three Ages” … dating of the Bronze Age, Iron Age and Modern period was modified to adapt to recent discoveries and ethnographic information on Palestine. The three scholars submitted their method to the scientific community during meetings of the POS. Adopted in 1922, the classification was implemented in archaeological sites for antiquities registration and analysis. The political context was also a reason for the policy, in an attempt to avoid subjective interpretations in favour of a particular civilisation.

 

This classification is an example of the effects of international collaboration within a foreign intellectual knowledge network, which developed in Jerusalem at the beginning of the 1920s.

The three scholars were from “the three archaeological Schools in Jerusalem” … and two were on the Board of Directors of the Palestine Oriental Society in 1922, Albright as President and Garstang as Director. The “New Chronological Classification of Palestinian Archaeology” was published in the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research (no. 7. October 1922) and the Revue Biblique (vol. 32. 1923) of the EBAF. This example demonstrates the openness of the scientific community based in Palestine and the shared aim of anchoring Palestinian archaeology as a scientific and formal discipline. ….

 

[End of quote]

 

 

 

Fr. Louis-Hugues Vincent (OP)

 

He and W. F. Albright were apparently very close, with the latter dedicating an article as a eulogy (1961) to the French Dominican, “In Memory of Louis Hugues Vincent”, after he had died aged 88:  In Memory of Louis Hugues Vincent on JSTOR

 

“To every generation and to every field there is given a man who is justly revered by his contemporaries and disciples. Pére L. H. Vincent, O.P., was such a man. In him were uniquely combined genius and industry, charm and humility, enthusiasm and balance. But for his tremendous contributions as scholar and as teacher, Palestinian archaeology could never have attained its present status among fields of antiquarian research”.

 

According to another article:

The connections to France - Graham Addison's Author Website

 

Father or Pere Vincent was a Dominican monk who had joined the order as a young man. Vincent came to the Ecole Biblique et Archaeologique in Jerusalem in 1891 and dedicated the rest of his long life to archaeological study in the Holy Land. He was a widely respected scholar and expert. In an obituary, the monk was described as combining ‘genius, industry, charm and humility, enthusiasm and balance’ in his work as a scholar and teacher.

…

Vincent brought his unrivalled knowledge of Jerusalem, gained over many decades, to his work. Professor Kathleen Kenyon said Father Vincent’s work in remapping the tunnels and shafts helped salvage a very unsatisfactory enterprise. She said Vincent was small, charming and elegant, but anyone who ‘disagreed with him came in for a terrific pounding, though always couched in the most polite terms.’ The plans he produced of the tunnels formed the basis of all archaeological work in these places for the next century. ….

[End of quote]

 

Herschel Shanks (1987) will add a further touch of colour and bite:

 

The Jerusalem Wall That Shouldn’t Be There - The BAS Library

“A Touch of Vehemence”—Père Vincent’s Passionate Rejection of the Third Wall

 

Father Louis-Hugues Vincent (1872–1960), head of Jerusalem’s famed École Biblique et Archéologique Française, with somewhat unscholarly aggression rejected the “Third Wall” hypothesis.

 

In the words of Israeli archaeologist Michael Avi Yonah … “The revered master [Vincent] unfortunately introduced into the debate [about the wall] a touch of vehemence. … One may even suspect that the force of his assertions in fact concealed a certain lack of confidence in them. No stick was too bad to belabour his opponents. Newspapers and weeklies which had nothing to do with the world of learning are quoted [by Vincent] at length; his adversaries and their opinions are described in terms which at the same time arouse our doubts about his scholarly impartiality and our admiration for his extensive vocabulary. Even the descriptions of the remains discovered, usually a tedious and dry-as-dust subject, are coloured by the same fervid style. …

The line rejected by P[ère] Vincent is nor a ‘normal’ wall—it becomes a Dracula-type ‘phantom rampart,’ a ‘moving rampart.’”

 

The debate on the Third Wall, says Avi-Yonah, “has suffered ever since” from the vehemence of Father Vincent’s critique. ….

 

Consequences

 

Thanks to the likes of Père Vincent and W.F. Albright, the Early Bronze III city of Jerich0 that fell to Joshua and his Israelite forces (c. 1450 BC), has been back-dated by a millennium (c. 2400-2300 BC), so that now historians and archaeologists must consider it to be far too early to accord with the biblical account. 

 

Joshua and his Conquest of Canaan are now to be viewed only as “a mirage”, a pious story based on a real historical event that had occurred about a millennium earlier.

A Proto-Joshuan event, if you like – some have admitted this, whilst refusing to accept a real historical Joshua.

 

So, in this case, and unlike the millennium shift forwards with Menes and Naram-Sin, W.F. Albright has shifted the dating backwards by a millennium, he and Père Vincent, with the most disastrous consequences for the historicity of the Bible.