Covenant Connector
March 2025 Vol. 18.3.
Adar, 5785
Biblical Belief
People defame the Bible, not just by warping its teachings – that happens constantly – but by insisting it’s just another of the nations’ supposedly holy books; that it’s no more holy nor valid than any other book, lore or teaching.
Balderdash.
People tend to take the Bible’s vaulting preeminence in mankind’s heritage for granted. The word biblemeans book; more than any other book, by far, the Bible is Western Civilization’s main book, a perpetual best-seller. Many, many people worldwide know about Adam and Eve, Noah and the Flood, the Tower of Babel, Egypt’s pharaohs and Joseph, Moses and the splitting of the Red Sea, the Mt. Sinai revelation, and the tablets of the Law.
“The Jews were the only ones whose sacred Scriptures were held in ever greater veneration as they became better known,” (Fr. J.B. Bossuet, Archbishop of Mieux, France, 1681); “The Bible: the Magna Carta of the poor and the oppressed” (T.H. Huxley 1892); “Our Jewish Bible has implanted itself in the table-talk and household life of every man and woman in the European and American nations” (Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1845).
Let’s get this clear. By “Bible,” here, we are mostly NOT speaking of Christianity’s “New Testament,” starting with the Book of Matthew. That Christian stuff is a whole different teaching and a foreign tradition.
To quote Nietzsche – who was supposedly so anti-religious:
“To have bound this New Testament, so completely rococo in taste, with the Old Testament into one book, as the Bible, is perhaps the greatest piece of audacity and ‘sin against the Holy Spirit’ which literary Europe has on its conscience.” – 1885
“In the Old Testament of the Jews, the book of Divine righteousness, there are men, events and words so great that there is nothing in Greek or Indian literature to compare with it.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, 1887
The Bible’s central message – the message from all the prophets – can be put as: “YOU [Insert your own name here]! Take care that you deeply study and keep all these Teachings, Statutes and Ordinances of Moses, our Teacher, for God’s sake and yours.
The “New Testament’s” central message is that a martyred Jewish man, a new deity – in the Bible’s Hebrew, a “later” deity – will save you, if you love Him.
Those are two extremely different messages.
Besides the confusion with Christianity, people ceaselessly attack aspects of the Biblical worldview, and the Bible itself.
From even before the ancient Greeks until the 1950’s, most of what passed for “science” didn’t just reject but actually ridiculed the Bible’s teaching of the universe created “ex nihilo,”1 out of nothing, as preposterous. “You claim the universe came into being from nothing but God’s will and you dare to call yourself a scientist?” It should have been a great big deal when proof of “the Big Bang” from radio telescopes collapsed that attack, but people blew it off. The fact that the Biblical Creation story, of all mankind’s “creation myths,” should be confirmed by modern science as having always been right, or as close to the scientific truth about Creation as anything could be, shouldn’t be ignored like that. Especially when its contrasted with ALL the world’s other origin stories or Creation myths, involving disgusting warring “gods,” vomiting demons, rape, incest, and racism.
Never underrate wholesome skepticism. Do blast unfair denigration and illogic. Above all, value truth. God Himself is “Truth,” “emes,” and the chief champion of truth. As the Bible teaches: “All His works are truth, and all His ways justice” (Daniel 4:34).
Ignorant misreadings of Genesis denigrate the Bible. The poetry of “Six Days” of Creation when the Hebrew for “day” (“yom“) connotes a single uninterrupted unit of time, an era or stage (like “the Day [yom] of the Lord), not a literal 12- or 24-hour day… or, for instance, the Bible’s dramatic ancient origin of species stories: beginning with simpler life forms and eventually getting to mankind, including the gift to mankind of planetary dominion… none of it should impinge the Bible’s reputation for outstanding truth. Darwinism doesn’t take away from anything except childish literalness.
German Protestant academics began attacking the Five Books’ credibility a little before America’s Civil War in 1860, offering “proofs” from textual analysis that no one author produced the Five Books of Moses; that it was, according to them, slapped together more or less thoughtlessly over many centuries. What proved this, allegedly? The different names the Bible assigns to its chief figure, God. And that, after the Revelation at Sinai, the text becomes much less readable. [Because those parts aren’t meant for everybody! If only they’d respected the Jews enough to ask about this!]
This is the Documentary Hypothesis, also called Biblical Historical Criticism, which, even today, dominates academic discourse about the origins of the Bible:
When Genesis relates that God – “Elohim” (literally, “the Powers” that Be; the “High Ones”) – “created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1), and that the Lord God – “HaShem/Y-H-V-H/Adonoi [this is the famous Tetragrammaton, the ineffable four-letter Name meaning “He is/He was/He will be”] Elohim” – “made heaven and earth” (Genesis 2:4), the different names are proof, supposedly, of different authors with different styles.
Sigh… This is literally incredible.
Every great work of literature is put together from many different influences, sources and traditions, and so were the Five Books of Moses. Moses mentions one such, the “Book of the Wars of the Lord” (Numbers 21:14). Different sources doesn’t mean that, in the famous 40-years in the Sinai wilderness, he didn’t write the Torah!
The Bible is – obviously, to anyone who studies it – a very, very carefully written work. That supposed different authors would mess up something like the name of the Deity Himself, thoughtlessly assigning Him different identifying labels, is risible. Yet Biblical scholarship today in our mainstream institutions is mostly speculation based largely on that alone.
Not much respect is paid to the Jews’ understanding of things. Nor to what should be obvious, that as Judaism has always taught, the different names of God evoke different aspects of His beyond-normal-human-understanding nature, the loving qualities, the stern, the eternally faithful, the generous, etc. – of His ineffable, infinite Nature. We’re talking about the Lord of Creation! The different Hebrew names convey deep meaning – they’re not a glitch, they’re a feature. In Genesis 11, for instance, Moses attaches the four-letter Name, particularly connoting His loving, eternally faithful nature, to Him at the Tower of Babel. Treating the text of Torah seriously, as we should, that suggests something about God: that He wasn’t that upset with us, human beings, at Babel – that He appreciates that men can work together to accomplish great things – and that the different languages of mankind aren’t a curse but a blessing.
This is a big deal. People attack the Bible to defeat its central message, that the God of Abraham and Moses is, in fact, God. Paraphrasing Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, the secularists’ idea that the universe came into being by accident, by a random fluctuation in the quantum field, that there is no God that knows we exist, that our moral convictions are self-serving means of self-preservation and our spiritual aspirations are mere delusions, doesn’t seem particularly attractive but it’s easier for a great many people to accept than the alternative: belief in the One God.
Besides the disdain of the secularist academic establishment, other attacks follow whatever current issue riles people most. “It’s unscientific!” (The Western world and the Western civilization’s so-called Scientific Revolution are largely products of the Bible.) “It’s racist!” (The Jews, the Bible’s central people, are a nation consisting of every race and nation; “Are you not like the Ethiopians to Me?” God asks His people Israel (Amos 9:7); the Bible has always been the world’s greatest instigator of revolt against despotism and racism. “The little book that started the Civil War,” Uncle Tom’s Cabin, would be a pamphlet if you took the Old Testament out from it). “It’s undemocratic!” (That God created man in His image, that all men are equally His children, and that all possess withing themselves a spark of the divine that must not be violated, is the very root of democracy.) “And sexist!” (God made woman in His image – “male and female created He them.” (Genesis 1:27)).
The so-called “Bible” itself isn’t above defaming the Bible! Again, that “New Testament”: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy'” (Matthew 5:43). “Hate your enemy” isn’t Torah! Judaism doesn’t teach “hate your enemy”! Rather: “If you meet your enemy’s ass or ox going astray, you shall surely bring it back to him” (Exodus 23:4); “If your enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat; if he be thirsty, give him water to drink… and HaShem (the Lord) will reward you (Proverbs 25:21).
Thomas Henry Huxley, “Darwin’s Bulldog,” reformed Christian, coiner of the term “agnostic” and agnosticism, on our subject: “There is no code of legislation, ancient or modern, at once so just and so merciful, as tender to the weak and poor, as the Jewish law.” (1870)
People take the power of the Bible’s mission-driven prophesies for granted. The supposed “holy scriptures” of other nations, including Islam’s Qur’an/Koran and Christianity’s New Testament (which both foretell a loathsome future of horrible end-times and then a pie-in-the-sky resolution, with most of humanity burnt to ashes) hardly “do” forecasts. But the Bible is loaded with prophesies. It’s not just the end-times – a progressive unveiling of God’s truth preceding coming glory and the next stages of human history – but many concrete promises and insights.
Abraham, the first Jew, was the brilliantly successful military commander and genius who founded Israel’s line. Religious Jews read every morning of the pledge to him, a very old man, a mere “stranger and sojourner” in the land (Genesis 23:4), that his “seed” won’t just come to own that country but that the King of the Universe Himself will make them numerous like “the stars of heaven and the [battered by the waves!] sand upon the sea-shore,” and, further, that “in your [his] seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed” [“that the nations shall bless themselves by [his] offspring’] (Genesis 22:17-18). His “seed” is the Jewish people, Abraham’s descendants through Isaac (Genesis 21:12), who are also described as “the fewest of all nations” (Deuteronomy 7:7), including Moses, Joshua, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Deborah, David and Solomon and the Maccabees, the whole Christian “holy family,” Marx, Freud, Einstein, Ayn Rand, Seinfeld, Mel Brooks and the Google guys, the Facebook and Oracle guys, authors, songwriters and poets, great inventors, healers and justice-fighters, labor leaders, rebels, great architects, military leaders, captains of industry, and, e.g., Bob Dylan.
That’s quite a prophecy! Contrast that to Christian prophecy, such as it is. How to tell the “end times”? “There will be powerful earthquakes, famines and plagues from place to place” (Luke 21:11). Daring, eh? When are there not earthquakes, plagues, etc.?
This is real prophecy: “I will bless those who bless Israel and curse those who curse Israel” (Genesis 12:3, 27:29, Leviticus 24:9). (Naturally, God wants the people created to incarnate His Torah to succeed.) This cosmic principle is offered as a rule of history.
This, too, is very sharp prophecy, from the mighty “tochachah,” the “Warning” of Leviticus 26:
If God drives Israel off the Land of the Israel, no other people will supplant the Jews, to settle there and make it thrive. Rather, “the land shall lie forsaken without them [the Jews],” “while she [the land] lies desolate” (26:43).
That’s what logicians call a testable hypothesis:
Before the Jews came to the Land of Israel the Canaanites and Philistines and other peoples managed to make live on the land. After that, following the Jews’ exile, no other people ever thrived there. Many peoples came and went. Yet, despite the myths of Palestinianism, the Land of Israel without the Jews did lie desolate and forsaken, a dry, malarial, howling waste. It was infamous. Mark Twain, visiting in 1868, remarked on its barrenness, asking, “Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land?” (The Innocents Abroad,1869) The Turks and Arabs never did well there; they knew it was the Jews’ land and firmly regarded it as cursed (See Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial; the origins of the Arab-Jewish conflict over Palestine (Harper & Row, 1984), pp. 155-161; Harold Fisch, The Zionist Revolution (St. Martin’s Press, 1978), pp. 146-148.)
More prophecy… about crafting a deal with Gentile claimants of the Land of Israel and trying to “share” it with them: the Bible forecasts God will send “a vile nation that is no nation” (Deuteronomy 32:21) against Israel, who will be “pins in your [the Jews’] eyes and thorns in your sides” (Numbers 33:55) until and unless they move off. If the Jews disobey – if they don’t get rid of them – expect to lose the land, get driven away and die (33:56).
This did more than any other passage to convince me that God, in the Torah, isn’t playing games. God is in the details of this rule, though: people have free will to determine their own destinies. Consider the difference between peoples like the Bible’s Kenites and the Gibeonites and Jebusites (Cana’anite “children of Ham”), who joined Israel, as philo-Semites, to pursue God and righteousness, on the one hand; versus those who resent the Divine plan and make themselves enemies of Israel, as anti-Semites.
More prophecy… On top of that, in the course of the struggle, Israel can expect to face a world-wide coalition of Jew-haters, a genocide-minded international conspiracy, seeking to erase “even the memory of Israel’s name” (Psalm 83:5).
“No weapon that is forged against you [Israel] shall prosper,” the Bible promises (Isaiah 54:17). Both the Catholic Inquisition and the Nazis hammered the Jews. But the enemies of the Jews all ultimately crash and go to hell. This, too, is testable.
Picture: Nazi Germany, aftermath. The blessing of the Lord. (Dresden, 1945)
Concerning rich Jews, the Bible teaches – I’m paraphrasing – “You will unfortunately forget that it was God Who gave you, a Jew, power to get wealth, and take all the credit yourself” (Deuteronomy 8:18). This, too, alas, is too true. But it would look ridiculous absent the Jews’ famous tendencies toward material success.
One of the Bible’s very strongest prophecies, repeated again and again and emphasized again and again: You [Israel] shall return to the Land of Israel (Deuteronomy 30:5, Isaiah 11:11, Amos 9:14, Ezekiel 20:33, etc., etc.).
Those are heavy prophecies. There are still a lot more. In fact, the Bible is too full of forecasts to list them all. But we need to mention Amalek.
Here’s the anti-Israel, the jealous, professedly holier-than-Israel Jew-hater, the wanna-be supplanter of Israel, the lethal spirit behind Haman and Hitler.
Amalek
They hid on the cliffs and sand dunes watching the Hebrews rushing from Egypt. You’d think that the Western Asian desert dwellers called Amalek might have respect for them, after hearing about the horrible Ten Plagues and the miracles it took getting Israel out of Egypt. God had just split the Red Sea/Sea of Reeds/yam souf for them, drowning Egypt’s army! Israel had certainly been favored by God, “the High Ones,” or anyway obviously by some tremendous Power.
But the reality of Israel often doesn’t live up to people’s expectations. Amalek, watching the Jews, despised them. After all the Jews had experienced and everything they’d been told before Sinai, they were still arguing and wondering whether God was with them (Exodus 17:7). And they made a bad showing, crossing the desert wastes. “What kind of “holy” people, Amalek must have asked, leave their sick, their mothers with children, their old people, to struggle alone, without protection or help, marching through a wilderness” (Deuteronomy 25:17)?
You can recognize Amalek in history, “in every generation,” the prophet says (Exodus 17: 16):
1) where other antagonists might be too proud to go after the Jews’ weakest, the women, children, feeble and infirm, Amalek targets them by preference, especially delighting in maiming and murdering mothers and infants. This is an invariable feature, not a flaw, in Amalek.
2) Amalek always looks for the Jews’ clay feet, indicia of weakness or unholiness, and of a deficit of confidence in Israel’s holy cause (“Is God with us or not?”); or similar signs of decadence, signaling a lack of attachment to the cause – Jews eating bread over pesach, for instance, or otherwise failing to adhere to basic Torah precepts.
3) Amalek always insists that it, Amalek, is holier and more deserving than the Jews – regardless of all contrary evidence, from the splitting of the Sea in Moses’ time to the Arabs’ horrible record of military losses – of the blessings of Deity.
Haman, Europe’s Crusaders, the Catholic Inquisition, the Nazis, and now the Arab world’s war against Israel exemplify the Amalek phenomenon. You can see it, always, in the touchstone of the Arabs’ cause today, after the Kalashnikov rifle: Al Aqsa, the Muslim shrine that sits atop the old Jewish Temples. Symbolizing, obviously, Islam’s triumph over the God of Israel.
The fierce Amalekite hatred for Israel that pervades the Muslim world is itself strong proof that HaShem, the eternally faithful, loving Lord, the God of Creation, will fulfill all His promises, including “blotting out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven” (Exodus 25:19),
Picture: Al Aqsa – the chief touchstone of Amalek – in Jerusalem
By Michael Dallen
Detroit
March, 2025
Over more than 18-years, First Covenant’s “Covenant Connector” newsletters have benefited from the supervision of (First Covenant Director) Rabbi Michael Katz.
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