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By Laurent Guyénot,
Not all Christians stand with modern Israel. But all Christians stand with ancient Israel. Not all Christians believe that Israel has “the right to defend itself” by committing a genocide in Palestine and invading other countries. But all Christians have been taught that ancient Israel had the right — and even the sacred duty — to exterminate the Amalekites, “man and woman, babe and suckling” because they stood in the way of Israel’s conquest of Canaan (1Samuel 15:3).
All Christians are expected to stand with Moses when, in Numbers 31, he ordered his men to slaughter all the Midianites, as a punishment for having encouraged the Israelites to intermarry with the Moabites. Moses was enraged with the army commanders for sparing the women and the children, but finally allowed them to keep for themselves “the young girls who have never slept with a man.” The booty amounted to thirty-two thousand girls, of which Yahweh required 0.1 percent as his own “portion”, offered to him presumably as holocausts, together with Yahweh’s portion of oxen, cattle, donkeys and sheep.
Where does this kind of story fit on the scale of civilization? It belongs, at best, to “prehistoric warfare” as described by Lawrence Keeley in War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, when the extermination of enemy tribes was not uncommon, and “[t]he capture of women was one of the spoils of victory — and occasionally one of the primary aims of warfare — for many tribal warriors. … The social position of captive women varied widely among cultures, from abject slaves to concubines to secondary wives to full spouses.”[1] In ancient Israel, “abject slaves” seems to have been the case. “Full spouses” was out of the question, since the whole justification for the massacre was to prevent intermarriage. Sex with non-Israelites is fine, as long as “no bastard shall enter the assembly of Yahweh, nor any descendant of his even to the tenth generation” (Deuteronomy 23:3). This, rather than any special respect for women, explains the rule that a Jewish mother is required for being a Jew.
There are other biblical stories reflecting such pre-civilizational war code. In Judges 19-21, the rape of the concubine of a Levite by the Benjaminites of the city of Gibeah leads to a blood feud, in the course of which the eleven other Israelite tribes slaughter everyone in Gibeah and set the city on fire, while six hundred Benjaminite warriors have escaped into the desert. Then, as a token of reconciliation, the Israelites decide to provide these Benjaminites with new wives. For that purpose, they attack the Israelite town of Jabesh-Gilead, which had refused to join the punitive expedition, and kill “all males and all those women who have ever slept with a man,” and gather four hundred virgins to offer the Benjaminites .
When these stories were written, there were civilizations in the Fertile Crescent — meaning civilized peoples, with moral values. Despite their legendary brutality, the Assyrians did not slaughter the defeated Israelites, but deported and resettled them. Later the Babylonians allowed their Judean captives to stick together and prosper on the riverbanks of the Euphrates. Yet the Israelites and the Judeans chose to record and cherish their gruesome stories of indiscriminate massacre and child-trafficking as part of their sacred traditions. Worse, they decided that, by committing these acts, their ancestors had done nothing but obey the Almighty God. And since the day we became Christians, Jews got us used to their inverted narrative, and to looking at the Assyrians and the Babylonians as the baddies.
By sanctifying old tales of tribal genocides, and claiming that the corresponding war code is the eternal Word of God, Israel has turned itself into a living stone-age fossil, a monster from a bygone age of savagery[2]. Not the elephant, but the tyrannosaurus in the room. The Hebrew Tanakh functions as a bronze-age software programming Israel with an inflexible prehistoric mentality or semi-nomadic pastoral raiders.
With a genocidal maniac as national-religious hero, with a kill count of 24,681,116 people for its national god[3] — a delusional demon who declared itself the only real god, therefore God — but with a modern army and a nuclear arsenal, and with an unmatched international power of corruption, Israel has grown to be the warmonger, the bloodsucker of the world, a force for the destruction of every civilizational achievement, such as human rights and international law. If civilization means less war, then Israel is the anti-civilization. And it’s not because they reject Jesus and read the Talmud; it’s because they worship Yahweh and read the Torah.
When the Zionists claimed that they were restoring ancient Israel, they really meant it. We should have listened carefully when the Chief Secretary of the Lehi, or Stern Gang, claimed that his terrorist organization was “the inheritors of the purest traditions of ancient Israel.”[4] He was right. Israel was always about the Bible. As it grew stronger, it became more and more openly biblical. And here we are today, with a government-funded rabbi like Yitzak Shapira (“a great halakhic arbiter” according to Netanyahu) writing in his book Hamelech (“The King’s Torah”): “There is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us.”[5] Shapira claims that his edict “is fully justified by the Torah.” He is right, no question about it. The Bible is Israel’s blueprint for genocide.
Put down for a moment your “allegorical” or “eschatological” Christian glasses, if you have any, and read the prophecy of Zechariah 14:
And this is the plague with which Yahweh will strike all the nations who have fought against Jerusalem; their flesh will rot while they are still standing on their feet; their eyes will rot in their sockets; their tongues will rot in their mouths. … [Then] the wealth of all the surrounding nations will be heaped together: gold, silver, clothing, in vast quantity. … After this, all the survivors of all the nations which have attacked Jerusalem will come up year after year to worship the King, Yahweh Sabaoth.
Now think what a nation with such a program and nuclear power will do when it thinks God gives the go-ahead.
Israel is not just anachronistic. It is sick. Israel is the psychopath. Something must have happened in the infancy of this Yahweh-worshipping federation of tribes, something of a traumatic nature. I will suggest a “Cain complex” — similar to the Oedipus complex that Freud projected on all mankind (Totem and Taboo, 1913). Not that I believe in the Freudian theory of a universal psychopathological pattern resulting from an original prehistoric murder. Rather, I believe that such a theory came into the mind of an introspective Jew because it does have some truth for Jews. Jewish identity is, among other things, the impression of being under the influence of an ambivalent collective fatum or karma going back thousands of years: what Jews rationalize as being a people “chosen” by God, they also perceive as a burden or a curse. Leon Pinsker has given a smart expression of this ambivalence when he wrote that the Jews are “the people chosen for universal hatred” (Auto-Emancipation, 1882). And Theodor Lessing approaches the same idea when he claimed that all Jews without exception suffer from some degree of self-hatred (Jewish Self-Hatred, 1930). If the theory I am about to present is correct, then the Jewish delusion of chosenness — clearly a psychopathological symptom —, is the manifestation of a sense of cursedness, by a process Freud called “compensation”.
The Cain Complex
According to the so-called “Kenite Hypothesis”, the Mosaic cult of Yahweh originated from a semi-nomadic tribe of coppersmiths, the Kenites (Qayn).[6] Moses’s father-in-law was a Kenite, according to Judges 1:16. He is named Hobab there, but Jethro in Numbers 18:1 and in most of Exodus, except in Exodus 2:18 where he is called Reuel. We’ll call him Jethro. The Book of Exodus records the following about him:
– Jethro was a priest, or kohen (2:16 and 18:1).
– It was while herding Jethro’s goats that Moses found himself on Yahweh’s “holy ground” (3:5).
– It was Jethro who “offered a burnt offering” to Yahweh when Moses and Aaron came back from Egypt, which makes him, by definition, a sacrificial priest of Yahweh (18:12).
– It was Jethro who instructed Moses how to organize the tribes politically (18:19-25): “Now, listen to me,” Jethro told Moses, “and I will give you some advice, that God may be with you.” The passage concludes with: “Moses followed the advice of his father-in-law and did all that he had suggested.”
– It was Jethro’s daughter Zipporah, Moses’s wife, who performed circumcision on their newborn son (4:24-26).
The Kenites are not presented as being part of the Israelites, but are uniquely associated to them, fighting and settling alongside the tribe of Judah in Canaan (Judges 1:16), and sharing with the Israelites the booty of the Amalekites (1Samuel 15:6, 30:26-29).
Additionally, according to 1Chronicles 2:55, the Kenites are “descended from Hammath, father of the House of Rechab.” This makes them identical or kindred to the Rechabites, who are praised by the prophet Jeremiah for their fidelity to Yahweh and to their ancestor’s pledge not to “drink wine, build houses, sow seed, plant vineyards or own them, but [to] live in tents all your lives” (Jeremiah 35:6-7). This sounds like a recognition of the Rechabites as the remnant of an archaic stage of Yahwism. We also hear of a Jonadab son of Rechab who helps the Judean general Jehu to exterminate the priests of Baal in the northern kingdom of Israel (2Rois 10).
As I said, Moses’ father-in-law is a Kenite according to Judges 1:16, but he is called a Midianite in Numbers 10:29, and a “priest of Midian” in Exodus 3:1 and 18:1. It seems that Midian was a region rather than a specific people, and that the Kenites were a tribe living in Midian. The Israelites apparently had a special alliance with the Kenites, but not with the rest of the Midianites, who were supposedly exterminated on Moses’ order in Numbers 31.
Midian is located in the northwest Arabian Peninsula, on the east shore of the Gulf of Aqaba. It is a region rich in copper, and copper was mined there by the Egyptians from the end of the 14th century BCE. The name of the Kenites (Qayn) actually means “blacksmith” or “metal-worker”. Their skill in copper or bronze metallurgy is consistent with the hypothesis that they worshipped a god coming from a volcano, as Exodus 19:16-19 makes quite clear. Northwest Arabia happens to be a volcanic area, unlike the Egyptian peninsula which later mistakenly came to be named Sinai (explorer Charles Beke was the first to point this out in Mount Sinai a Volcano, 1873). Israeli Biblical scholar Nissim Amzallag is of the opinion that Yahweh was originally a god of metallurgy worshipped by semi-nomadic copper smelters between the Bronze and the Iron Ages.[7] In that case, Moses’s major innovation to the Kenites’ religion was to build a wooden chest (the Ark) and a tent (the Tabernacle) to carry their god to Canaan.
But here is where the Kenite hypothesis becomes interesting and possibly enlightening about the inborn character of Israel.
As a rule in the Torah, peoples bear the name of their supposed ancestor: just like the Edomites are named Edom, the Kenites are simply named Cain (Qayn), which means that Cain is their legendary ancestor. Genesis 4:19-24 describes the descendants of Cain as tent-dwellers, inventors of copper and iron metallurgy, and makers of musical instruments. It is therefore surmised that the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4 was adapted from an etiological myth by which the Kenites explained their wandering lifestyle as a consequence of a divine curse for the fratricide committed by their eponymous ancestor on his younger brother. Yahweh said to Cain:
“What have you done! Listen: your brother’s blood cries out to me from the soil! Therefore you shall be banned from the soil that opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. If you till the soil, it shall no longer give you its produce. You shall become a restless wanderer on the earth.” (Genesis 4:10-12)
Yahweh’s curse is counterbalanced by a special protection: “‘Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance.’ Yahweh puts a mark on Cain, so that no one coming across him would kill him” (4:15). One of Cain’s descendants, Lamech, changed the rule to seventy-sevenfold vengeance (4:24).
The third brother Seth, conceived by Adam and Eve as a substitute for the dead Abel (Genesis 4:26) was not part of the Kenite myth. He was added to the story by a biblical redactor who, on second thoughts, decided to give the tribes named as descendants of Cain an alternative, blameless ancestor. This is the likely explanation for why the names of Seth’s children in Genesis 5:6-32 are a rough copy-and-paste of the names of Cain’s children’s in Genesis 4:17-18.
The general picture we can form based on this scriptural material is that the Kenites were a semi-nomadic tribe known for their skill in copper and brass work, but also feared, not only because metallurgy was a secret art associated to magic, but also because they had a reputation for being dangerous and extremely vengeful. It is also plausible that, as keepers of a secret art associated to the cult of a jealous god, they cultivated a rigid tradition of separateness.
Since individuals stand for peoples in the Torah, the story of Cain and Abel can be interpreted as a tribe exterminating a kindred tribe (as the Israelites did to the Midianites, actually). The genocidal tribe may have been haunted by the guilt, the sense of being cursed, the paranoid fear of being themselves exterminated in retribution, and the need to both deceive and build a reputation of extreme vengefulness in order to preclude that possibility.
The parallel between the story of Cain killing Abel and the story of Jacob cheating Esau of his birthright, suggests the possibility that the Kenites’ ethnogenetic myth was duplicated by the Israelites, who reinterpreted the divine curse as a divine election. We can even speculate that in a primitive version of the Jacob and Esau story, Jacob killed Esau and later wrestled against Esau’s ghost in the form of an angel at the ford of the Yabboq (Genesis 32).
Finally, we must recall that, when he was adopted by a Kenite priest, Moses was himself a murderer on the run: “Looking this way and that and seeing no one in sight, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand” (Exodus 2:12).
It may seem improbable that a people would attribute their nomadic and separate lifestyle to a divine curse, but Yuri Slezkine mentions other ethnic groups of wanderers who conceived their mode of existence “as divine punishment for an original transgression.” For example, “of the many legends accounting for the Gypsy predicament, … the most common one blames the Gypsies for forging the nails used to crucify Jesus.[8]” This is an interesting parallel to the Christians’ blame on the Jews for having crucified Jesus, and to the medieval legend of the Wandering Jew.
Should we then seek the secret source of Jewish psychology in a “Cain complex” dating back to a primordial tribal genocide, like Freud seeking the key to the human psyche in a universal Oedipus complex dating back to a primordial parricide, or like Augustine theorizing an original sin going back to Adam and Eve and affecting all their descendants (a very Jewish theory, come to think of it).
Whatever the case may be, it is interesting to think of the Jews’ assertion of their being chosen by God as a compensation for a deep-seated sense of being cursed by God. The implications of that hypothesis are immense, both for understanding the Jews and for dealing with them.
Suggested Reading: Talmud Research- Zionist views on Non Jews: “Non Jews Are Beasts to Serve Us as Slaves”
It’s not genetic, but it’s genital
As an interesting appendix to the above theory, there is some evidence that, before they adopted the rite of circumcising every newborn male, the early Israelites were once required to sacrifice every first-born male: could it have been an atonement rite for the murder committed by the first-born Cain?
The evidence starts with Exodus 4:24-26, in which Yahweh wants to kill Moses but spares him when his wife Zipporah, Jethro’s daughter, circumcises their newborn son with a flint. Since Yahweh’s wish to kill Moses comes totally unexplained, and since the previous verse is about Yahweh’s threat to Pharaoh to “kill your son, your first-born,” I speculate that this incoherent narrative is the distorted version of a more straightforward one, in which Yahweh would have killed Moses’s son if he hadn’t been circumcised.
Why would a scribe make this clumsy edit? Answer: to obscure the obvious implication that the Jewish rite of brit milah (the “covenant of cutting”) was established as a substitute for the sacrifice of the first-born male. This would be speculation if there were no other scriptural clues that this is precisely what happened during the Babylonian exile, when human sacrifices were banned and eighth-day circumcision established.
Exodus 13:12-13 commands: “you shall dedicate to Yahweh every son that opens the womb; and all the male firstlings of your animals shall belong to Yahweh.” It adds that the first-born of a donkey can be “redeemed by a sheep,” and that the same must be done for the first-born of a human: “Every first-born son you must redeem.” This is repeated in Exodus 34:19-20.[9] “Redeem” means “buy back”; in the context of a religious sacrifice, it means that the first-born son is sacrificed symbolically while replaced on the altar by an animal (as was Abraham’s son Isaac).
If these verses are open to interpretation, Exodus 22:28-29 removes the ambiguity: “You shall give me the first-born of your sons. You must do the same with your oxen and your sheep; for seven days the firstling may stay with its mother, but on the eighth day you must give it to me.” This clarifies that the commandment is the same for farm animals and for humans. It also specifies that the first-born is to be sacrificed on the eighth day after his birth.
How can a sheep — or a human — be “given to Yahweh” except by sacrificing it, presumably as a holocaust (burnt offering), since this is the only sacrifice pleasing to Yahweh? It is true that the notion is not fully explicit in the verses I’ve just quoted. We should not expect it to be, because at the time of the final redaction of the Bible, that commandment was obsolete; human sacrifices were no longer required, nor even allowed. But Ezekiel 20:25-26 confirms unambiguously that, in a not so distant past, Yahweh demanded that the Israelites “sacrifice every first-born son.”
Human sacrifices are forbidden in Leviticus 18:21 and 22:2-5, as well as in Jeremiah 7:30-31, but to the historian, the prohibition proves the practice, because there is no need to forbid something that is never done (the same holds true for the commandment not to copulate with animals in Exodus 22:18-19, by the way). Therefore children were still sacrificed at the time when Leviticus and the Book of Jeremiah were written, although it was officially outlawed.
What is puzzling is that, in Leviticus and Jeremiah, child sacrifices are said to be offered to Molek (or Molech) but in the name of Yahweh and in his temple. For example: “Anyone … who gives any of his children to Molek, will be put to death, [for] he has defiled my sanctuary and profaned my holy name” (Leviticus 20:2-3). This apparent paradox has been solved by Swiss biblical scholar Thomas Römer: the word MLK, vocalized as molek in the Hebrew Masoretic version and melek in the Greek Septuagint, means “king” (malik in Arabic), and it is applied more than fifty times to Yahweh himself. This means that Molek was originally none other than Yahweh himself. During the exilic period, YHWH–MLK was dissociated between the evil god MLK who asked the sacrifice of every first-born son eight days after birth, and the good god YHWH who forbade this practice.[10] The result is a biblical text containing two layers, as in a palimpsest: in the ancient version, the first-born son was to be sacrificed to Yahweh on the eighth day, while in the new version written over it, human sacrifices are forbidden but still offered to Melek (but in Yahweh’s name and in Yahweh’s sanctuary). Kings of Israel and Judea who offered their sons as burnt offerings are condemned (1Kings 16:34, 2Kings 16:3, and 2Kings 21:6).
The systematic sacrifice of the first-born son on the eighth day of his life was not just abandoned during the exile. It was replaced by the systematic circumcision of every son on the eighth day of his life:
“As soon as he is eight days old, every one of your males, generation after generation, must be circumcised … My covenant must be marked in your flesh as a covenant in perpetuity. The uncircumcised male, whose foreskin has not been circumcised — that person must be cut off from his people: he has broken my covenant.” (Genesis 17:9-14)
This Abrahamic covenant comes before the Mosaic covenant in the biblical narrative, but it was written later. Abraham is never mentioned by pre-exilic prophets.[11] His journey from Mesopotamia to Palestine, promised to him in Genesis 15:7, was invented as a blueprint for the (re)conquest of Palestine by the exiles in Babylon.
The story of Abraham showing perfect obedience to Yahweh when being asked to sacrifice Isaac, but then being prevented from it, is traditionally held as marking a major civilizational breakthrough credited to Israel. René Girard adapted this interpretation in numerous books, starting with The Scapegoat (1986): the story of God sparing Isaac is about ending the polytheistic practice of sacrificing one’s own children to the likes of Moloch. Girard suggests that the stance of biblical monotheism against idolatry stems largely from an understanding that polytheistic “religions” are, in the final analysis, cults of human sacrifice.
But the historical record does not support that interpretation, and if you ask me, Girard’s theory is a Jewish fantasy, just like Augustine’s original sin — I known, Girard was a Catholic, like Augustine. Human sacrifices were indeed practiced in many other societies. The Phoenicians certainly did it. Even the Achaeans (Greeks) did it exceptionally (Iphigenia, Oedipus). But the Israelites were certainly not the first to give up human sacrifices. Theophrastus, a disciple of Aristotle, wrote around 250 BC that, “the Syrians, or whom the Jews [Ioudaioi, or Judaeans] constitute a part, still now sacrifice live victims.” He adds that, “they were the first to institute sacrifices both of other living beings and of themselves.”[12] This may not be true, but it shows that the Jews were not regarded as pioneers in the abolition of human sacrifices.
According to 2Kings 23:10, it was King Josiah (640-609 BC) who abolished the sacrifices of children, “so that no one could pass his son or daughter through the fire of sacrifice to Molek.” But Thomas Römer believes that human sacrifices were only banned after the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem, for the reason that it was outlawed in Babylon. Eighth-day sacrifice of the first-born male was then replaced by eighth-day circumcision of every newborn male instead.
Circumcision on the eighth day is, objectively, a ritual trauma whose psychological impact is intense and irreparable. A week after he enters life — a trauma in itself, but one that is soon healed by the mother’s love — the male infant is painfully initiated into the cruelty of his family and their god. We know, thanks to Stephan Blackford (but do we really need to be told) that basic trust is the fundamental sense of security and confidence that an individual develops during the first year of his life. It is the bedrock of his future psychological development, as psychologist Erik Erikson theorized it, and it depends primarily on the sense of being protected and nurtured by the parents. Failure to develop this basic trust can lead to chronic anxiety, depression, and personality disorders. Children enduring the excruciating pain of circumcision (without anesthesia) may not all react the same, but can there be any doubt that many will have their basic trust permanently damaged?
The trauma is also on the mother, whose guilt is a determining factor in the well-known ambivalence of the “Jewish mother”. During the ceremony of brit milah, the mother is normally kept away from the scene. But testimonies by “Mothers Who Observed Circumcision,” published on the Circumcision Resource Center web page, are eloquent. “The screams of my baby remain embedded in my bones and haunt my mind,” says Miriam Pollack. “His cry sounded like he was being butchered. I lost my milk.” Nancy Wainer Cohen: “I will go to my grave hearing that horrible wail, and feeling somewhat responsible.” Elizabeth Pickard-Ginsburg:
Jesse was shrieking and I had tears streaming down my face. … Jesse screamed so loud that all of a sudden there was no sound! I’ve never heard anything like it!! He was screaming and it went up and then there was no sound and his mouth was just open and his face was full of pain!! I remember something happened inside me … the intensity of it was like blowing a fuse! It was too much. We knew something was over. I don’t feel that it ever really healed. … I don’t think I can recover from it. It’s a scar. I’ve put a lot of energy into trying to recover. I did some crying and we did some therapy. There’s still a lot of feeling that’s blocked off. It was too intense. … We had this beautiful baby boy and seven beautiful days and this beautiful rhythm starting, and it was like something had been shattered!! … When he was first born there was a tie with my young one, my newborn. And when the circumcision happened, in order to allow it I had cut off the bond. I had to cut off my natural instincts, and in doing so I cut off a lot of feelings towards Jesse. I cut it off to repress the pain and to repress the natural instinct to stop the circumcision.
Because infants cannot speak, rabbis who defend the tradition of brit milah speak in their place to minimize their physical pain. But according to Professor Ronald Goldman, author of Circumcision, the Hidden Trauma (1997), studies prove the neurological impact of infant circumcision. Behavioral changes observed after the operation, including sleep disorders and inhibition in mother-child bonding, are signs of a post-traumatic stress syndrome.
Parental abuse cannot be processed by the infant, whose very survival depends on his parents. The idea of the wickedness of parental figures is so devastating that the repressed anger will be deviated away from them. Is it farfetched to suppose a causal link between the trauma of eighth-day circumcision and the tendency of Jews to be incapable of seeing the abuse perpetrated on them by their own community leaders, and instead see the rest of the world as a constant threat? Could it be that the trauma of eighth-day circumcision has caused a special predisposition to paranoia that impairs the Jews’ capacity to relate and react rationally to certain situations? Was brit milah invented some twenty-three centuries ago as a kind of ritual trauma intended to enslave mentally millions of people, a “covenant” carved into their heart in the form of an incurable subconscious terror that can at any time be triggered by code-words such as “Holocaust” or “anti-Semitism”?
In 2015, a research team led by Dr. Rachel Yehuda at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, concluded that the trauma of the Holocaust is passed from generation to generation via “epigenetic inheritance.”[13] While they’re at it, they should study the epigenetic impact (or “genomic imprinting”) of eighth-day circumcision? Today, more than 9 out of 10 Israelis have endured the trauma: this cannot be without consequence on the national psyche.
This is just a theory. But we know we are dealing with a madman, so we need to find a cause, before we can find a cure. It would be easy to test that theory: outlaw circumcision in one nation, and see if the Jews’ mental health improve. The Icelanders tried in 2018, but their bill was successfully fought by European Jewish organizations as “anti-Semitic”.[14]
Sooner or later, it will have to be banned globally anyway, because it goes against the most basic, natural and universal child protection legislation. There is a good chance that banning brit milah will go half-way toward solving the Jewish Problem.
The Temple of Satan
Let’s face the truth: we, the collective Christian world, have not been helping Jews get better: we have been telling them that we believe them when they say that God chose them, and we have allowed them to keep on mutilating their newborns. We have always granted them a privileged position within Christendom, as the only non-Christian religion allowed. This goes back to Augustine’s “witness theory” in The City of God:
By the evidence of their own scriptures they bear witness for us that we have not fabricated the prophecies about Christ. … It follows that when the Jews do not believe in our scriptures, their scriptures are fulfilled in them, while they read them with blind eyes. … It is in order to give this testimony which, in spite of themselves, they supply for our benefit by their possession and preservation of those books [of the Old Testament] that they are themselves dispersed among all nations, wherever the Christian church spreads. … Hence the prophecy in the Book of Psalms [Psalm 59]: “Slay them not, lest they forget your law; scatter them by your might.”[15]
Let’s go back to the pre-Christian way. Almost unanimously, the Greeks and the Romans used to think that hatred of humankind was a common trait of the Jews (read Peter Schäfer, Judeophobia: Attitudes Toward the Jews in the Ancient World, Harvard UP, 1998). Tacitus noted in the first century A.D. that they are ever-ready to help each other, but “regard the rest of mankind with all the hatred of enemies” (Histories V.5). In the same period, the Alexandrian Greek Isidoros went to Rome at the head of a delegation to complain to the emperor that the Jews “are trying to throw the whole world into a state of turmoil.”[16] Apion, another Greek from Alexandria, wrote a best-seller against the Jews, which is lost but known in part through its refutation by Flavius Josephus (Against Apion); he claimed that the Jews worshipped a golden ass’s head in their temple. The rumor came from the Egyptian belief, documented by Plutarch in his treatise on Isis and Osiris, that the Jews’ god was Seth, the Egyptian donkey-headed god. Seth is the murderer of his brother Osiris (a Cain-like fratricide), exiled by the community of the gods and settled in the Judean desert. For the Egyptians, Seth is the god of lies, civil war and famine, a polytheistic equivalent of Satan.
When they became Christians, the Romans were taught that the Jews were the first to worship the true God. And so the wickedness of the Jews could no longer be attributed to the wickedness of their god. Instead it was explained as a consequence of the Jews’ turning away from the true God. Whereas ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans had thought the Jews were a cursed people because they hated all gods but Yahweh, Christians believe that the Jews were a holy people as long as they hated all gods but Yahweh.
Using Revelation 2:9 and 3:9, Christians blame the “synagogue of Satan” and the Talmud rather than the Temple and the Torah. Which is odd, because Jesus fought the Temple, not the synagogue. He called the Temple “a den of thieves” (Mark 11:17), and it was the uproar he caused there that determined the priests to get rid of him. They accused him of wanting to destroy the Temple. And according to the gospels, he did predict its total destruction (Mark 13:2).
The Christian “synagogue of Satan” theory means that Jews commit evil under the influence of Satan, not Yahweh. But that theory is demonstrably false: whenever Israelis do satanic things, they do it in the name of Yahweh, not in the name of Satan. Netanyahu declared that he will do to the Palestinians what Yahweh, not Satan, ordered Moses to do to Amalek. So it is about time we return to the Greco-Roman theory: Israel is evil because the god of Israel is evil. The problem is with the Temple itself (which, in ancient times, was also the Bank, by the way).
The Babylonians must have known this, when they destroyed Solomon’s Temple in 586 BC. The Romans knew it, when they leveled Herod’s Temple to the ground in 70 AD. Then in the 130s, emperor Hadrian built a new city on the ruins of the old one, and named it Aelia Capitolina (the Arabs continued long after to call it Iliya), and used the Temple site as the city dump. He renamed the province Syria Palæstina, in remembrance of the Philistines.
But Christian nations gave Palestine back to the Jews, who renamed it Israel and are now planning to rebuild their Temple and (re)create Solomon’s regional empire.
My Christian friends resent me for hammering these facts. And I hate to disturb their religious hypnosis. But history demands that they wake up from their delusion about holy Israel. There is no longer any excuse for the worshipping of the Hebrew Bible and its genocidal god. There is no longer any excuse for failing to denounce Jewish chosenness as the biggest and most catastrophic lie in human history. Enough theological cop-out, such as “reading the Bible allegorically”! Take the green pill!
But don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Keep Baby Jesus: he is the mythical and ritual personification of the “new sun” (noio hel), a European tradition predating Christianity, and therefore a keystone for our reappropriation of our pre-Christian roots. Keep the adult Jesus as well. His story is the story of every man destroyed by the Empire for having defied the Temple. Jesus is the Palestinians.
Jesus to Israel: “Go to hell, Satan!”
But beware: there are two Jesuses, and that’s one Jesus too many: there is Jesus the Messiah, and there is Jesus the son of God. The first is Jewish, the second is Greek. We don’t need Jesus the Messiah, because if Jesus was the Messiah, that means the whole messianic scenario — Israel being chosen by God and the rest — is true.
By chance, it turns out that Jesus didn’t believe he was the Messiah. He said so in Mark 8:27-33 (here from the Catholic Jerusalem Bible):
27 Now Jesus and his disciples set out for the villages of Caesarea Philippi. Along the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” 28 They said in reply, “John the Baptist, others Elijah, still others one of the prophets.” 29 And he asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter said to him in reply, “You are the Messiah.” … 33 At this he turned around and, looking at his disciples, rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”
Yes, I skipped verses 30 to 32, because they are a later interpolation:
30 Then he warned them not to tell anyone about him. 31 He began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer greatly and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and rise after three days. 32 He spoke this openly. Then Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.
With these verses, the passage takes the opposite meaning: Jesus accepts the messianic title, but wants to keep it secret, and Peter is now rebuked for not wanting Jesus to die. But Jesus’s predestined death and resurrection is a post-Easter Christological development, so the whole passage can plausibly be attributed to the historical Jesus, but only without verses 30-32.
Verse 30 introduces the motif known to Jesus scholars as the “messianic secret” (first conceptualized in 1901 by William Wrede). The purpose was to respond to an objection: in the early 70s, some people who had known Jesus or his early disciples had never heard that Jesus claimed to be the Messiah. The gospel writer’s response was that Jesus had told his disciples to keep it secret. And so the motif of Jesus’s messianic secret was written over the motif of Jesus’s messianic denial.
That’s just a theory. But there is another strong argument that Jesus did say something like “Get behind me, Satan” (Vade retro, Satana, in the Latin Vulgate) in response to the Jewish messianic hope of his time, and that his words became memorable: the very same phrase is replicated in the story of Jesus’ temptation in the desert:
the devil showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor, and said to him, “I will give you all these, if you kneel down to me and worship me.” Then Jesus replied, “Get behind, Satan!” (Matthew 4:8-10).
Here we have Jesus rejecting the very principle of Yahweh’s covenant with his people, recorded in Deuteronomy and repeated as a leitmotiv throughout the Hebrew scripture: if the Jews worship Yahweh and no other gods, then Yahweh “will raise you higher than every other nation he has made”, and “you will make many nations your subjects, and will be subject to none” (Deuteronomy 26:17-19 and 28:12). The parallel between Satan’s temptation and Yahweh’s covenant is unmistakable. Jesus refuses to be the messianic king that will usher Israel’s glorious supremacy. The temptation story may be legendary, but it was probably built upon a memorable expression used by Jesus to qualify Israel’s messianic dream, and Mark 8:27-33 provides a plausible context for those words.
That is still just a theory. Let’s face it: we don’t know exactly what Jesus really said, and no one will ever know for sure how to separate the words he said from the words that gospels writers and editors made him say. The point is that we have the choice of interpretations. There is only one Jesus, but there are many ways to understand Jesus. Even with the relatively recent “historical Jesus”, there are variations: Jesus the rabbi, Jesus the revolutionary, Jesus the healer, Jesus the apocalyptic preacher, or Jesus the Palestinian. We can choose to believe that Jesus endorsed Israel’s narcissistic and xenophobic delusion of metaphysical superiority, or that he tried to cure Israel from it. We can choose to believe that Jesus accepted the god of Israel as his Father in Heaven, or that he implicitly identified the god of Israel with Satan. We can choose to believe that Jesus was Israel’s Messiah, or that he vehemently rejected that title as a satanic idea. It is a rational choice, and there are strong scholarly arguments in favor of the second choice. I have presented one of them.
I’m trying to help Christians who are starting to understand that Israel is evil from the start. There is a rational basis for Marcionism, if we understand by that term a vision of Jesus as radically opposed to the ideology of the Old Testament, and a concept of Jesus’s Father as radically opposed to Yahweh. Marcionism is a heresy? Tertullian condemned it? Who cares? Jesus taught to seek treasures in heaven, while Yahweh is obsessed with filling his Temple with gold and silver: “I shall shake all the nations, and the treasures of all the nations will flow in, and I shall fill this Temple with glory, says Yahweh Sabaoth. Mine is the silver, mine the gold! Yahweh Sabaoth declares” (Haggai 2:7–8). It’s not just the synagogue of Satan, it’s the Temple of Satan.
Notes
[1] City of God, 18.46, quoted in Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, Oxford UP, 1996, p. 86.
[2] Arnold Toynbee applied the metaphor of the fossil to the Jews in the first volume of his monumental Study of History (1934).
[3] Steve Wells, Drunk With Blood: God’s Killings in the Bible, SAB Books, 2013.
[4] Thomas Suárez, State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel, Skyscraper, 2016, p. 55.
[5] Wyatt Peterson, Perfidy of Zion, 2022, p. 58.
[6] The “Kenite hypothesis,” or “Midianite hypothesis”, is presented in Thomas Römer, The Invention of God, Harvard UP, 2015. Also worth reading is Hyam Maccoby, The Sacred Executioner, Thames & Hudson, 1982.
[7] Ariel David, “Jewish God Yahweh Originated in Canaanite Vulcan, Says New Theory,” Haaretz, April 11, 2018, on haaretz.com.
[8] Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century, Princeton UP, 2004, pp. 22-23.
[9] Numbers 18:15-17 declares redeemable the “first-born of an unclean animal” (unfit for consumption), but forbids to redeem “the first-born of cow, sheep and goat,” which are destined for the consumption of the Levites.
[10] Thomas Römer, The Invention of God, Harvard UP, 2015, pp. 137-138.
[11] Mario Liverani, La Bible et l’invention de l’histoire, Gallimard, 2012, pp. 354–355. English edition: Israel’s History and the History of Israel, Equinox Publishing, 2007.
[12] Menahem Stern, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism (vol. 1), Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1974, p. 10.
[13] “Study of Holocaust survivors finds trauma passed on to children’s genes,” The Guardian, August 21, 2015, on www.theguardian.com.
[14] David Rosenberg, “Iceland drops proposed circumcision ban,” April 30, 2018, on www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/245193
[15] Paula Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism, Yale UP, 2010.
[16] Joseph Mélèze Modrzejewski, The Jews of Egypt, From Rameses II to Emperor Hadrian, Princeton UP, 1995, p. 178.
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