[Diggers350] Michael Hudson: Were the Biblical Prophets Anti-Semitic?

Sat Nov 25 01:32:47 GMT 2023

Were the Biblical Prophets Anti-Semitic?

Were the prophets self-loathing Jews? Are those 
who criticize todays right-wing politicians 
abolishing the lands courts of justice, urging 
the mass murder of civilians and destroying an 
entire societys infrastructure anti-Semites?
By Michael Friday, November 17, 2023 Articles and 
forgive them their debts, Middle East Permalink

https://michael-hudson.com/2023/11/were-the-biblical-prophets-anti-semitic/

If the prophets of ancient Israel such as Isaiah, 
Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Malachi and Amos were alive 
today, Benjamin Netanyahu would accuse them of 
anti-Semitism for daring to describe his 
government as a travesty of what the Mosaic 
covenant was all about. A common thread running 
throughout the Jewish Bible  Christianitys Old 
Testament  was to criticize kings, the wealthy 
and corrupt courts for violating the Mosaic 
commandments to create a fair and equitable 
society protecting the poor from the economic 
oppression of debt bondage, and loss of their 
land. If the prophets were summoned to give 
judgment today, it is Netanyahus right-wing 
Likud Party and the steeply unequal economy of 
Israel that would be condemned as violating the 
most basic laws of Biblical Judaism.
Prophet after prophet described the Lord as being 
so displeased with Israel on so many occasions 
for deviating from his commandments that he 
withdrew his protection and condemned the land to 
which Moses had led his followers to be conquered 
as punishment. The Biblical prophets attributed 
Israels defeat by Sargon in 722 BC to the Lords 
punishment for its falling away from the covenant 
the Lord had offered. Israels punishment fit the 
crime: Just as its wealthy creditor elite had 
dispossessed their brethren from the land, so the 
ten tribes of Israel were deported to Mesopotamia 
and Media, and Judahs size was reduced to only 
the region surrounding Jerusalem.
Ezekiel, the great prophet of the Exile, was 
taken to Babylonia in 597 BC as a military 
hostage. He became the leading influence on Ezra 
and the priestly school that edited the Torahs 
early sources into a version that was finalized 
when the Jews returned from Babylon and wrote the 
Babylonian concepts of economic justice into the 
Mosaic Holiness Code. In an apocalyptic tone 
Ezekiel 7 announces: The word of the Lord came 
to me: 
 The end is now upon you and I will 
unleash my anger against you. I will judge you 
according to your conduct and repay you for all 
your detestable practices, citing the 
polarization of wealth by the wealthiest Jews, 
corrupting the law courts and violating the original covenant with the Lord.
Were the prophets self-loathing Jews? Are those 
who criticize todays right-wing politicians 
abolishing the lands courts of justice, urging 
the mass murder of civilians and destroying an 
entire societys infrastructure anti-Semites? 
Does commenting that October 7th did not occur 
in a vacuum, as UN Secretary General Antonio 
Guterres did  even indeed after characterizing 
it as an atrocity  make one an anti-Semite?
What I find most amazing is that no religious 
scholars are pointing out that Netanyahus claim 
to be following a Biblical covenant as his excuse 
for committing genocide to seize Palestinian land 
and destroy its existing population is a travesty 
of what actually is written in the Bible.

Emacs!

By a sleight-of-hand like that of a stage 
magician trying to distract the audiences 
attention from what really is happening, 
Netanyahu has evoked what he claims to be a 
Biblical excuse for Israeli genocide. But what he 
pretends to be a covenant in the tradition of 
Moses is a vicious demand by the judge and grey 
eminence Samuel telling Saul, the general whom he 
hopes to make king: Now go and smite Amalek [an 
enemy of Israel], and totally destroy everything 
that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to 
death men and women, children and infants, cattle 
and sheep, camels and donkeys (1 Samuel 15:3).
These were not the Lords own words, and Samuel 
was no Moses. And there was no blanket promise to 
back the Jews regardless of their behavior. And 
indeed, in following Samuels demand for conquest 
 as a means of making Saul popular enough to be 
made king  Saul broke the Lords commandments 
about proper religious ceremonial and dietary 
behavior. One would have no idea from Netanyahus 
celebration of the compact between Samuel and 
Saul to become popular by military conquest. 
Sauls misbehavior led Samuel himself to rebuke 
him, telling him that the Lord had decided that 
another man must be found to be king of Israel.
It was not the Lord offering that command to 
destroy Amalek, but a prophet anxious to place a 
king on the throne. Invocation of such a command 
is prima facie evidence of an intention to commit 
genocide. But that seemed less important to 
Netanyahu than pandering to the desire for 
revenge amongst Israelis. Netanyahu makes no 
mention of the fact that Saul disobeyed the 
Lords commandments and the Lord rejected him as 
king. Nor does Likud acknowledge the context, a 
few chapters earlier in I Samuel 12:15, 
describing the corrupt rule of judges and 
Samuels warning that if you do not obey the 
Lord, and if you rebel against his commands, his 
hand will be against you. The Lords warning 
that if you persist in doing evil, both you and 
your king will be swept away should have rung loudly for Netanyahu.
The Jewish Bible is remarkable in criticizing the 
kings who ruled Judah and Israel. It is in fact a 
long narrative of social revolution, in which 
religious leaders sought  often successfully  
to check the power of a selfish and aggressive 
oligarchy that was denounced again and again for 
its greed in impoverishing the poor, taking their 
land and reducing them to debt bondage. (My book 

 and forgive them their debts [Dresden 2018] 
describes this history.) The Jewish kings, 
wealthy families and corrupt courts led the Lord 
repeatedly to abandon them in the face of 
Assyria, Babylon and lesser opponents when they 
lapsed into selfish and oppressive behavior.
What was the covenant at Horeb near Mount Sinai? 
Simply put, the Lord gave Moses the Ten 
Commandments, which had a moral focus on economic 
justice, and made a bargain binding all future 
Jews to obey these commandments (Exodus 19-23 and 
Deuteronomy 5:2 and 28:43). From the very 
beginning the Lord threatened to punish the Jews 
if they broke this covenant. The prophets are 
quoted as citing the many ways in which succeeding generations broke it.
Reference to that context of fair rule was the 
role of a prophet (both ancient and modern): to 
awaken the people  and to be despised by those 
in power, especially by oppressive oligarchies. 
Judea, in accordance with the commandments, was 
supposed to provide mutual aid and protect the 
poor, not let creditors take the land for themselves.
So Judea lost battles to foreigners, whom the 
prophets described as used by the Lord as his 
instrument to punish the Jews for their 
transgression against the economic and other 
moral laws that the Lord had laid down. Does one 
doubt that todays greater Israel [the land over 
which it exerts total control, including Gaza, 
the West Bank and East Jerusalem] is economically 
polarized and unequal both financially and in terms of human rights?
Deuteronomy 28:21-25 warns that if the Jews fail 
to obey the Lords commandments, The Lord will 
plague you with diseases until he has destroyed 
you from the land you are entering to possess, 
and will cause you to be defeated before your 
enemies. Deuteronomy then (29:24-25) reminds the 
Jews that if the Lord does to them as he had done 
to Sodom and Gomorrah, Admath and Zeboiim, It is 
because this people abandoned the covenant of the 
Lord, the God of their fathers, the covenant he 
made with them when he brought them out of Egypt.
The prophets described what obeying the covenant 
meant. Isaiah 5:3 and 8 cited economic inequality 
as the greatest woe, blaming the elders and 
leaders for taking plunder from the poor into 
your houses. He declaimed: Woe to you who add 
house to house and join field to field, till no 
space is left alone in the land. That is exactly 
the fate that is befalling the Palestinians 
driven off their land by todays Israel as a settler state.
Isaiah 10:1-3 declaims: Woe to those who make 
unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive 
decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and 
rob my oppressed people of justice, making widows 
their prey and robbing the fatherless. What will 
you do on the day of reckoning, when disaster 
comes from afar? And in 29:13-15: The Lord 
says: These people come to me with their mouth 
and honor me with their lips, but their hearts 
are far from me. Their worship of me is made up 
only of rules taught by men. 
 Woe to those who 
go to great depths to hide their plans from the Lord.
Sound familiar? Isaiah 48:1 and 8 says, Listen, 
O house of Jacob, you who are called by the name 
of Israel 
 and invoke the God of Israel  but 
not in truth or righteousness. 
 Well I know how 
treacherous you are; you were called a rebel from birth.
The next prophet, Jeremiah 2, accuses Israel of 
abandoning the Lord and thus breaking the 
covenant, bringing disaster upon itself with its 
wickedness and backsliding and becoming a 
corrupt, wild vine. Calling Israel unfaithful 
(3:8 and 20-21) the Lord gave faithless Israel 
her certificate of divorce and sent her away, 
and Judah was just as bad. The Lord again 
threatened (17:3-4): Through your own fault you 
will lose the inheritance I gave you 
 for you 
have kindled my anger and it will burn forever.
In a move that has failed to shock or dismay 
conservative Christians, the United States has 
become modern Israels protector and lord, while 
Israels economy (like that of the United States) 
is polarizing along the same lines that the 
Biblical prophets denounced, such as when Ezekiel 
7 and 16 repeated the Lords anger at unfaithful 
Jerusalem, saying metaphorically (16:13) that 
you trusted in your beauty and used your fame to 
become a prostitute, not heeding the poor and 
needy. And in 34:2: Woe to the shepherds of 
Israel who only take care of themselves but plunder their flock.
Amos 2 accuses Israel of numerous sins: They 
sell the righteous for silver, and 
 trample on 
the heads of the poor 
 and deny justice to the 
oppressed. And Micah 7:3 declaims: Woe to those 
who plan inequity, to those who plot evil on 
their beds 
 because it is in their power to do 
it. 
 Therefore, the Lord said, I am planning 
disaster against this people, from which you 
cannot save yourselves when the wealthy join up 
as the ruler demands gifts, the judge accepts 
bribes, the powerful dictate what they desire  they all conspire together.
Todays modern Zionism is at odds with the Jewish 
Bible. That is understandable given that its 
ideology comes from a very secular group despite 
its recent takeover by self-identified orthodox 
Jews. The rhetoric used by Netanyahu is a 
travesty when one notes how the Jewish Bible 
proclaimed that wealth and property were to be 
distributed equitably, not concentrated in the 
hands of an oligarchy. Exodus 23:1 and 9 give the 
following insight into how aliens  the 
Palestinians of their day  were to be treated: 
Do not follow the crowd in doing wrong, but 
lay down the law of justice and mercy: Do not 
oppress an alien; you yourselves know how it 
feels to be aliens, because you were aliens in Egypt.
Is it justice and mercy to shut off water, food, 
medicine and fuel to an entire population and 
level or damage half of its buildings and most of 
its critical infrastructure including entire 
swarths of homes? Is it justice and mercy to 
force hospitals to shut down, bomb ambulances, 
and drop six 2,000 pound bombs on a refugee camp?
While billions around the world witness the 
super-Kristalnacht carnage in Gaza and blatant 
pogroms on the West Bank, serious Western 
journalists warn that an existential threat is 
posed by refugees with hang gliders but no 
planes, tanks or artillery pieces. The same 
journalists ignore the time-proven truism that 
the blood of martyrs is the seed of the faith 
and that killing thousands of innocents 
immediately and many thousands in the chaos that 
follows will not weaken but strengthen a 
resistance movement. It was that same reaction in 
the wake of Nazism that turned todays Zionist leaders into haters.
In the final lines of the Jewish Bible, Malachi 4 
speaks of the Lords emphasis that Israels 
covenant with God had a strong contractual quid 
pro quo as a condition for his support: All the 
arrogant and every evil-doer will be stubble, and 
that day that is coming will set them on fire, 
says the Lord Almighty. 
 Remember the law of my 
servant Moses, the decrees and laws I gave him at 
Horeb for all Israel. If these laws continued 
to be disobeyed, the Lord threatened, I will 
come and strike the land with a curse.
It seems that this curse has now come, in the 
form of most of the worlds population so 
appalled at the self-righteous genocide being 
committed by two secular governments claiming (to 
the discredit of Western religions) divine 
sanctification, Israel and the United States, 
just as the Western non-Soviet economy created in 
1945 in the wake of World War II is breaking into two parts.
We are living in secular times. The United States 
has become modern Israels protector and lord, 
and it itself has become corrupt along the same 
lines that the great prophets denounced. American 
evangelists, like the Israeli government, have 
excluded the message of the Biblical prophets and 
Jesuss social message, selecting only the 
Covenant as a deed of conquest and promise of a 
ticket to heaven without any behavioral quid pro quo involved.
The broad spectrum of Judeo-Christian religion 
has been secularized as todays world differs so 
fundamentally from that of classical antiquity. 
American TV evangelicals make a travesty of 
Jesuss attempt to restore the Mosaic Jubilee 
Year cancelling the debts that threatened ancient 
populations with bondage and led to the loss of 
their means of self-support on the land. The 
Prosperity Gospel has replaced Jesus with Ayn 
Rand, Milton Friedman and Frederick Hayek.
Already in the 4th and 5th centuries, almost as 
soon as Constantine made Christianity the Roman 
State religion, Augustine changed the translation 
of the Lords Prayer and Jesuss Sermon on the 
Mount by replacing debt cancellation with the 
non-economic idea of original sin inborn from 
Adam. To cap matters, the new interpretation 
replaced Jesuss call for debt cancellation with 
Church demands for monetary contributions to 
obtain indulgences and forgiveness. Subsequent 
Christianity became so pro-creditor that it 
defended the sanctity of debt, not its 
cancellation. To finance the Crusades in the 13th 
century, the popes excommunicated Christian 
clergy and secular reformers who opposed paying 
usury  which was re-defined as interest and 
permitted as long as it was Christian bankers who were making the loans.
Israel may have a convoluted legal right to shoot 
Palestinians coming over its wall in an attempt 
to defend land that settlers have seized 
illegally from them. But as an occupying power it 
does not have the sanctimonious right to 
disregard virtually every international law 
regarding war and collective punishment simply 
for revenge and to demonstrate to Lebanon, Syria, 
Turkey and Iran what it will do to them with 
American support if they join in the fray. 
Netanyahus actions and claims for religious 
sanctification for them are the antithesis of the 
original Judaism. His Likud government rejects 
the ethic of the Jewish Bible as much as 
Americas Christian evangelists reject the message of Jesus. 
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