In the aftermath of October 7, many (including this author) noted the similarity between the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas and those of the Amalekites during the Israelite exodus from ancient Egypt. This, in turn, led others to suggest that any comparison to the Amalekites could be seen to justify genocide.
According to Hebrew scripture and Midrash, as the Israelites came out of Egypt, the Amalekites slaughtered defenseless stragglers, women and children, the elderly and wounded. The Amalekites cut off the circumcised organs of the males, the mark of God’s covenant with Abraham, which they hurled toward the sky, calling out in mockery to heaven: “Here, take what you have chosen.” This, Yahweh seems not to have taken well.
After Moses sent Joshua to defeat the Amalekites and “put their people to the sword,” God told Moses to write down God’s words and repeat them for Joshua: “I will completely blot out the name of Amalek from under heaven.” Moses then constructed an altar, “because the Lord hath sworn that the Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation.” The command “do not forget Amalek” recurs throughout Hebrew scripture and liturgy. The enmity between God and Amalek is unique in scripture: nowhere else does God declare a perpetual state of conflict with a human community. This perplexed Jewish and later Abrahamic scholars for centuries. Since October 7, it has been debated more widely, invoked as evidence of the genocidal ethos of primitive paganism or of the genocidal inclinations of Israel.
Neither Jew nor Christian is required to believe in the historicity of the account, nor in the mandate to eradicate Amalek. It may be that the Amalekites never existed. But whether the Amalekites existed, and whether God is at war with some regenerate incarnate malevolence called Amalek—none of which is falsifiable—misses the point. What’s certain is that the Jewish people have been targeted in a distinct way for centuries (one could say, in every generation) and that they’ve often forgotten this fact—or have tried desperately to forget.
What’s also certain, moreover, is that the violence of the kind described in Midrash was standard practice in pagan societies, as was ritualized torture of every conceivable kind, human sacrifice, and cannibalism. The myth of ‘the noble savage’ somehow survives despite the mounting evidence. In truth, there is nothing noble in our origins, only savagery, and the primary reason few of us have encountered such savagery is the spread of the Abrahamic religions.
Most will agree that civilized behavior, at a minimum, consists of abstaining from ritualistic torture, rape, sexual mutilation, human sacrifice, cannibalism, and related conduct. Yet for most of human history such conduct was normative and often sacralized. Habits of ritual violence and scapegoating to satisfy blood lust and communal anxiety were ubiquitous.
Human sacrifice was a near-universal practice in primitive pagan societies, even among sophisticated pagans. Greeks had elaborate religious rituals for killing their pharmokoi (scapegoats). Romans buried sacrificial victims alive in religious rituals to spare Rome from enemies like the Carthaginians, and though human sacrifice was later banned, crucifixion, mass executions, and murderous entertainment continued until banished in the Christian era. The Carthaginians, like their Phoenician and Canaanite ancestors, sacrificed their own children, as did many Mediterranean peoples. Aztec, Maya, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian civilizations all had rituals for human sacrifice.
Ritualistic violence among low pagans was less well documented but often more horrific. Christians from the medieval to modern eras, travelers like Ahmad ibn Fadlan and Samuel de Champlain, and missionaries all personally witnessed ritualized torture, murder, and cannibalism, from North America to Northern Europe and Asia. Celtic and Baltic, Germanic and Angle, Comanche and Guanche—more peoples partook than can be numbered because most have gone extinct. Ritualistic barbarity was universal.
We probably cling to the myth of the noble savage despite the evidence because the truth—that we all descend from inbred cannibals who made a sacred ritual of torture, rape, sexual mutilation, child sacrifice, and murder—is too unpleasant. We have no desire to confront our history, ourselves, or what the world looks like with different gods. The earth beneath us is a vast crime scene, and those of us walking around descend from something far worse than our simian ancestors. Apes are incapable of the tortures humans inflict on one another.
So what brought most of that savagery to an end? And why do we believe in universal moral norms that restrain violent impulse rather than indulge it? Each inquirer is free to examine cause and effect throughout history. But if by progress we mean the spread of universal concepts of human dignity, equality, and morality—rather than, say, democracy or roads or sound architecture or law—then it all began with the Hebrews. It was the Jews who gave us monotheism, universal moral standards, the notion of the human person, and much else besides. Civilizational progress came from the Abrahamic faiths—unevenly, imperfectly, and undeniably.
Sacrificial violence and scapegoating were cathartic. They satisfy blood lust and the innate sense that there is injustice, that something is wrong, and that someone ought to be held to account, hence the sacrificial victim. The Hebrews shifted the violent cathartic urge from man to creature, and Christians shifted it to bread and water.
There are of course examples of civilized conduct among high pagans, though many of these had a threshold for quotidian violence that we conveniently ignore. And there are Abrahamic peoples who, often in the name of God, inflict unspeakable violence—much of it on each other, and the worst of it on the Jews. However, in general, civilized conduct among high pagans requires a deviation from pagan norms, and uncivilized behavior among Abrahamic communities requires a deviation from their own morality. Sorting through the genealogy and authenticity of moral systems today is nearly impossible for many reasons. Suffice it to say, most of us behave very differently from our pagan ancestors—and why we do so has everything to do with Judaism.
Sophisticated pagans, like primitive pagans, have tried to do away with the Hebrew God, Hebrew scripture and tradition, and the Hebrews themselves. Some early Christian sects, thanks to various pagan influences, sought to do the same—to supplant the wrathful Yahweh.
The problem of Amalek contributes perhaps more than any single factor to the Marcionite impulse. Marcionism, which existed as early as the second century and survives today, is the belief that Jewish and Christian deities were distinct, or that Hebraic and Christian scriptures and traditions should be severed. Marcionism was condemned as a heresy—a gnostic attempt to wrest Christianity thoroughly from Judaism—but it survives into our century, giving rise to an odd bed-fellowship of Enlightenment secularists and Christians. The late Christopher Hitchens lamented the failure of the Hellenistic empires, and later Marcion, to eradicate Hebraic influence (and, by implication, the Jews). Over the centuries, many Christians not only joined in the lament but in the work of eradication.
Enlightenment Europe was so far removed in time from the ritualized pagan violence of their ancestors that philosophers could develop amnesia, the evidence buried and forgotten. So Kant and Kierkegaard, in languages that had no word for mercy before their conversion to Abrahamic faiths, and with no memory of the ritual horrors of their Norse and Germanic ancestors, had the luxury to ponder with horror the story of Isaac’s binding by his father Abraham.
If Abraham’s God could suspend the ethical, then what need did we have for him? Reason was a sufficient basis for rejecting child sacrifice, and so Enlightenment secularism, in the spirit of Marcionism, retained Christian sentiment but parted ways with its Hebraic origins—embarrassed of its Abrahamic patrimony, apparently unaware of its pagan patrimony. It was pagan man who demanded a human sacrifice, not God—and it is Isaac’s unbinding that began humanity’s liberation from child sacrifice and paganism’s attendant horrors. But all this was lost in the spirit of modernity and universal values free of religion.
The Enlightenment first made those values secular and then, once they were safely divorced from their Abrahamic origins, made them sacred again in various ideologies. Some modern movements essentially retained Hebraic values like equality and personal dignity, and kept the spheres of religion and state separate.
Enlightenment ideologies had universal appeal—the first such non-Abrahamic universalist movements since the Hellenistic era. These ideologies sought, like ancient pagans, to reforge the unity of political and religious power in a single entity—the totalitarian state. Even where the modern state was limited, religious and voluntary associations in civil society—a distinctive feature of Abrahamic cultures—were often brought under state dominion. America has been an exception to this trend, generally if unevenly preserving personal liberty and civil society, and rejecting ethno-racial or religious uniformity. Not coincidentally, it is one of the few places where all three Abrahamic faiths and many others have equal citizenship and protection of law.
However, many modern ideologies, amid the resurgence of paganism, condemned Judeo-Christian morality as a mark of weakness, a ‘slave morality.’ There were two kinds of Enlightenment secularism: the soft paganism that preserved most of the moral sentiments of biblical religion and the hard neopagan ideologies that made political-religious idols of the state or an ideology, often fusing low paganism (ethnos) and high paganism (ethos) in centralized and industrialized societies.
Among the incalculable violence of the last century, one struggle was distinct: the neopagan Nazis, possessed by a drive to exterminate the Jews, who were often armed only with a divine command to survive. The Nazis, like Amalek, targeted the weakest for murder, but on an unimaginable scale. The modern exodus consisted not only those who survived the Shoah but also Jews from around the Middle East, forced out after 1948, more than a million of whom were exiled and who today constitute the majority of Israeli Jews. Hence a better-informed protestors’ clamor would be, “Go back to Iran,” instead of, “Go back to Poland.”
Over three-quarters of a century, Israel has survived several attacks from their neighbors, each of which aspired to genocide, sometimes in word, sometimes in deed. Israel survived. October 7 was distinct in that it posed no existential threat to Israel but that it nevertheless constituted the most murders of Jews in a single day since the Shoah. Israel’s sentinels forgot Amalek.
There is another side to the Amalek problem: Israel has long been accused of apartheid and—as the term has become so readily invoked as to lose significance—genocide. Both claims might readily be refuted by good faith inquiry, but even the stubbornest of facts struggles to survive the rhetoric of colonialism, victimhood, and frequently bandied but seldom defined terms like ‘Zionism.’ Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, Israel’s critics, mainstream and fringe alike, have variously asserted that the Israeli Defense Forces have been indifferent to the lives of non-combatants or that the casualty rates in Gaza are higher than other urban conflicts, such as the U.S.-led campaign against ISIS in Mosul at the height of fighting in 2017.
Mosul was truly genocidal, as anyone who saw it can attest. The U.S. declared it a Sunni-on-Shia genocide in 2016, and the following year, the Shia got their revenge. Nothing like that is happening in Gaza. It has been reported that the Pentagon offered the IDF blueprints for Gaza based on the anti-ISIS campaigns in Mosul and Raqqa and that the IDF refused, opting instead for a protracted urban campaign that was certain to increase IDF casualties but reduce non-combatant deaths. That’s the strategy the IDF pursued and the result has been fewer non-combatant deaths than in Iraq and Syria—far fewer.
International media relied, with little scrutiny, on the casualty rates published by the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, despite its own admission that its figures came from uncited but “reliable media sources,” and despite the ministry’s exaggerated claim of 500 casualties from a hospital bombing on October 16, which even most Israel critics acknowledge was conducted by Palestinians. In early April, the health ministry adjusted its casualty data, revealing that approximately one-third of the casualties couldn’t be verified. The adjusted data upend claims that the IDF have been indifferent to civilian casualties and support the counterclaim that the IDF is setting the standard for limiting civilian deaths in urban combat—especially where the enemy has built its defensive strategy around human shields. This is all the more astonishing since getting the IDF to kill Palestinian civilians is the essence of Hamas’ strategy.
NATO set forth Hamas’ mindset with clarity: “The strategic logic of human shields has two components. It is based on an awareness of Israel’s desire to minimise collateral damage, and of Western public opinion’s sensitivity towards civilian casualties.” This begs the strategy of whether, given the enemy’s mindset and willingness to kill its own people, it makes sense to restrict one’s objectives, thereby incentivizing the use of human shields?
Assuming one’s war is just on its own merits, is its justice negated because the enemy adopts ever more ruthless methods, such as positioning civilians to be killed in order to gain the upper hand in public relations? Wouldn’t the most just approach in such an instance be to convey to the enemy that one will not take extraordinary measures to limit collateral damage? Of course, only one side in the conflict is even bothering with such questions—Israel—which is also the only side being held to any kind of moral standard. That perverse ethic is what gives rise to human shields.
For Hamas, their strategy values collateral damage over killing the IDF. In other words, they’re not trying to repel the invasion but rather to get the Israelis to kill as many Palestinians as possible. The IDF, for their part, are trying to kill Hamas and trying not to kill non-combatants, which makes them the only party to the conflict whose strategy seeks to avoid killing Palestinian civilians. Yet the Palestinians overwhelmingly support Hamas, whose objective is to kill them. These macabre perversities would be impossible but for two factors: first, disproportionate media attention, which obsesses about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and, second, an extremist movement rooted in academia that’s substantially funded by foreign entities with Islamist ties.
There are several reasons why Israel might seek to reduce civilian casualties, some of which wouldn’t occur to most Westerners. First, they need support from the U.S. and the West. Second, they need the tacit approval of many Arab governments, for whom Hamas and other Islamists are an existential threat (which Hamas is not to Israel). Third, they need the support of their Arab-Israeli citizens, who are one-fifth of Israel’s population—and most of whom support the war despite Netanyahu’s unpopularity. Fourth, and fundamentally, there remains the core ethics of the Israelis themselves. One either understands this or one does not. Simply put: Israel could commit genocide but won’t, while Hamas would commit genocide but can’t. Until this is grasped by good faith observers, they won’t understand.
The admonition to remember Amalek was not for vengeance but for survival. Hebrew scripture also commands Jews to be kind to the stranger (“for you yourselves were once strangers in the land of Egypt”) and to show compassion for the ‘other,’ its patriarchs and prophets serving as advocates for the gentiles. How can this be reconciled with the command to make merciless war on Amalek?
There’s a paradox in the story of the Amalekites and the Hebrews: the Hebrews (and with them monotheism) would have perished had they not been ruthless in the unspeakably violent horror of that ancient world. Were it not for the Jews and their Abrahamic progeny, the world would never have conceived its luxury beliefs, as Rob Henderson aptly termed it—morals that had no equivalent in the pagan world. Kantians can invoke the categorical imperative, but that notion was Christian before it was secular, and Hebraic before it was Christian—and before the Hebrews, it existed only in the mind of God. The rage over the treatment of the Hebrews’ treatment of the Amalekites is only possible because of a moral framework brought to us by the Hebrews—which we presumably wouldn’t have inherited if the Amalekites had prevailed.
Again—most primitive languages had no word for ‘mercy,’ or any such concept for those outside their tribe. Many languages only incorporated words like ‘mercy’ after they were converted to an Abrahamic religion, usually by Christian or Muslim missionaries. True, primitive languages tend not to have abstract terms, but even words that alluded to tenderness or kindness were reserved for intimates, rather than ‘the other’—and the story of primitive humanity is, to paraphrase Hobbes, little more than a war of “other against other.” Not so the Hebrews: while few languages had a word for mercy, the Hebrews had several.
Notions of mercy, compassion, charity for ‘the other,’ began with the Jews and to this day continue to make them vulnerable to attack: ancient pagans and modern pagans alike diagnose this weakness. But so, apparently, had their God and his prophets. This is why Hebrew scripture and liturgy enjoin the Jewish people to never forget Amalek, who will rise in every generation.
The Hebraic way and the pagan way tend toward mutual exclusivity. The Hebrew God was one, and made superior claims against those of the pagans that bound Jew and gentile alike. The patriarch Abraham stood solitary among the pagans: the father who did not kill his son when all the pagans did. That was the beginning of the long Abrahamic struggle against humanity’s natural state: libido dominandi, lex talionis, primitive savagery.
Today, spectacles of violence can be seen when scrolling through social media, from the horrors of October 7 to the streets of Gaza. But the spectacles on campuses commemorate the distant violence into strange rituals of their own: frenzied mobs chanting wrathful phrases in quasi-liturgical cadences, making ritual of slaughter, sometimes searching out scapegoats in their midst, as if summoning what Gerard Manley Hopkins called “the death-dance in our blood.”
It may be fair to wonder whether those who’ve long lectured on subjects like, say, unconscious bias might themselves experience some hidden satisfaction from the bloodshed, perhaps in the form of moral superiority, perhaps some more tenebrous sensation: not merely emotional distance and catharsis but sheer dominance. Much of the protest spectacles feels pagan.
Few protesters, including the professors, have spent much time in the region, and few grasp the salient facts. Fewer still were seeking before the war to help Palestinians, or will help after. Yet Palestinians serve an important function in the ritual indignation: their suffering gives form to the protests, their blood the substance. But it’s not really about them. In this perverse amalgam of narcissism, ideology, and outrage, the distant Palestinians are the victim, the wicked oppressors are the Jews, and they—the protesters—are the heroes, the righteous priestly class, who preside and render moral judgments.
Ideology, ritual protests, sacrificial victims, oppressor classes, liberation, and moral supremacy—even good faith protesters fail to grasp that there’s no amount of self-loathing that will bring peace. For the pagan, compassion is a weakness and the compassionate deserve to be dominated and victimized—enslaved by the very logic of their own morality. Even the ‘underdogma’ theory, that the weaker side is morally righteous, is Hebraic in origin. But it’s a perversion of even this Judeo-Christian sentiment, for it ignores the systematic rape, torture, mutilation, and murder that followed October 7. Mercy presupposes justice: mercy without justice only invites more injustice. Antisocial types prey on that weakness.
The anti-Zionist axis of Western elites—academia, media, establishment institutions, and increasingly the state—are party (wittingly or unwittingly) to a strategy that gets more Palestinians killed, all in order to feel morally superior, which is perhaps the most pagan and colonial perversity of all. Many among the polite anti-Zionists don’t want to say that they simply don’t believe that Israel has a right to exist. That’s the essence of anti-Zionism—and that notion itself contains a genocidal whiff, however polite the anti-Zionist is.
It’s likely that professors, more than students, delight in reenacting the ’60s. But most of the campus protests then were anti-war. Today’s protesters aren’t anti-war: they’re simply upset that the wrong side is prevailing. One wonders if some of the new pagan folk secretly delight in the ritual, the violence, whether the scapegoat urge has overpowered them, or satisfies some atavistic prurience—the sanguine “death dance.” Whatever the case, and whatever the clamorous mobs utter, they do so with “the approval of their own consciences,” as C.S. Lewis said. And, as ever, there’s another way—the Hebraic way.
The story of the Jewish people has been described as that people’s long struggle against paganism. The Hebrew God was the first transcendent deity, removed from the earth. He chose a people but gave a moral law for all of humanity. The Jews had to survive in order to transmit monotheism and objective morality to the world. The Jews were not and are not tribal in the sense that they only care about their own group—but they are tribal in the sense that, at some level, they know that the nations will turn on them, that Amalek will rise, and that they still struggle to survive. But anyone who doubts Jewish gratitude to non-Jews should visit the trees on the Mount of Remembrance at Yad Vashem, which plants new trees each year: it’s Jews, not Christians, who preserve the names of those who risked everything but their souls to save Jews.
For all the angst of some Christians over the Amalekite problem, many have eagerly joined in antisemitism over the centuries, often with the approval of their own consciences. Christian institutions and leaders often struggle to confront antisemitism beyond overly vague condemnations. In this way, past wrongs survive into the present and the burden of memory falls to the Jews. Christianity’s ultimate failure to confront antisemitism, however, lay not in the particulars of conduct but deeper: in the failure to confront the paganism that rises anew in every generation, and perhaps in the perverse tendency to have sympathy for Amalek.
