John Jualisti: Bible

A progressive, feminist friend of mine came back from a vacation in Paris eager to see Jacques-Louis David’s major retrospective at the Louvre and chastised me for holding that peace agreements don’t work without winners and losers. Look, when he saw the Sabine women, he said to me, … They stood between the Romans who had kidnapped them and their very angry relatives, snapping them out of their trance. I admit that David’s painting of this subject is moving (although I prefer Poussin, and I know who inspired this work). But both the paintings and the myths they represent are versions of the same feel-good joke. The Romans killed the Sabines and divided the women. There were never peaceful kidnappings in ancient warfare. Every warrior knew that if his side was defeated, the victor would kill him and take his widow as a slave or concubine. This is what poor Hector tells his wife Andromache in Canto 6 of the Iliad.

The Bible is not much of a comfort. It brings a lot of reality to life and its conflicts. There is never a draw in their battles. We can learn a lot from the Bible if we read it carefully, rather than reading it hastily, as the Israeli government has recently done. I mention the facts. Calling the military operation of the invasion of Gaza “Gideon’s Chariot” betrayed nonsense. In traditional Spanish, it’s “gideonada.” Gideon fought in the land of Transjordan against two great armies that had invaded from the east: the Midianite army and the Amalekite army. While it may serve as a biblical teaching during the Yom Kippur War, the war that began on October 7, 2023 more closely resembles what happened during the final stages of the life of Samson, another great judge of Israel. Samson had long, thick hair that gave him strength.

Dear children, this story will still touch your heart. The Philistines take Hebrew hostages to Gaza in a lightning raid. In fact, they take away Samson himself, whom the evil Philistine Delilah has whittled down to zero. They gouged out his eyes and chained him to a Ferris wheel. One day, they decide to have fun at the expense of the bald man and take him to the temple of Dagon. There are people out there who just want to have a healthy laugh at the bald guy’s expense, but they didn’t notice that the bald guy was growing his hair out. “Let me die with all the Philistines!” Samson pulls down the pillars of the temple, but the roof collapses and no one survives. And as the Bible teaches, hostages are a double-edged or triple-edged sword. Like Samson, they destroyed Gaza and fell over the tunnels, lying blind. Every day Hamas detained them, part of the sky collapsed on top of the Gazans. It is a shame for Gaza that jihadists do not read the Bible, and a tragedy for Israel that the Israeli government does not understand it.

Session limit reached

• Access to premium content is made available to the public courtesy of the institution it belongs to, but there are currently too many users logged in at once. Please try again in a few minutes.

Please try again

Session limit exceeded

• Only three sessions can be started at a time. Now that you have closed the oldest session, you can continue to browse the remaining sessions without any restrictions.

Continue browsing