They say, “If the Torah is not divine letter-for-letter, then how we know what to do?” How did the Hebrews know before Moses told them? How did the Sadducees live while rejecting Deuteronomy? We test conjectures, live normal lives, respect tradition, and assess the writings critically.

Moses judged the people well before he received the Torah. On Jethro’s urging, Moses wrote down the law and passed it to the elders. The Torah itself is clear that a significant portion of Jewish law is not divine.

People observe secular laws because they are enforceable and basically authoritative. Secular laws are promulgated because they are thought beneficial for the nation. Likewise, religious laws dating back to the priests are good enough if Israel cares to enforce them.

Theological issues need not determine our present. Strictly speaking, the Torah does not prohibit intermarriage. Rather, we refuse assimilation because everybody demands it of us; because the world tried to convert, annihilate, and expunge us; because of the stakes, pogroms, and gas chambers; because of the countless Jews burned, torn, and gassed; and because of the thousands of years we kept repeating, “The next year, in Jerusalem!”

Another instance of reiteration bears on the current events. Before Joshua crossed the Jordan, God commanded him to be “strong and courageous”—thrice. Grammatically, it is the strongest repetition in the Tanakh: be strong and courageous, only be strong and courageous, haven’t I commanded you to be strong and courageous? Add Moses’ similar injunctions in Deut31 to make it seven repetitions. This is puzzling. Joshua saw all the miracles together with Moses. He spent decades in Moshe’s tent and knew everything his teacher knew; in the Scripture’s words, “the book of Torah did not depart from his mouth.” Now God speaks directly to Joshua, and what can we expect—that he could be insufficiently courageous? God just promised him all the help in the world, leaving little need for courage.

A better translation is, “Cling strongly and be firm.” The people were enjoined to cling to God lest they be frightened (Deut31:6, Joshua 1:9), but for Joshua the command meant something entirely different, “to observe to do according to all the law.” Are we to imagine that Joshua would violate the laws of the Torah, that he would eat non-kosher meat or sacrifice to other deities? Surely not.

Joshua, like any normal person, had a problem with the commandment at hand: “destroy these nations from before you, and you shall dispossess them.”

Think of the sequence: “And the LORD will deliver them up before you, and you shall do unto them according unto all the commandments which I have commanded you,” and only then, “Be strong and of good courage, fear not, nor be affrighted at them.” The enemy will be delivered into Jewish hands first, and then the Jews should not be frightened. This is not about being frightened by a mighty enemy before or during combat: the enemy is already rounded up. Jews must not be afraid to do what God has commanded us: “destroy these nations.” This is why Joshua’s firmness is connected with “you shall cause this people to inherit the land.” The only way to dispossess others and inherit the land is to kill them.

The Scripture does not call the land “theirs,” but speaks of inheritance: Jews receive the land which was promised to Jacob. The land became legally his at the time of the promise; he did not just take possession of it. Thus, the enemy nations must be dispossessed of the land they hold illegally.

The commandment looked harsh to contemporaries, not only to us. And so Joshua is enjoined to execute every Jew who refuse to carry out this commandment (Joshua 1:18). Yes, Judaism is about observing commandments; it is not about human morality or worse, moralism.

Deut31:5 contains the most astonishing statement, “you shall do unto them according to all the commandments which I have commanded you.” The commandment to kill our enemies equals all other commandments combined.

Because it is common sense.

Joshua was probably the greatest Jewish leader, at once a prophet and a warrior. Listen to what the Scripture says of him: “He blessed them, and spoke to them saying, ‘Return with very much wealth unto your tents, and with very much cattle, silver, gold, brass, iron, and clothes. Divide the spoil of your enemies…’” (Joshua 22:8) That was the prophet’s blessing for Jews!

And this was Jewish peace: “And the Lord gave them rest around them… the Lord delivered all their enemies into their hand. There failed not a single good thing which the Lord promised to the house of Israel” (Joshua 21:42-43). Jews were able to rest not by signing peace treaties, which were well known at the time, but by killing their enemies―and the prophet calls the wholesale slaughter of native populations a good thing!

Jewish worship has always taken second place to nationalism. When the trans-Jordan tribes of Reuben, Gad, and Manasseh built an altar to God, other Israelites prepared for a war against them. What wrong would it be if God were worshipped on two altars rather than one? Enough Levites lived on the East Bank to man the new altar. Yet, the centralization of Jewish worship―which unifed the nation―was deemed more important than the abundance of sacrifices.

Looking at the commandments, we see that they were addressed to Bedouins: the ruthless people who tended to avenge a murder on their own rather than rely on communal justice, who were full of sexual urges (and acted upon them), who would prefer to kill a robber rather than get a fine from him. Consider it: the priests, the most humane of them all, behaved like modern-day butchers. What would you think of your rabbi dabbing his fingers in animal blood or sprinkling it around? If that seems distasteful to you, consider how distasteful the true Jews, those who were given the Torah, would have found your habits and yourself.

Rabbis, when they were real rabbis, maintained that Jews must kill all the inhabitants of the Promised Land during the invasion. Joshua bin Nun allegedly sent three letters to the Canaanite nations before the invasion: Whoever wants to leave, leave; whoever wants to make a treaty of tribute and servitude, make the treaty; whoever wants to fight, fight.

How come? On the face of it, the Torah promises to evict the natives rather than exterminate them. Moreover, it is God who will do the expelling (Exodus 23:27). The last misconception is simple: wherever the Torah speaks of God doing something, it means him working through human agents. Only on a handful of occasions did God resort to outright miracles, and every time they were very short. Thus, God expelling the natives means that he will empower the Jews to do his bidding. That is like the events of 1948: God made Stalin supply us with weapons, but the Jews had to pull the triggers themselves.

The promise of eviction touches on the fundamental question of free will. At every junction, the choice can only be made once; there is no Replay option. God gave the natives the relatively easy choice of moving out, but it was up to them to accept or reject it. Just as in 1948, the natives had to vacate their villages in good order so that Jews could take them over. They couldn’t even take their idols with them, as Jews are commanded to destroy those traces of foreign worship (v.24). Is that just? Definitely. Not in your common sense of human morality, but in the ultimate sense: whatever God has pronounced is just. Genocide, thus, can also be just.

At the time of Deuteronomy, just as they did 3,000 years later, the natives exercised their free will: they said, No. Pharaoh responded similarly to God’s demand to release the Jews; God took away his free will by hardening his heart, so that the pharaoh could suffer the punishment for his prior offenses. The Canaanite nations, on the on the other hand, exercised their free will unhindered, and the time has come for them to suffer the consequences.

“Only from the towns of the nations which Lord your God gives you for inheritance, you shall leave none alive. But you shall cease, cease them” (Deut20:16-17). The commandment can be interpreted in a minimally bloodthirsty manner: evicting the natives leaves none of them alive in our towns and ceases their existence in the land God promised to us. Such a relatively peaceful interpretation, however, flies in the face of the context.

Jewish law distinguishes between two kinds of war: obligatory and voluntary. The obligatory war is fought to conquer the Promised Land and defend it from any enemy, even one who offers a land-for-peace deal (like the Amonites) or merely demands straw and hay. The voluntary war is fought for expansion of the boundaries of the Promised Land. The earlier verses deal with a voluntary war: much of the population, notably newlyweds and cowards, are exempted from military service. Now the Torah spells out the consequences of the enemy’s freedom of choice clearly. He can accept the Jewish offer of peace or fight. The peace deal that normal Jews offered to our enemies would have sent your Temple rabbi running for the Criminal Court in Hague: the surrendering inhabitants had to accept “tribute and servitude.” They could, however, continue pagan worship because these things happened away from the Promised Land; contrary to the liberal tikkun olam nonsense, Jews did not intend to serve as a beacon to nations who could persist in their pagan filth. The Exodus 20:24 commandment to extirpate foreign worship only applies to the Promised Land, not to the entire territory conquered by Jews.

The enemy can also reject the rather illiberal Jewish peace initiative. Upon respecting his freedom of choice, Jews are commanded to slay all adult males and take women and children captive (Deut20:14). Here lies a concept of immense importance: they are not enemies spared out of humanitarian concern, but as a harmless trophy. The defeated enemy’s women and children suddenly became rootless and can be safely assimilated into the Jewish nation. As Moses, the humblest of all people, told Jewish soldiers, “But leave alive for yourself all female children who did not know a man.” (Num31:18) Enemy women and children can be left alive only insofar as they can be distributed among the conquerors, albeit on relatively humane terms of treatment.

Obligatory wars are fought on divine command to purify the land; those wars are critical to Israeli nationhood and religious objectives. Obligatory war has to be harsher on Israel’s enemies than a voluntary war. If all the adult males are killed in voluntary wars, then that is all the more reason for them to be killed—rather than merely evicted—in obligatory wars. Once they have refused the divine command to flee before the Jews, they lose the benefit of the divine offer which allowed them to stay alive. God is merciful to his creatures: the natives are killed so that they don’t compound their sin of opposing God and his people.

Many rabbis take refuge in the list of nations to be exterminated: the Torah lists seven of them, none of which exists today, though some Palestinians claim descent from the Canaanites. Palestinian Arabs, who refused to vacate the divinely established Jewish state, need not be exterminated according to this logic. As a human being educated in atheistic morality, I would be greatly relieved had it really been so. Unfortunately, the list of nations is clearly illustrative. In those days, nations did not exist. People thought on the level of kingdoms, towns, and clans. It is extremely unlikely that any town’s population considered themselves, for example, Canaanites. Deut20:16 is clear: “From the towns of those people which God your Lord gives you for inheritance, leave none alive.” If we constrain this verse to the long-gone nations, then we have to assume that today God gave us no land at all. Indeed, we’re commanded throughout the Torah to take the land of “those nations”—six or seven of them. If the nations don’t exist, Jews have no religious right to take over the land. Nevertheless, the Torah commands us to return from Exile and take over this land (Deut30:5). Thus, the list of particular nations is expendable; Jews must take the towns in the Promised Land from whatever nations happen to have settled them at the time. And when we take the towns, the exterminatory commandment of Deut20:16 kicks in.

Machiavelli agrees: exterminating the natives is the only way for a conqueror to establish himself in the land. If he does not follow the cruel logic of conquest, the natives would become “thorns in his side,” which the Palestinian population has indeed become to Israel.

The Palestinians exercised their freedom of choice in 1948 when they fought the Jewish state. There is no room, accordingly, for the peace process. And in case you think that the Torah is out of sync with modern realities, ask the Native Indians who were exterminated by good Christians arriving from Europe.

Some unthinking Orthodox rabbis recently joined the ranks of interfaith pundits. Like the Reform ignoramuses, they call for interfaith dialogue and respect for other religions. I wonder, how are we supposed to respect what we consider manifestly wrong?

Every day every religious Jew thanks God for being unlike other people who worship idols and the things bereft of meaning. The prayer’s statement is unqualified: we thank God for being unlike all people rather than some of them. Every classical commentator who expounded on the matter stated that trinity is contrary to unity. Though some find monotheism and abstract deism even in Hinduism, the sages clearly considered every other religion idolatry. A Jewish textbook on idolatry is called tellingly, Avodah Zarah—foreign worship. Clearly the sages considered any other form of worship idolatry; even more, every other religion is considered idolatrous.

Such an approach is well rooted in the Torah. A paramount case of Jewish idolatry is the golden calf incident. The Torah is adamant that the Hebrews did not seek another god then, but merely asked for a divine intermediary to replace Moses, who was thought to be lost. Thus, a golden intermediary constitutes idolatry. Even more, a free-will intermediary such as Jesus or Buddha is idolatrous to Jews. Even more, someone who is claimed to share in the divine attributes or hypostases both denies God’s unity and incorporeality, and establishes himself as an idol.

Any other reading makes a joke of the numerous biblical warnings against idolatry. The ancient Greeks were not so stupid as to believe that their statues were actually deities; they thought of their idols as representations of true deities. How is that different from statues and icons of Jesus? Yet Jewish scriptures condemn Hellenic and other idols beyond doubt. In Sumer, god the founder created both the world and other deities; likewise in Greek myths. How is that different from Christian and Buddhist monotheism?

We respect people for conformity to our values, not to theirs. A Polynesian cannibal might be a wonderful cook, but we don’t respect his skill in making steaks from his mother-in-law. Christians might be wonderfully correct in their own system of values—but not in ours. We Jews believe we know the truth. That might seem arrogant, but faith is uncompromising by nature.

I don’t presume to teach Christians or Buddhists, but merely to point out the fundamental dishonesty of the modern rabbinical establishment.

Two delusions plague the minds of Jews, even those generally knowledgeable of the Torah: that the commandment to cleanse the Promised Land of its natives applies to the seven ancient nations only, and that they only have to be expelled. The truth is, the commandment tells us to cleanse away any natives, and once they have raised their weapons against Jews they must be exterminated. Many people may not like that, but that is Judaism, like it or not, and everything on the matter can be learned from the opening chapter of the Book of Deuteronomy.

On the surface, Exodus 34:11 says that God will do all the dirty work, “Lo, I’m expelling [the six Canaanite nations] from before you.” Well, the Torah is more religious than us: it attributes all actions to God, whether performed by him directly or through human agents. So Deuteronomy 1:8 clarifies, “Look, I gave you this land, come and conquer it.” God did his part on the grand scale, by spiritually allocating this land to Jews, but we must act in the physical realm.

Jews have no choice in the matter: they must obey the divine command. In the scouts’ episode, Jews refused to enter the Promised Land, fearing the associated fighting. It is a matter of conjecture whether they were punished by staying forty years in Sinai, or allowed to live comfortable lives in Sinai according to their wishes. Whether as punishment or rehabilitation after slavery, they were barred from the Promised Land. God did not differentiate between good and bad Jews: Moses, too, was barred from entering Canaan, and died shortly before the invasion. The shepherd shares his flock’s fate. The concept is of great importance: Jews are chosen and have no right to refuse. In the short term, they can exercise free will and suffer for that, but the next generation will follow the divine orders. Executing the divine will later rather than sooner only increases hardships: after forty years of wanderings in Sinai, Jews became affluent (Deut2:7), and therefore less suitable to warfare than their parents.

Zeal matters. Not only in the account of Pinchas, whose descendants received an eternal blessing of peace for his murder of a high-society interfaith family, but closer to our discussion, too. In Deut2:19, God explicitly bans Jews from taking over the land of Amonites, the descendants of Lot. Nevertheless, Jews eventually ran it over and annexed it to the State of God. Centuries later, the Amonites asked for their land back in return for peace. Not a fan of land-for-peace deals, Judge Yiphtah refused to abandon the “towns of our God,” went to war, and with divine help won. Thousands of years before Stephen Decatur, God viewed the Jews as “my people, right or wrong.” In sticking to the right, Jews need not fear being carried away by their zeal.

Jews must act preemptively, unprovoked, even against peaceful natives. Deut2:24, “Look, I gave Sihon, the king of Heshbon the Amorite, and his land into your hand—start the conquest. And launch a military campaign against him.” The land was unquestionably Sihon’s; God confirmed it to be his land. The Amorites may not have been righteous, but they were right in the civil sense. In the Jewish war to conquer the Promised Land civil matters are unimportant. European settlers in America, too, ignored civil rights when they dispossessed and eliminated the Native Indians. Most states were formed in such a fashion. The Jews must start a war: the Torah has no qualms that they are offenders of peace.

The lesson is tremendous: in the quest for the Promised Land, Jews must disregard every civic notion: breach peace, evict the rightful owners of the land, and kill them. Perhaps the times have changed, and what was normal for the ancients is hateful today? Wrong. Not only does the continuation of the Torah, given thousands years ago, presume that its object, a society, remains the same, but murder was always murder. We need not dwell on Greek tragedies extolling virtues similar to the modern leftist press. Consider Numbers 31:15, in which Moses, “the humblest of all men,” fumes at the Jewish militia returning from a campaign against the Midians, “Did you leave females alive?” The Jews were perfectly able to recognize the killing of prisoners, especially women and children, as murder, so they left them alive—but Moshe overrode them. Acting on the divine authority (v.2), he instructed Jews, including the Levitical priests, to murder male children and widowed women (v.17).

The Rabbis taught: when someone extols the divine mercy expressed in the commandment to avoid killing the bird while taking eggs from its nest, we shut him up. If he extols the commandments as merciful, what would he do when faced with a horribly cruel, exterminatory commandment? All commandments are of absolute authority, all are closed to questioning, and all are above human morality.

Back to Sihon. Moses had no trouble relying on the divine commission (v.26). He entreated Sihon to give the Jews the right of peaceful passage, which the Jews needed in order to attack unsuspecting Heshbonites. Not being stupid, Sihon refused, giving Moses the excuse he needed to attack him. God approved of Moses’ artful plan, for he “hardened the heart of Sihon,” making him refuse Moses’ fake offer of peace (v.30).

And here the exile option ends. After Sihon went to battle with the invading Jews (v.32), Moses relates proudly, they exterminated men, women, and children in all of his towns, leaving not a single human being alive (v.34). Lest we think that that was an exception, the Torah continues with a similar account of King Og of Bashan (3:6). Here, God uses the genocide in Heshbon as a proper example: “Do unto him like you have done to Sihon.” (3:2)

Needless to say, Jews robbed their enemies (3:7), which is why the occasional IDF investigations of marauders are so ridiculous—Jewish soldiers are religiously entitled to the booty, it is not up to us to decide.

A big question is, why did God harden the hearts of the natives so that they opposed us and we had to exterminate rather than expel them? Probably for the same reason he hardened Pharaoh’s heart: to punish him for previous transgressions. The difference between exile and extermination reveals the straightforward divine logic of “my people, right or wrong”: after a nation takes up arms against his people, it loses the divine entitlement to life. Moses recognized that logic when exhorting Yehoshua bin Nun: “You see what Lord your God did to those two kings… Lord your God, he fights the battle for you” (3:21-22). Atheist Jews might find respite in the fact that they are not alone: Krishna said similar things to Arjuna before the battle in which Arjuna had to kill a multitude of his relatives; so much for pacifist Hinduism.

In the same verse, the Torah bridges the gap between past and present, “The same things God will do to all kingdoms where you come.”

Samson’s life started with two major transgressions. Acting upon the advice of a man who only subsequently proved to be a angel, his father brought an out-of-the-Tabernacle sacrifice to thank God for his son’s birth. Samson’s parents vowed to make him a lifelong Nazirite despite the Torah’s ban on permanent monastic status.

Samson was a reveler from his youth. As the book says, he was “moving” in Mahane-Dan. While thus moving around, he met a Philistine women and pressed his parents to get her for him to be his wife. Oddly, both his father and mother went to the bride’s tribe to ask for her hand; apparently, Samson was still very young. He married the Philistine over her parents’ objections: they implored him to marry a nice Jewish girl instead.

At the wedding, he wronged her Philistine relatives by posing to them a riddle which they had no chance of deciphering. In rabbinical terms, he violated the injunction against placing a stone before the blind (though one could argue that the commandment is intra-communal, and applies to fellow Jews only).

The Philistines, also a rough bunch, blackmailed his bride to find out the answer to the riddle. Having thus lost, Samson was not eager to part with the thirty sets of clothes he had wagered. Instead, he went to another Philistine town, killed thirty of the inhabitants, and passed their raiments to the victorious solvers of the riddle.

Embittered by the wife’s betrayal of his riddle to the Philistines, Samson abandoned her. He soon changed his mind, but by that time her father had married her to someone else. According to Jewish law, Samson was positively prohibited from remarrying his ex-wife after she had married someone else. Samson remained undeterred. Faced with an angry Samson, the girls’ father offered an amicable solution: a younger and better-looking daughter in place of the ex-wife. Unwilling to trade a wife for peace, Samson set Philistine fields on fire. That was not a matter of a field or two, which he could have torched personally. Rather, in a somewhat anti-Greenpeace fashion, Samson attached torches to hundreds of foxes. That cannot be interpreted as a one-time attack: to catch so many foxes at once would be problematic, and by the time he had finished attaching a torch to the last fox, the first torches would have been extinguished. Thus, Samson continually set Philistine farms on fire for a considerable time; the price-tag zealots among Israeli settlers do not come close to him in terms of scale.

The Philistines tried their best to end the conflict. They burned Samson’s father-in-law for offending him, and Samson’s ex-wife was burned to boot. Instead of accepting their practical apology, Samson escalated the hostilities: from burning fields, he turned to killing Philistines.

In all of this, Samson did not consider himself bound by the doctrine of proportional response. After killing scores of Philistines and burning their fields, he could say to the Jews, “As they [the Philistines] did unto me, so I have done unto them.” Never mind that they had merely remarried his abandoned ex.

By turning Samson over to the Philistines, the Jews built a precedent for rabbinical opinion on human shields. It is permissible to turn over a Jew to gentiles for execution if that is the only practical way of saving the larger community. All the more, it is permissible to kill foreign civilians to protect a Jewish community.

The account of Samson subsequently killing many Philistines with donkey’s jawbone is not incredible. The jaw would have been a decent weapon in hand-to-hand combat if we were to assume that the Philistine detachment sent to arrest Samson was much less than the declared thousand people.

The tradition insists that the judges were righteous people, unlike the kings who came in their stead. But consider this judge: a lewd, rogue Jew, he married Philistine women and feasted with their idolatrous relatives. Though killing Philistines is probably sanctioned by the commandments, doing so exclusively for the sake of robbery as Samson did in Ashkelon is hardly a laudable affair.

It would be odd for Jews to submit to him for judgment. Hebrew language employs the same homonym for “trial” and “ordinance.” What we read as “judges” might be better interpreted as, “promulgators of ordinances,” i.e., rulers. That function is more in line with the rogue character of many purported judges.

Though he was a Nazirite monk, Samson was not particularly pious. He loved foreign women and did not hesitate to visit a harlot in Gaza. He took wild honey from the corpse of a lion, something which rabbis would take for a violation of the prohibition on touching carrion and tasting unclean things. Given the way Dalilah put him to sleep, it is hard not to suspect that Samson ignored the Nazirite prohibition of wine.

His long hair was made into seven braids. Given the fact that he had never cut his hair, the braids must have been very thick. That comes close to violating the Torah’s prohibition for men to take on female attire.

The authors of the Book of Judges emphasize that Jews were often subjugated by neighboring tribes. For the pious authors, that was a way to explain why the Jews did not drive those tribes away as the Torah commands us, and to establish that the Jews were punished for that failure. In truth, the oppression could not have been great in that age of Bedouin mobility. The Jews and Philistines apparently had some mutual agreement to live and let live. When Samson destroyed the Philistine fields, they demanded his extradition from the Jews. When Samson committed his glorious suicide, his relatives encountered no difficulty in taking his body from the Philistine town.

As we can see from Samson’s example, bad people can be good Jews. And bad Jews can be good leaders of our nation.

When, for example, Judges tells us that the forces of Midian lining up against Gideon were numerous as grains of sand, we can respectfully object that that many Bedouins cannot gather in one place. Even if they left most of their cattle east of Jordan―that is, if we were to make the extremely unlikely assumption that the Bedouins parted with their assets―camels would still require a lot of field for grazing. By Delbruck’s reasoning, a dangerous enemy became a numerous enemy. A relatively small number of Midian invaders explains the puzzle of how Gideon was able to drive them away with just 300 men. Had the Midians numbered in the tens of thousands, they would not even have noticed the battle noise faked by Gideon’s three companies. And certainly, after the initial shock, the Midians would not have continued to flee, tailed by just three hundred Jews.

Stripped of its editorial embellishments, Judges 2–3 relates a drama of the highest order.

Despite the commandment to expel all the natives, the Jews left many Canaanite towns in their midst. While in Sinai, the Jews thought of the locals as seven nations only. By the time we settled the Promised Land, it was clearly understood that all natives must be expelled, not just the seven tribes (Judges 3:3). In constant communication with pagans, Jews quickly assimilated their beliefs. Why not vice versa? Pagan worship is tolerant, whereas Jewish worship is exclusionary. The social process of moving from a strict religion to a permissive one could be likened to entropy. And could it be that even at that time Jews already had an inferiority complex, making them eager to assimilate foreign habits? They were foreigners among natives, they had no idols while the natives had plenty of them, they were severely restricted in bringing sacrifices while the natives could bring them at will. In any case, Jews quickly assimilated―both spiritually, by adopting pagan beliefs, and physically, through intermarriage.

Periods of assimilation coincided with military defeats. A nation which loses its national identity becomes weak. Periodic religious revivals increased national passion and paved the way to military victories. The Bible’s editors have it in reverse: God punished the Jews for defection, they repented, he saved them.

For decades, the assimilated, culturally and politically weak Jews suffered from Midian Bedouin raids. Gideon struck a chord with his fellow Jews by calling for a religious revival. He broke some idols, and soon the Jews were on the battlefield, shouting, “For God and Gideon!”

The Jewish zeal did not last long. Soon, the peasant warriors started defecting from Gideon’s band in the face of Midian’s camps. The narrator politely describes this by saying that Gideon sent less than the bravest of them away.

In the mob fight with the Bedouins, Gideon’s highly motivated “commandos” prevailed. The book numbers them as three hundred people, but it is common in public memoirs to understate one’s own strength. The battles could not have been especially hard, since the Ephraimites were extremely displeased that Gideon had not invited them for the raid and they missed out on the spoils.

Immediately upon throwing off the Midian yoke, the Jews lapsed back into comfortable idolatry. Gideon made a golden altar, and the cycle started again.

Throughout the Hebrew chronicles, we see that our great judges and military leaders employed religion as a tool for rallying the masses. Cynical? Perhaps. Yet this is the only alternative to assimilation, weakness, and ultimately defeat.

The Greek version of the Esther contains profuse prayers, but the Jewish canonical version lacks any reference to God. It is as secular as Woody Allen’s movies. Perhaps for that reason Esther is the only canonical book absent from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Religious people simply were not interested in secular romance.

The Esther was written for intelligent people. Judean peasants could believe that Joshua parted the River Jordan and the flowing water kept forming a wall into the skies; Rambam warned that these miracles were not to be taken literally. Educated Babylonian Jews wouldn’t buy that. In the Esther, miracles are of a different order: they represent improbable rather than physically impossible events. To educated Jews, God performs miracles by adjusting probabilities rather than by violating the laws of nature.

Mordechai Bilshan was a typical assimilated Jew, much like any ADL functionary today. Just as Jews of today are called Paul, after our Christian nemesis, he took the name of Marduk Bel Shunu, [god] Marduk Our Lord. Not unlike the modern court Jews, Mordechai was extremely ill-mannered, as he refused to show basic respect to viceroy. The entire Jewish community was endangered because of Mordechai’s frankly unethical behavior; did you think, “Polish tax farmers?”

Rabbis surmise that Mordechai behaved brutishly because he was certain of eventual deliverance. Such a hypothesis does not square with the fact that Mordechai rent his closes and was otherwise shocked upon hearing of Haman’s reaction—extermination of all Jews.

Mordechai was a scheming Jew at that. Upon overhearing putschists, he quickly ratted on them to the king. By doing so, Mordechai kept alive the very ruler who would order the annihilation of all Jews. The narrator missed no opportunity to hint to his readers that assimilated Jews are guilty, and deserving of their fate.

Mordechai was only happy to introduce Esther, his cousin, to a pagan king for a marriage which would likely have amounted to a one-time concubinage. Esther, too, had no trouble understanding that she should keep her Jewishness from the king. She abandoned Judaism in favor of pagan religious ceremonies.

At the time of the crisis, both assimilated personages changed. When Esther initially refused to plead with the king for the Jews, Mordechai clearly hinted to her that she could not expect that her own Jewishness would remain hidden from the king. Pressed against the wall, Esther sprung into action, and with much cunning and strong nerve overcame Haman, her husband’s favorite.

Esther was not your liberal Jew. After she managed to reverse the edict, Jews were allowed to slaughter those who hated them. After five hundred alleged anti-Semites were murdered in the capital, the shocked king turned to Esther to ask if, perhaps, she wished for something else. Pretending not to understand him, Esther answered that indeed, she had a wish—for one more day of killings. So the Jews murdered another three hundred residents the next day.

Among other things, the Esther Scroll reminds American Jews to gather their last shreds of Jewishness and support the expulsion of the Arabs as the least criminal measure according to our religious precepts.

Theoretically speaking, why cannot we kill out the Palestinian Arabs? Senseless murder is disgusting because it is senseless. Traditionally, humans have only nominal qualms about purposeful killing: no one really complains about the Old World’s religious refugees and settlers annihilating the New World’s Indians, or the New World’s military carpet-bombing Dresden or Tokyo.

Killing out the aboriginal population is the surest, indeed the only way to take over its territory, as Machiavelli has noted. Whoever does not like Machiavelli might busy himself with the Bible: God, the supreme source of moral authority, commanded the Jews to annihilate the nations which settle the Promised Land: “However of the cities of these peoples, that the LORD your God gives you for an inheritance, you shall leave alive nothing that breathes” (Deuteronomy 20:16). Just as the preceding lines were not wholly fulfilled in antiquity, this one looks into the future and cannot be said to describe past events.

As always, God is not only moral but normal as well: how can Jews coexist with people who believe that we took the land which is rightfully theirs? The Russians stopped short of exterminating the Chechens because they never meant to settle the Chechen land, but only to incorporate Chechnya for reasons of imperial grandeur. Even so, non-exterminatory occupation explodes into riots once in a while. Tiny Israel cannot absorb major riots, as the aboriginal mobs could overcome the Jewish population in a matter of hours simply because they live among us. Mass murder is well accepted in modern history: the United States and France never apologized to the Vietnamese for killing a couple of million of them, America launched guerrilla wars which eventually claimed 1.5 million lives in Afghanistan and over a million in Iraq. Killing by the millions is not unthinkable, but really quite acceptable.

The world might well accept the mass killing if it were presented as a fait accompli. A crazy Israeli general stages a putsch, removes the government, and sends the IAF to thoroughly weed out every concentrated trace of Arab presence from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean and from Litani to Sinai. In a day or two, the issue would be over. Afterwards, the government might overcome the leaders of the putsch, try them for crimes against humanity, and sentence them to a five-star jail. They would be released quietly over health issues within a few years. The world could do nothing about such a scenario: there would be no time to react and no reason to punish the government. Besides, many foreign governments would be relieved that the nagging problem had gone away. Even if there were sanctions, they would be lifted within a few years: the world leaves happily with Serbia after condemning a handful of its leaders of massacres.

A peace treaty does not preclude such a scenario.