Trump’s Bible and Netanyahu’s Smiting

Donald Trump, Bible salesman

Throughout my Christian life, I’ve struggled to wrap my had around Psalm 137, which usually gets used liturgically in abbreviated form. The first several verses, written during the Babylonian exile, lament the experience of alienation from homeland, nation, and God. We see here beginning traces of the “foreigners in a strange land” ethos which undergirds much modern Judaism and Christianity. Then verse 9 veers abruptly:

“Happy is the one who seizes your infants / and dashes them against the rocks.”

The earliest Hebrew scriptures describe a national religion and an explicitly Israelite deity, not a universal one. The G-d described in the Pentateuch of Moses sides with Israel and aids Israelites in murdering “foreigners.” Not until the prophet Amos does Judaism begin embracing the idea that worshiping G-d is about honoring principles. Moses never intended the Levitical law to govern everyone, everywhere; he wrote the laws of a hill-dwelling agrarian nation in the Late Bronze Age.

Which brings us to two important current events. Israel’s ongoing pummeling of Palestinians in Gaza has reached a threshold which UN officials are willing to tentatively consider genocide. The Netanyahu administration’s continued strafing of civilian targets is merely the inevitable conclusion of Israeli policy which protects Israelis (as distinct from Israelites) at everyone else’s expense. Amnesty Internation has termed the Israeli government’s longstanding policies as “racism.”

Meanwhile, to cover mounting legal debts, former President Donald Trump has begun hawking Bibles online. This salesmanship doesn’t surprise me, as his core voting bloc conflates being Christian with being American. Rather, I take profound exception at the contents of Trump’s Bible. According to press reports, the King James translation comes bound together with the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Pledge of Allegiance, and Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.”

In other words, Trump’s Bible includes American national law and an American patriotic psalm—erm, I mean “song”—bound together as a rudimentary Third Testament. American conservatives have long considered the Declaration and Constitution as divinely inspired documents, a position that’s literally Mormon doctrine. Yet in literally binding American nationalism into the Bible, Trump is dragging Christianity backward into a proto-Hebrew Bronze Age.

Netanyahu and Trump share a theological worldview founded in the Levitical notion that whatever benefits the nation, and especially whatever benefits the nation’s oligarchs, necessarily benefits the faith. It bears noting, as Obery Hendricks writes, that the High Priesthood of Solomon’s Temple, described in both Jewish and Christian scriptures, wasn’t merely an airy-fairy religious grouping. The priesthood governed the nation, often on behalf of conquering empires.

Benjamin Netanyahu, acolyte
of his country's secular Priesthood

Let me state, before I continue, I realize my “Judeo-Christian” language is sweeping. Though Judaism and Christianity germinated in the same Levantine soil, they historically parted ways following Bar Kochba’s Rebellion, and are substantially different now. Yet because both religions share common ancestry in Moses, Amos, and Isaiah, we can, for convenience, address them syncretically for the moment. Because we’re seeing both being degraded right now.

Isaiah and Jesus shared the recognition that worldly empires can break the body. Kings anointed by G-d die, whether through violence or through age and entropy. Investing religious sacrality in human governments means placing trust in something which inevitably rots. Rather, the deity extoled by prophets and Christ wasn’t bound to any nation or land (though Third Isaiah still called Israelites to come home). Ha-Shem dwells, instead, among the believers.

In this regard, global Judaism has perhaps handled the prophetic call with greater integrity than Christianity. Since the days of Nehemiah, global Judaism has recognized that one becomes Jewish by honoring Jewish heritage and maintaining Jewish practice, even when resident in strange lands. To be Jewish, in today’s Judaism, means accepting the world as transitory. Don’t conform to kings and kingdoms, but stand fast in Truth.

Christianity, by contrast, regularly conforms to kingdoms. Though conservative Christians think themselves pure because they dump on out-groups like Muslims or LGBTQIA+, they nevertheless seek worldly power, something Jesus abhorred. Ever since Emperor Constantine, Christians have thought themselves worthy to govern, and to enforce their moral code on everyone. Or anyway, as Gorski and Perry write, White Christians have thought that.

Netanyahu’s Israel has something global Judaism hasn’t had for over two millennia: state power. Therefore Netanyahu makes the same mistake which Trump and other nominal Christians have made throughout those same ages, thinking state power comes from G-d. Whether through adding new Biblical texts, like Trump, or ignoring the prophets’ convictions, like Netanyahu, the effect is similar: both leaders drag their nations backward into the Bronze Age.

Follow-up: Trump’s Bible, Part Two and Trump’s Bible, Part Three