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The Eternal Arab?

Last week brought an amazing discovery in an Irish bog: an ancient Book of Psalms that had been lost about a millennium ago. The psalter was opened to Psalm 83, which – and this is startling – is a prayer asking God to deliver Israel from the Arab peoples of the north who, according to […]

Last week brought an amazing discovery in an Irish bog: an ancient Book of Psalms that had been lost about a millennium ago. The psalter was opened to Psalm 83, which – and this is startling – is a prayer asking God to deliver Israel from the Arab peoples of the north who, according to the Psalmist, “say, ‘Come, let us wipe out their nation; let Israel’s name be mentioned no more!’ ” ~Rod Dreher, Dallas Morning News

Via Rod Dreher 

Suffice it to say that Rod and I have a difference of opinion about the current campaign in Lebanon, as my posts and his posts over the last three weeks will have made clear to everyone.  I appreciate why so many conservatives, including Rod, support the current Israeli campaign, and I am not going rehash now all the reasons why I believe it has been a colossal mistake that has not only resulted in senseless and avoidable civilian deaths but has also not really enhanced the long-term security of Israel.  What I do want to question is the easy identification of the Ishmaelites and Hagarenes, among many others, of Psalm 83 (LXX 82) as “Arab peoples.” 

This identification rhetorically accomplishes three things, none of them good, in order to set up the rest of the article.  First, it telescopes ancient conflicts of Biblical Israel into the current Israeli-Lebanese war (which is what it has unfortunately become) in a way that is convenient but not really exegetically accurate: it implies divine sanction for the State of Israel against her enemies, who have already been aligned with the ancient tribes pressing down upon the Chosen People of the Old Testament just as the State of Israel has been identified with Biblical Israel.  A basic problem: the State of Israel is not the Davidic monarchy.  In Christian theology, it is doubly hazardous to elide the two, since it is the Church that is the New Israel, and not any temporal kingdom (the moral hazards of the modern identification of various nation-states as the New Israel are plain enough).  This also savours of the rhetorical error of oraculum that M.E. Bradford warns against.  Second, it sets up the current war as part of some eternal tribal war between Jews and “Arab peoples,” when according to the Israeli government and its defenders the target and enemy is supposed to be an Islamic guerrilla terrorist group and not all the Arabs of Lebanon.  Third, it makes an historical claim that is not really correct: it takes the traditional origin stories that identify Arabs as descendants of Hagar and Ishmael, and then reads back an Arab identity that was virtually unknown before the ancient Nabataean kingdom onto myriad tribes, only some of which even fit the Ishmaelite designation, which in turn suggests an essentialist view of the Arabs as perpetually anti-Jewish.  It says to the reader: “the Arabs” have always wanted to destroy the Jews, so if there is to be any peace for Israel “the Arabs” must be destroyed instead. 

This is a densely packed use of Scripture that seeks to make the reader believe that this war is the same kind of conflict to which the Psalmist refers, in which the “Arab peoples” are seeking to annihilate the Jews.  It urges the audience to desire the destruction of this Israel’s enemies who have been described as “Arab peoples”–we are therefore urged to desire the destruction of modern Arabs in general, when the broad majority of the Arabs in Lebanon did not have any say in entering this conflict and when two-fifths of the people in Lebanon are Arab, Greek, Armenian or other Christians, who despise Hizbullah but nonetheless have suffered greatly from the current campaign.  If Rod is right in the rest of his article, this is a war with Hizbullah and Islamic terrorists, not a tribal or ethnic war with “Arab peoples.”  Indeed, if this is a tribal or ethnic war, it is a fight in which the United States has no particular stake–it is only in the strategic context of combating rising Islamist powers that America would have much reason to closely align itself with Israel’s current campaign.  If the fight is against Hizbullah alone, why invoke scriptural authority calling for the destruction of Israel’s enemies and then identify Israel’s enemies as “Arab peoples”?  Is it to call for the destruction of Arabs?  I do not believe that Rod wants anything of the sort, so why use Scripture in such a way as to give precisely that impression?   

Update: The National Museum of Ireland has issued a clarification that rather negates the impressive synchronicity of the discovery of the manuscript:

In the press release issued by the National Museum of Ireland on 26th July the following reference was made to Psalm 83:

“While part of Psalm 83 is legible, the extent to which other Psalms or additional texts are preserved will only be determined by painstaking work by a team of invited experts probably operating over a long time in the Museum laboratory”

The above mention of Psalm 83 has led to misconceptions about the revealed wording and may be a source of concern for people who believe Psalm 83 deals with “the wiping out of Israel”.

The Director of the National Museum of Ireland, Dr. Patrick F. Wallace, would like to highlight that the text visible on the manuscript does NOT refer to wiping out Israel but to the ‘vale of tears’.

This is part of verse 7 of Psalm 83 in the old latin translation of the Bible (the Vulgate) which, in turn, was translated from an original Greek text would have been the version used in the medieval period. In the much later King James version the number of the Psalms is different, based on the Hebrew text and the ‘vale of tears’ occurs in Psalm 84. The text about wiping out Israel occurs in the Vulgate as Psalm 82 = Psalm 83 (King James version).

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