In my work, I do something simple: I read the Bible literally, “pretending it’s true,” and use it as a historical lens to interpret current events. The Bible is certainly not enough to explain geopolitics, interests, and strategies, but some key issues of the present—Israel, the 2018 Nation-State Law, the political reference to “Amalek”—become more understandable when viewed in continuity with the biblical text.
2018: the Nation-State Law and the biblical echo of identity
In 2018, the Knesset passed a law defining Israel as “the historic homeland of the Jewish people,” encouraging communities reserved for Jews, and downgrading Arabic from an official language to a language with “special status.” As Gideon Levy wrote in Haaretz, this step explicitly codifies an identity priority that makes it difficult to be “Jewish and democratic” at the same time. Even Israeli institutional figures have expressed concerns.
As a reader of the Bible, I see an ancient pattern resurfacing here: Yahweh wants a distinct, “consecrated” people, heirs of Jacob/Israel and the twelve tribes. The biblical narrative—from the calling of Abraham (about 4,000 years ago) to the conquest of an already inhabited land—is a story of separation and belonging. This does not “justify” anything in the present, but it explains why certain choices find a ready-made symbolic framework. The Shoah is a dramatic break that marks modernity, but it does not exhaust the theme of today’s political legitimacy. The 2018 law legally translates an identity that the Bible had already clearly addressed.
“Remember Amalek”: when sacred vocabulary becomes political code
In recent times, Benjamin Netanyahu said, “Remember Amalek.” Who is Amalek? Genesis 36 places him in the lineage of Esau, Jacob’s twin brother. In Exodus 17, the Amalekites attack Israel at Rephidim: I read the episode without theological filters—Moses climbs the hill and raises his hands like a military signal to boost the morale of his people, until Joshua prevails. The key point, however, is 1 Samuel 15: Yahweh orders Saul to “devote Amalek to destruction”; Saul spares King Agag and the best livestock and loses his kingdom because “obedience is better than sacrifice.”
Josephus, in Antiquities of the Jews, describes even more explicitly sieges, war machines, and the massacre “beginning with women and children,” justified as obedience to divine order. This is why the reference to “Amalek” acts today as a code for absolute enemy and annihilation: a short word, but with a semantic charge so powerful that it has crossed the millennia and landed in contemporary debate.
The Jaeger case (1960): when the Bible becomes a normative alibi
In 1960, the jurist and constitutional judge Nicola Jaeger, in Il diritto nella Bibbia (Law in the Bible), went so far as to consider “wars of annihilation” as the result of the instinct for self-preservation, even defining the attempts of three thousand years ago as “modest” compared to modern genocides. I quote this passage because it shows the drift that is always lurking: if the sacred text becomes a direct normative source for politics, then violence obtains retrospective justification. I do not accept this: the Bible, read literally, tells us what is written, but it certainly does not authorize us to repeat it.
The Bible as active (but not acquittal) history
I repeat: the Bible is also history. In Israel, archaeology has identified 53 biblical figures attested to by external sources (from Egypt, Syria, Moab, the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, Babylon, Persia). This is useful data, of course, because it confirms the historicity of many passages. But “historical” does not mean “prescriptive.” The Scriptures can help us understand the cultural matrices of the present—lexicon, symbols, political genealogies—without absolving today’s choices. The political use of the Bible remains slippery ground: the more it is quoted, the more it is necessary to read it with philological precision, without theological filters and without turning it into a weapon.
Conclusion
The Bible, read literally, remains “active” in the present: it shapes identity, vocabulary, and political imagery. But for me, it is not — and must not become — a moral shortcut or a pass for today’s choices. The two examples I mentioned—the 2018 Nation-State Law and the reference to “Amalek”—show how much the biblical heritage continues to guide discourse and decisions; precisely for this reason, they impose a greater responsibility: to use the Scriptures to understand, not to strike; to read history, not to reproduce annihilation.
My method remains simple: read what is written, without theological filters, place it in its historical context, and recognize how much that lexicon still applies. “Obedience rather than sacrifice” is not a license for violence in the present; “Amalek” cannot become a code that transforms the enemy into an absolute target. The historicity of the text — also confirmed by the many biblical characters attested to outside the Bible — is not a political mandate: it absolves no one. The responsibility for choices belongs to the people of today, to international law, to politics, to ethics.
Forty centuries after Abraham, the heavens can “continue to be on fire” not because the Bible demands it, but because we decide how to use it in the public sphere. I propose this: philological precision, historical memory, and the assumption of responsibility. The Bible can help us understand; it cannot—and must not—absolve.
