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The UK Bible Students Website Christian Biblical Studies
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– Part Two –
Some trust in chariots, and some in
horses:
but we will remember the name of the LORD our God.
– Psalm 20: 7 –
All
Scripture citations are to the KJV, unless noted
otherwise.
The preceding instalment
was an overview of the asymmetric ‘war’ raging in Gaza – one-sided in that the
brunt of the conflict appears now to be falling on civilians; the haste with
which the Netanyahu government – embraced by the United States – appears to be
running amok, despite widespread alarm across the world at the genocidal impact of the onslaught; Israel’s post-1948
history of involvement in unsavoury wars abroad, allied with its development
and export of high-tech weapons; its squandering the good will it had accrued
following its establishment in 1948; lastly, we adverted to the Scriptures
which offer hope and restoration of the Jewish state and its exaltation to the
head of the nations, to which, at the return of its Messiah and her consequent
conversion, Israel will, at last, prove to be a blessing to all peoples of the
earth.
________________________________________________
THE GHASTLY, GRIM military operation of
revenge that passes for Israel’s self defence, aided and abetted by the United
States and its lowly sidekick, Britain, grinds on, as tens of thousands of
Palestinian citizens, the ‘lesser people’ of Gaza, are mowed down by the
juggernaut of the IDF. As of writing, Israel’s troops
have focused their attention on the southern part of the Gaza Strip, the city
of Khan Younis, an
ancient village that, according to Wikipedia, dates to the 14th century and the
Mamluk Empire, and named after its emir.
The stand-off in West Asia
between the U.S. naval task force and the Shia
grouping, Ansar Allah (the ‘Houthi’),
in Yemen, threatens to balloon into a larger battle should Hezbollah, stationed
in the South of Lebanon, join the fray. As mentioned in our previous
instalment, the United States lusts to go after Iran, a move that will most likely
exacerbate the troubles now facing the region, with
far-reaching consequences for the world. In this eventuality Israel would find
itself fighting a second or third front. ‘God shakes the earth from its place
and makes its pillars tremble’ (Job 9: 6, NIV-UK).
The sadism of the U.S. and its NATO cohort is already
on full display in the US-Russia imbroglio being waged on Ukraine soil; that
war – the seeds of which now sprout in the Arabian Peninsula – wherein the
colossal scale of deaths amongst the Ukraine Armed Forces (AFU)
is counted of little moment in Washington, London, Brussels.
They drive their feudal serfs over the cliff to national ruin, ‘fighting to the
last Ukrainian’. The Western Press, ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’,
surrendered their services to Kiev's interests,
regurgitating without analysis the pronouncements emanating from that capital,
a cynical exercise in obfuscation of the facts on the ground.
Janus, the Roman god, looked to the future and the
past at one and the same time. Human regret is a suitable analogy. Netanyahu
and Biden may now lament the decisions they have made, each with the moral
support of the other; the price for their folly may be more than either or both
together can pay.
From the start of the Gaza war Israel was trapped by
revenge; she, in turn, has snared the United States, the interests of the
latter being of the existential sort – an hegemony
does not take kindly to losing face. Both heads of government have an eye to
politics: Prime Minister Netanyahu to a revival of his chances at home, before
the Knesset, contingent on victory over Hamas. President Biden, tottering
between his obligatory support for the Jewish state,
balanced against the catastrophe of defeat at the polls, should the American
electorate gauge his acquiescence in the slaughter of mothers and children as
intemperate. Biden will not be allowed to sit astride two horses for long. If
and when he decides to pull on the reins, Israel’s prospects will quickly go
dark.
So,
Sir page, your philandering is over, far too long
you’ve been living in clover, and at last you’ve begun to discover what it
means to be dressed up for war.
– The Marriage of Figaro, Mozart –
______________________________
Returning to the Scripture text at the head of this article:
Psa. 20: 7, 8, Adam Clarke’s Commentary has the following:
7.
Some trust in chariots – The words of the original are short and
emphatic: These in chariots; and these in horses; but we will record [‘remember’,
‘honour’] in the name of Jehovah our God. Or, as the Septuagint, μεγαλυνθησομεθα , “we shall be magnified.” Or, as the Vulgate, invocabimus, “we shall invoke the name of the Lord.”
This and the following verse I suppose to be the words of David and his
officers. And the mention of chariots and horses makes it likely that
the war with the Ammonites and Syrians is that to which reference
is made here; for they came against him with vast multitudes of horsemen and
chariots. See 2
Samuel 10: 6-8 .
According to the law [of Israel], David could neither
have chariots nor horses;
and those who came against him with cavalry must have a very great advantage;
but he saw that Jehovah his God was more than a match for all his foes, and in
him he trusts with implicit confidence.
8. They are brought down and fallen – They [Ammonites, etc.] were so confident
of victory that they looked upon it as already gained. They who trusted
in their horses and chariots are bowed down, and prostrated on
the earth: they are all overthrown. But we are risen
– We who have trusted in the name of Jehovah are raised up from all
despondency; and we stand upright – we shall conquer, and go on to
conquer.
Cf.
Josh. 11: 6 – . . . Be not afraid because of them: for to morrow about this time will I [Yahweh] deliver them up
all slain before Israel: thou shalt hough [hamstring] their horses, and
burn their chariots with fire.
______
BACKGROUND
NOTES
Extracts
Reproduced from
Encyclopedia Judaica in
22 volumes
©2007
Keter Publishing House Ltd.
Subject
Headings Added;
Omissions
indicated by ellipses
1. [From] 1922, when the
British, who had received the Mandate over Palestine on both sides of the
Jordan from the League of Nations, practically restricted the application of
the name to the part west of the Jordan, while east of the Jordan and south of
the Yarmuk they established the emirate of
Transjordan, which in 1946 became a kingdom. In 1948 the State of Israel was
established in a large part of western Palestine, its territory demarcated in
the Armistice agreements of 1949 with the neighboring
Arab countries. Transjordan annexed the Arab-inhabited part of western
Palestine occupied by the Jordanian army and changed its own name to the
Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and Egypt retained and administered the Gaza
Strip. Thus, Palestine as a political entity ceased to exist. During the
Six-Day War (1967) the Israel army occupied the whole of the country west of
the Jordan (hence the term “West Bank”; referred to also as “Judea and Samaria”
or the “occupied” or “administered” territories), which also included the Gaza
Strip, as well as the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights. However, the
latter were never geographically part of the earlier designation of Palestine.
The name Palestine is now loosely used in the west to refer to the territories
of Area A that are under the autonomous rule of the Palestinian Authority, even
though by 2006 a State of Palestine had not yet been proclaimed.
___________
2. After World War I the
United States, Great Britain, and France agreed, on President Wilson’s
suggestion, to appoint a special committee to visit the regions of the former
Ottoman Empire involved in recent agreements, negotiations, and declarations
“to acquaint themselves as fully as possible with the shade of opinion there …
with the social, racial, and economic conditions … and to form as definite an
opinion as the circumstances and the time at your disposal will permit, of the
divisions of territory and assignment of mandates.” As a result of obstruction
by France and the lukewarm attitude of Britain, however, the only members
actually appointed were two Americans, H.C. King,
president of Oberlin College, Ohio, and C.R. Crane, a Chicago businessman with
many connections in the Near East, particularly Turkey.
In their report, presented only to the American Peace
Commission (published in a somewhat condensed form in December 1922 and
officially published only in 1947), King and Crane recommended the preservation
of the unity of Syria, including both Lebanon and Palestine, which should be
granted a reasonable measure of local autonomy; and that a Mandate over Syria
be entrusted to the United States or, if that seemed impracticable, to Great
Britain. The commission further recommended “a serious modification of the
extreme Zionist program for Palestine of unlimited immigration [emphases
added] of Jews, looking finally to making Palestine distinctly a Jewish State.”
Policy toward Palestine should be governed by the principle laid down by
President Wilson on July 4, 1918: “The settlement of every question on the
basis of the free acceptance of that settlement by the people immediately
concerned [emphases added].”
Since, according to the commission’s findings, the
non-Jewish population of Palestine – nearly 90% of the whole – were
“emphatically against the entire Zionist program,” their wishes should be
respected [emphases added].’
The commission declared that the Zionist claim “that
they have a ‘right’ to Palestine, based on an occupation of two thousand years
ago, can hardly be seriously considered [emphases added].” A further
consideration was the fact that, since Palestine was the Holy Land for Jews,
Christians, and Muslims alike, the Jews could not be proper guardians of the
holy places. The complete Jewish occupation of Palestine “would intensify, with
a certainty like fate, the anti-Jewish feeling both in Palestine and in all
other portions of the world which look to Palestine as ‘the Holy Land [emphases
added].’”
In view of all these considerations, the commission
recommended that “Jewish immigration to Palestine should definitely be limited
and that the project for making Palestine distinctly a Jewish commonwealth
should be given up [emphases added].”
The commission’s report was never submitted to the
Paris Peace Conference, and its recommendations were never acted upon.’
___________
UKBS Editor: An aside on this Background
Note re Amalek:
1 Samuel 15 (any
translation) recites Jehovah’s decree regarding the slaughter by Israel of the Amalekites in raw, unsparing detail, a cultural shock,
absent further elaboration. Although this passage raises a number of questions
and concerns for the thoughtful, we will not tackle this matter here; it must
wait for another time. Nonetheless, we should remember that in the period of
Saul, Israel was a theocracy – rule by God – who cannot sin. Modern
Israel, though having returned to her ancient land, is not a theocracy and,
therefore, has no right to murder at will, any more than the Jewish people,
when under the Roman empire, had the right to call for
Christ’s death. She is obliged in this day and age to follow humanitarian laws.
However, one can see from the trauma of Israel’s history that the name, Amalek, has become a generic by-word to the Jewish people.
Prime Minister Netanyahu has applied the name to Hamas.
Amalek, “the first of the nations” (Num. 24: 20), had
no wish to fight alone against Israel but rather, with the help of many nations
. . . . At first these nations were afraid to join Amalek,
but he persuaded them by saying: “Come, and I shall
advise you what to do. If they defeat me, you flee, and if not, come and help
me against Israel.”
Moses appointed Joshua to lead the Israelite army not
because of his own weakness or advanced years but because he wished “to train
Joshua in warfare” . . . . After he defeated the Amalekites,
Joshua refrained from
the common practice of abusing
the bodies of the slain and instead “treated them with mercy” . . . . The war
with Amalek did not end with
their defeat, and the Israelites were commanded always to remember the deeds
of Amalek (Deut. 25: 17). In rabbinic
literature, the reasons for the unusual eternal remembrance of Amalek are the following [emphases added]:
(1) Amalek
is the irreconcilable enemy and it is forbidden to show mercy foolishly to one
wholly dedicated to the destruction of Israel . . . . Moreover, the attack
of the Amalekites upon the Israelites encouraged others.
All the tragedies which Israel suffered are considered the direct outcome of
Amalek’s hostile act . . . .
(2) The injunction “Remember” does not enjoin
us to recall the evil actions of others but rather our own. For “the enemy
comes only on account of sin and transgression” . . . .
(3) The verse “Remember…” is meant to remind
all men of “the rule which holds good for all generations, namely, that the
scourge [the staff of God’s indignation] with which Israel is smitten will
itself finally be smitten” . . . .
In the course of time this biblical injunction became
so deeply rooted in Jewish thought that many important enemies of Israel were
identified as direct descendants of Amalek. Thus the tannaitic aggadah
[rabbinic texts] of the first century b.c.e.
identifies Amalek with Rome. . . . The most
outstanding example is “Haman the Agagite” (Esth.
3: 1) who is regarded as a descendant of Agag (i Sam. 15: 8) the Amalekite
king (Josephus, Ant., 11: 209*; see note at end).
___________
The first partition of
Palestine took place in 1922, when the British government excluded Transjordan
from the area to which the provisions of the Balfour Declaration would apply.
The Zionist Executive reluctantly acquiesced in this decision. The
Revisionist movement, established in 1925, hotly opposed the separation of
Transjordan; its basic slogan was “a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan.”
[emphases added] The idea of partitioning
western Palestine between Jews and Arabs was first broached officially in 1937
by the Palestine Royal Commission . . . as a method of enabling each nation to
exercise sovereignty and achieve its principal national aims in part of the
country while maintaining a British foothold centered
in Jerusalem. The proposal was at first approved by the British government and
accepted in principle, after a vigorous controversy, by the majority of the *yishuv and the Zionist movement. The British
withdrew their support, however, after the Palestine Partition Commission (the Woodhead Commission. . .) had failed to produce a
“practicable” partition plan, and instead adopted in 1939 the White Paper
policy, which would ultimately have created an independent Palestinian state
with a permanent Arab majority [emphases added].
[* Yishuv, or HaYishuv HaIvri, or HaYishuv HaYehudi Be’Eretz Yisra’el, denote the
body of Jewish residents in Palestine prior to the establishment of the
State of Israel in 1948.]
The abortive Morrison-Grady scheme of 1946, which
would have left more than two-fifths of the country in British hands and given
neither Arabs nor Jews more than limited autonomy, was rejected by both sides,
and it was not until Britain put the problem before the United Nations that a
new partition plan was evolved. This was done by the UN Special Committee on
Palestine (UNSCOP), which recommended the
establishment of a Jewish and an Arab state joined in an economic union,
with Jerusalem and its environs as a separate international enclave. This
proposal was accepted by the Jews and rejected by the Arabs,
while the British refused to play any part in implementing it. [emphases added]
The partition of western Palestine was not merely a
theoretical proposal, but one of the possibilities inherent in the situation
created by two generations of Zionist settlement before and during the British
Mandate [emphases added]. Jewish land purchases, mainly by the Jewish
National Fund, and the establishment of Jewish towns and villages had created
areas of contiguous Jewish settlement, with a self-reliant and economically
viable community that was prepared and able to defend itself and institutions
of self-government based upon the voluntary allegiance of the Jewish
population. Without such a yishuv, fortified by the
moral, political, and financial support of Jews around the world, no decision
by any external body could have been implemented. Ultimately, the partition
of western Palestine was the result of two forces: the capacity of the yishuv to hold its own by force against the attacks of
Palestinian Arabs and the surrounding Arab states on the one hand, and the
inability of the yishuv to gain control of the whole
of western Palestine, on the other. . . . [emphases
added]
* Josephus, Antiquities, 11: 209
Now there was one Haman,
the son of Amedatha, by birth an Amalekite,
that used to go in to the king; and the foreigners and Persians worshipped him,
as Artaxerxes had commanded that such honor should be paid to him; but Mordecai was so wise, and
so observant of his own country's laws, that he would not worship the man. When
Haman observed this, he inquired whence he came; and when he understood that he
was a Jew, he had indignation at him, and said within himself, that whereas the
Persians, who were free men, worshipped him, this man, who was no better than a
slave, does not vouchsafe to do so. And when he desired to punish Mordecai, he
thought it too small a thing to request of the king that he alone might be
punished; he rather determined to abolish the whole nation, for he was naturally
an enemy to the Jews, because the nation of the Amalekites,
of which he was; had been destroyed by them. Accordingly he came to the king,
and accused them, saying, “There is a certain wicked nation, and it is
dispersed over all the habitable earth that was under his dominion; a nation
separate from others, unsociable, neither admitting the same sort of Divine
worship that others do, nor using laws like to the laws of others, at enmity
with thy people, and with all men, both in their manners and practices. Now, if
thou wilt be a benefactor to thy subjects, thou wilt give order to destroy them
utterly, and not leave the least remains of them, nor preserve any of them,
either for slaves or for captives.” But that the king might not be damnified by the loss of the tributes which the Jews paid
him, Haman promised to give him out of his own estate forty thousand talents whensoever he pleased; and he said he would pay this money
very willingly, that the kingdom might. be freed from
such a misfortune. – Flavius Josephus. The Works of
Flavius Josephus. Translated by. William Whiston, A.M. Auburn and Buffalo.
John E. Beardsley. 1895.
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To be continued
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