On Monday (Sept. 29), Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House to hash out a possible peace deal that would bring an end to fighting in the Gaza Strip, lead to the freeing of the remaining hostages held by Hamas, and begin the rebuilding of the devastated Gaza Strip. During a press conference to talk about the possible deal to bring much-needed peace, Netanyahu attempted to justify his government’s genocidal actions over the last two years by quoting the Bible.
“Since Oct. 7, Israel’s enemies have learned a hard truth: Those who attack us pay a heavy price, but those who partner with us advance progress and security for their peoples,” he said. “President Trump just said it. It’s also in the Bible. It says, ‘Those who will bless you will be blessed, and those who will curse you will be cursed.’ And that’s actually what is happening. We want the blessings. I think we’ve done a lot in the past two years to end the curse.”
Reframing a genocide as ending a curse rather than being a curse itself is quite Orwellian. It’s also important to remember that the verse Netanyahu quoted doesn’t quite mean what he claimed. Genesis 12:3 does not actually mention Israel since Israel didn’t yet exist at that point in the story. The father of Jacob — aka, Israel — hadn’t even been born yet. In fact, Jacob’s grandfather hadn’t even been renamed as Abraham. So the promise about blessing and cursing is really made by God to Abram and his descendants, which is not only a broader category than just the descendants of Jacob but also is not inherently synonymous with the modern nation bearing the same name as a people in the Bible. (Also, if he keeps reading, he’ll find plenty of biblical prophets condemning Israel, so the verse can’t be construed as a blank check.)
Somehow, the Bible-Salesman-in-Chief didn’t catch that exegetical trick. To be fair, the prime minister is far from the only person to invoke Genesis 12:3 to justify Israel today doing whatever it wants to the people in Gaza. For instance, Speaker Mike Johnson cited it in July.
“This goes back to the opening book, in Genesis: I’ll bless the nation that blesses Israel and curse the nation that curses Israel. There’s all sorts of theological interpretations of how that applies to us today, but I take it literally,” he said.
Ironically, he claimed to read and apply the Bible “literally” while literally misquoting the text as he added “Israel” into the verse. Putting aside the Christian Nationalist problem of attempting to codify a Bible verse as the U.S.’s foreign policy goal, it’s even worse when the verse doesn’t even say what he claims it does.
Meanwhile, many conservative Christians are also pushing an even odder argument they think comes from the Bible. But this time they’re looking not at a verse but at the maps added in the back — which, for clarification, are not actually part of the official canon.
With the Trump-Netanyahu peace talks this week, the Family Research Council organized a statement signed by numerous Christian Nationalist figures that demands the U.S. support Israel’s “sovereignty over the biblical heartland” of places like “Judea and Samaria.” They think such phrasing — instead of the international language of the West Bank — is a strong biblical argument for Israeli hegemony. But staking out a claim based on maps from biblical times is like building a house on shifting sands. So this issue of A Public Witness flips to the maps section of the Bible to see who should control the “biblical heartland.”
This Land Is … Whose Land?
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to A Public Witness to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.