The Weekly Sift

I don’t have a peace plan. I just want the destruction to stop.

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One of the more intriguing stories in Genesis happens in chapter 18: God visits Abraham in human form, along with two companions. As he is about to leave, God lets Abraham in on a divine secret: He is about to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. He tells his companions why he thinks Abraham needs to know about this:

Abraham will surely become a great and powerful nation, and all nations on earth will be blessed through him. For I have chosen him, so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just

Like many passages in the Bible, there are at least two ways to read this: Maybe Abraham needs to know how evil nations are punished, and to teach his children, so that the nation of his descendants will know better than to be like Sodom. [1] But the conversation develops in such a way as to allow a second interpretation. Abraham knows his nephew Lot lives in Sodom, and he worries that God will kill evil and good people indiscriminately. So he pushes back against God’s judgment.

Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing—to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?

Gods agrees that he should save Sodom for the sake of fifty. And then Abraham begins to bargain. What about 45 good people? Forty? Thirty? Twenty? Ten? Each time, God agrees. And then the text says only “When the Lord had finished speaking with Abraham, he left”, not telling us whether Abraham pushed no further or God cut the discussion short.

Again, there are at least two ways to read this: Maybe God already knows that there aren’t ten righteous people in Sodom, and he indulges Abraham because the concessions he grants are moot; he’s going to destroy Sodom one way or the other. Or maybe something else is happening. Maybe this conversation establishes the idea of acceptable and unacceptable levels of collateral damage. Maybe that’s the lesson that God is drawing out of Abraham, so that he can pass it down to the great and powerful nation of his descendants. [2]

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, as the world watches the city of Gaza be destroyed. [3]

Immediately after October 7, my sympathies were entirely with the Israelis. The coordinated attacks of that day, targeted at places of no military value, apparently aimed at killing and carrying off as many civilians as possible, could not be tolerated. The people who planned and carried out those attacks could not be allowed to sit in safety and plot another one. And Hamas is famous for using civilians as shields, so I accepted that an Israeli counterattack would kill some number of innocent Gazans.

But not any number of innocent Gazans.

As of January 20, this was the British Red Cross‘ assessment of the situation in Gaza:

• Winter temperatures are putting the lives of 1.9 million displaced people at risk
• 80% of the population faces severe food insecurity
• The death toll in Gaza currently stands at more than 23,210, and 330 in the West Bank
• 59,167 people have been injured in Gaza and 4,042 in the West Bank
• Food and safe and adequate shelter are extremely scarce, with many families unable to eat a single meal a day and people setting up makeshift camps in the street.
• Sanitation and public health conditions have seriously deteriorated, posing a high risk of disease outbreaks that could cause significant casualties. Heavy rain and flooding is affecting Gaza which adds to the risk of waterborne diseases.
• The situation facing Gaza’s hospitals and those relying on their care is also dire. Hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza no longer have access to healthcare.
• Nearly 85% of the total population of Gaza have been forced to leave their homes in precarious and unsafe conditions. Many of these people have been forced to move and seek new shelter several times.

The BBC adds details about property damage.

[S]atellite data analysis obtained by the BBC shows the true extent of the destruction. The analysis suggests between 144,000 and 175,000 buildings across the whole Gaza Strip have been damaged or destroyed. That’s between 50% and 61% of Gaza’s buildings.

I don’t want to make claims beyond my knowledge and expertise, so let me admit my limitations: I don’t know what alternative responses to October 7 were considered or were even possible. I don’t know what negotiations have happened behind the scenes, or what possibilities for peace have been offered. I don’t know how much influence the Biden administration has, or how it has tried to use that influence.

I also don’t know precisely what the Israeli government intended or how well that matches what the Israeli public wants. I do know that some elements of the Netanyahu government have genocidal intent. Some others, I suspect, simply don’t care: They (understandably) want Hamas gone and want Israeli lives to be secure; the number of Gazans who must die or have their lives shattered to achieve that goal does not matter to them.

I just want to say this: What we have seen is already too much. Gazan lives do matter.

I contrast what’s going on in Gaza with smaller-scale hostage situations, thinking not just of the Israeli hostages, but of the Gazan civilians who are simply in the wrong place. Police typically do not charge into such situations as if the survival of the hostages were not their responsibility.

I still have no sympathy with Hamas, and I continue to condemn what they did in October. But are there fifty righteous people in Gaza? It seems like there must be.

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[1] What exactly made Sodom so intolerable to God is widely misunderstood. When God’s two angels (presumably the two companions Abraham met) arrive in the city, the men of Sodom want to rape them. So it’s often thought that Sodom’s sin had something to do with homosexuality, i.e., sodomy. But Genesis doesn’t explicitly say that, and Ezekiel says something else entirely:

Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.

So if your political plan involves cracking down on LGBTQ folks while kicking children off food stamps, you might want to reconsider.

[2] Apparently there is some history to this interpretation. I first ran across it in Adam Levin’s novel The Instructions, about a boy from Chicago who may or may not become the Messiah. The boy’s training is full of such rabbinical discussions.

Of course, you can contest this interpretation by pointing to the conquest of Canaan described in the book of Joshua, in which God orders genocide.

So Joshua subdued the whole region, including the hill country, the Negev, the western foothills and the mountain slopes, together with all their kings. He left no survivors. He totally destroyed all who breathed, just as the Lord, the God of Israel, had commanded.

Conflicts like this are a major reason most modern scholars read the Bible as an amalgamation of separate sources rather than as a narrative from a single point of view.

[3] Gaza’s history also goes back to Biblical times, and perhaps further. It was the Philistine capital where Samson was taken, blinded, and held prisoner. Gaza is where he killed himself and numerous Philistines by pulling down the Temple of Dagon. The Aldous Huxley title Eyeless in Gaza is an allusion to Samson.