Fear and Terror

How the Levites Depraved the Israelites

Shame on me! In my previous Substack post, I was unfairly critical of Thomas Suárez’s book, State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel (freely downloadable here), for failing to address the root cause of Israel’s inborn terrorism. I must confess I had scanned through it rather quickly. Kevin Barrett has advised me to read it more carefully, and I did. It is, I now realize, the fruit of an Herculean research by a scholar of outstanding capacity and great integrity. It is an eye-opener to a sickening reality that even myself had underestimated before reading it. It demonstrates with clarity that Israel was born a rogue state, with malevolence in its DNA.

My criticism stands. Suárez could have quoted at least once Deuteronomy 2:25, in which “Yahweh, the god of Israel” presents himself as the god of “fear and terror”: “Today and henceforth, I shall fill the peoples under all heavens with fear and terror of you; whoever hears word of your approach will tremble and writhe in anguish because of you.” Like god, like people. When Suárez mentions that, “The Stern Gang, as it was commonly called, or more formally Lehi, was the most fanatical of the three major organizations, claiming to be (as the Chief Secretary in Jerusalem put it), ‘the inheritors of the purest traditions of ancient Israel’,” it would have been appropriate to discuss whether or not that claim was well-founded.

On the other hand, it is probably best that Suárez limited his inquiry to the bare facts; it makes his case for the criminal nature of Israel—and the complicity of the West—unassailable.

I will study this book in more depth—and check Suárez’s other books—and probably review it in a future post. But for now, I want to dwell on one important aspect of Israeli terrorism that Suárez underlines, as Kevin rightly pointed out to me: Zionists did commit many atrocious crimes against Jews deemed “uncooperative” to their mafia-style robbery of the Palestinians’ lands.

That is quite Biblical too. “Fear and terror” is the essence of the Jews’ control over the Goyim, but it is  also the essence of the Jews’ control over the Jews themselves. The Tanakh was written by generations of Levites as a means of controlling the Israelites by the fear of a bogeyman god. Which is why, in the Biblical world, a good Jew is a God-fearing Jew.

The God of Terror, and the God-fearing Jews

According to Jewish Law (Torah), the Jews who seek assimilation, cooperation, or, worse, intermarriage with Gentiles, deserve death, and their death will serve as an example to the rest. When, in the second century BC, some Israelites thought, “let us ally ourselves with the gentiles surrounding us, for since we separated ourselves from them many misfortunes have overtaken us,” the Maccabees stirred a civil war against them, “striking down the sinners in their anger, and the renegades in their fury” (1Maccabees 1-2).[1] The Book of Jubilees, dating from this period, proclaims:

And if there is any man who wishes in Israel to give his daughter or his sister to any man who is of the seed of the Gentiles he shall surely die, and they shall stone him with stones; for he has wrought shame in Israel; and they shall burn the woman with fire, because she has dishonored the name of the house of her father, and she shall be rooted out of Israel. (30:7)

Terrorizing the Jews into strict separateness and endogamy is the essence of the Yahwist covenant.

In Numbers 16-17, a group of two hundred and fifty Levites led by Korah are themselves exterminated for having rebelled against Moses and Aaron. “I am going to destroy them here and now,” said Yahweh, and “Fire then shot out from Yahweh and consumed the two hundred and fifty men offering incense” (16:20-35). “On the following day, the whole community of Israelites were muttering against Moses and Aaron and saying, ‘You are responsible for killing Yahweh’s people!’” Then Yahweh said “I am going to destroy them here and now,” and a plague decimated fourteen thousand seven hundreds of them (17:6-14).

What these episodes highlight is that the authority of Yahweh and of his Levitical caste is entirely founded on violence and terror against the Israelites themselves. It also shows that the Covenant is based on the permanent threat of destruction. Jews who challenge their God-appointed elites and who socialize with their non-Jewish neighbors, eat with them, intermarry with them, and, while doing all this, show respect to their gods, are the dregs of the Jewish people, traitors to Yahweh and to their race. They deserve to be eliminated without mercy, especially since they endanger the whole community by attracting Yahweh’s wrath.

Yahweh teaches the Jewish people that friendship with non-Jews is a betrayal of the covenant, and will be punished by disaster, possibly extermination. That Yahweh’s covenant is based on terror is plain enough in Leviticus: “And if, in spite of this, you will not listen to me but go against me, I shall go against you in fury and punish you seven times over for your sins. You will eat the flesh of your own sons, you will eat the flesh of your own daughters. I shall destroy your high places and smash your incense-altars; I shall pile your corpses on the corpses of your foul idols and shall reject you. I shall reduce your cities to ruins, etc.” (26:27-31).

Such threats are repeated over and over. Joshua, Moses’ successor among the Levites, said to the Israelites who had taken possession of Canaan:

Never mix with the peoples who are still left beside you. Do not utter the names of their gods, do not swear by them, do not serve them and do not bow down to them. … if you make friends with the remnant of these nations still living beside you, if you intermarry with them, if you mix with them and they with you, then know for certain that Yahweh your god will stop dispossessing these nations before you, and for you they will be a snare, a pitfall, thorns in your sides and thistles in your eyes, until you vanish from this fine country given you by Yahweh your god. … For if you violate the covenant which Yahweh your god has imposed on you, if you go and serve other gods and bow down to them, then Yahweh’s anger will be roused against you and you will quickly vanish from the fine country which he has given you. (Joshua 23:6-16)

In this passage alone, you have everything you need to know in order to understand what is going on in Palestine today. For Israelis, the Biblical past is an eternal present. And it’s not about religion; it’s about the pattern of Israel’s history.

Today’s Jewish elites might not be Levites in the strict, genetic sense, but Jewishness is still a system of mind control of the Jewish masses by the Jewish elites. Jewishness is, in fact, best understood as a form of Stockholm syndrome. As Smilesburger says in Philip Roth’s novel Operation Shylock: “A Jew knows God and how, from the very first day He created man, He has been irritated with him from morning till night. […] To appeal to a crazy, violent father, and for three thousand years, that is what it is to be a crazy Jew!”[2] Jews feel hated by all of humankind (the Jews are “the people chosen for universal hatred,” wrote proto-Zionist Leon Pinsker[3]), but this may be, in part, a case of Freudian projection: deep inside, they know that the god who chose them is the god of hate, not a god of love. He only loves them as long as they obey his crazy laws without discussion, but hates them as soon as they try to be free human beings. This sociopathic god is, or course, a bogeyman conjured up by the Levites.

That is why the only way to save the Jews is to expose the evilness of their leadership. “The evils of Israel are the evils of leadership,” wrote Jewish publisher Samuel Roth in Jews Must Live: An Account of the Persecution of the World by Israel on All the Frontiers of Civilization (1934). He blames all the suffering of the Jews on “the stupendous hypocrisy and cruelty imposed upon us by our fatal leadership.”

Beginning with the Lord God of Israel Himself, it was the successive leaders of Israel who one by one foregathered and guided the tragic career of the Jews—tragic to the Jews and no less tragic to the neighboring nations who have suffered them. […] despite our faults, we would never have done so much damage to the world if it had not been for our genius for evil leadership.[4]

Jews can and will be saved, when they break the spell of Yahweh. We need to help them by stating unequivocally that their biblical god is not God, but a grotesque puppet fashioned by their evil priestly leadership to terrorize them into submission. Unless they are willing to adopt Marcionism, Christians should keep away from this dialogue; Jews need not convert to Christianity, they need to convert to historical criticism, the rational, scientific analysis and deconstruction of their scriptures.

By chance, some Jews are pretty good at it.

Richard E. Friedman’s theory of the Exodus

One of today’s most talented and respected biblical scholars is Richard Elliott Friedman. In his most recent book, The Exodus: How it Happened and Why it Matters (HarperOne, 2017), he solves the following contradiction: on the one hand, we have no archaeological evidence for a massive migration from Egypt to Canaan, and we have instead archaeological evidence that the Israelites were indigenous to the land of Canaan; on the other hand, we have scriptural evidence of an Egyptian origin for much of the priestly traditions in the Torah. The solution, Friedman argues, is simple: the tribes of Israel had “largely indigenous origins” in the land of Canaan, except the one without a territory: the Levites, who came from Egypt in relatively small number, and superposed their exclusivist Yahwist cult on the Israelites’ worship of the supreme god El. Israel probably existed as a kingdom in today’s Palestine before a conquering band of Levites moved there and progressively imposed their religious and military rule. Here are the key arguments:

First, many Levites have Egyptian-sounding names (Hophni, Hur, two men named Phinehas, Merari, Mushi, Pashhur, and of course Moses), while “not one person from any of the rest of Israel has an Egyptian name.”

Second, “in all of our earlier sources, only the Levites have any connection with the exodus.”

Third, priestly sources (E, P, and D) show familiarity with Egyptian culture, tradition and literature.

A strong argument is drawn from two of the most archaic sources in the Bible: the Song of the Sea or Song of Miriam (Exodus 15), and the Song of Deborah (Judges 5). “The Song of Deborah, set in Israel, does not mention the Levites; and the Song of Miriam, set in Egypt, does not mention Israel.” In the Song of Miriam, the people rescued from the pursuing Egyptians are simply “the people of Yahweh.” The Song of Deborah “celebrates the battle … that first established Israelite hegemony as a country,” and names all the tribes but the Levites.

This is confirmed by another very ancient source, the Blessing of Moses (Deuteronomy 33), which combines oracles about many of the tribes of Israel and Judah, including Levi, whose oracle is the only one mentioning the wilderness wanderings.

The Levites were not a tribe, but a priestly group, with no territory allotment. They were dispersed among the tribes, took direct control of ten cities, and lived off a tenth (a tithe) of the Israelite tribes’ produce (Joshua 13-19). It was only by a late fiction that the Levites came to be counted as one of the tribes of Israel and given an ancestor among Jacob’s sons (Genesis 49).

What this means is that the Yahweh-worshipping Levites colonized the Israeli tribes, and taught them that the real name of their god El had been revealed to the chief Levite Moses as “Yahweh” (Exodus 3:6). Although they migrated from Egypt, the Levites were not of Egyptian stock, and may have been Judean “Habiru” (a word meaning “nomadic raiders”, from which “Hebrew” is derived) exploited as forced laborers by the Egyptians. That would explains why, “[w]hat we know of ancient Israel’s religion does not look like it came out of an Egyptian source” (contrary to what Freud speculated, Yahweh has nothing in common with Akhenaton’s Sun God).

The Levites could convert, submit and tax the indigenous Israelites because they were not just a priestly caste, but a particularly violent and cruel band of conquerors. They massacred around three thousand Israelites in the Golden Calf episode (Exodus 32:26-28):

And Moses stood in the gate of the camp and said, “Whoever is for Yahweh: to me!” And all the children of Levi were gathered to him. And he said to them, “Yahweh, God of Israel, said this: ‘Set, each man, his sword on his thigh; cross over and come back from gate to gate in the camp; and kill, each man, his brother and, each man, his neighbor and, each man, his relative.’” And the children of Levi did according to Moses’ word, and about three thousand men fell from the people in that day.

In this passage, the Levites appear as some sort of elite troops of Moses, terrorizing the people into submission to their exclusivist, ethnocentric cult of the Jealous God.

As Friedman demonstrated in Who Wrote the Bible? the Levites came to be divided into two rival priestly houses, the Aaronids (descendants of Aaron) and the Mushites (descendants of Moses), who engaged in struggles for leadership. The Book of Numbers recalls how the Aaronids secured for themselves the priesthood when Phinehas, Aaron’s grandson, received from Yahweh, “to him and his descendants after him, […] the priesthood for ever,” that is, “the right to perform the ritual of expiation for the Israelites.” For what holy deed was Phinehas thus rewarded? For the murder of an Israelite and his Midianite wife, who had transgressed the Law of strict endogamy: he “seized a lance, followed the Israelite into the alcove, and there ran them both through, the Israelite and the woman, through the stomach.” By this act, says Yahweh, Phinehas showed that he had “the same zeal as I have” (Numbers 25:11-13). To call Yahweh a “jealous god” is a euphemism: he is really a hateful, murderous xenophobe.

Let us ponder the fact that, according to the Bible, the priesthood of the Jealous God was secured as a reward for the double murder of an interracial couple. Here you have the very essence of the Jewish faith.

---

[1] Norman Cantor, The Sacred Chain: The History of the Jews, Harper Perennial, 1995, pp. 55-61.

[2] Philip Roth, Operation Shylock: A Confession, Simon & Schuster, 1993, p. 110.

[3] Leon Pinsker, Auto-Emancipation: An Appeal to His People by a Russian Jew (1882), on www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Zionism/pinsker.html.

[4] Samuel Roth, Jews Must Live: An Account of the Persecution of the World by Israel on All the Frontiers of Civilization, 1934 (on archive.org).