Jesus to Israel: "Get behind, Satan!"

A historical-critical perspective

Not all Christians stand with modern Israel. But all Christians stand with ancient Israel. Not all Christians believe that Israel has “the right to defend itself” by committing a genocide in Palestine and invading other countries. But all Christians believe that ancient Israel had the right—and even the sacred duty—to exterminate the Amalekites, “man and woman, babe and suckling” (1Samuel 15:3) because they stood in the way of Israel’s conquest of Canaan.

All Christians are expected to stand with Moses when, in Numbers 31, he ordered his men to slaughter all the Midianites, as a punishment for having encouraged the Israelites to intermarry with the Moabites. Moses was enraged with the army commanders for sparing the women and the children, but finally allowed them to keep for themselves “the young girls who have never slept with a man.” The booty amounted to thirty-two thousand girls, who were divided between all men: half for the warriors, half for the rest. Yahweh required as his own “portion” 0,2 percent of the warriors’ half, that is, 32 girls, who were offered to Yahweh by the sacrificial priest Eleazar, presumably as holocausts, together with Yahweh’s portion of oxen, cattle, donkeys and sheep.

Where does this kind of story fit on the scale of civilization? It belongs to “prehistoric warfare” as described by Lawrence Keeley in War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, when the extermination of enemy tribes was not uncommon, and

“[t]he capture of women was one of the spoils of victory—and occasionally one of the primary aims of warfare—for many tribal warriors. … The social position of captive women varied widely among cultures, from abject slaves to concubines to secondary wives to full spouses.”[1]

In ancient Israel, “abject slaves” seems to have been the case. “Full spouses” was out of the question, since the whole justification for the massacre was to prevent intermarriage. Sex with non-Israelites is fine, as long as “no bastard shall enter the assembly of Yahweh, nor any descendant of his even to the tenth generation” (Deuteronomy 23:3). This, rather than any special respect for women, explains the rule that a Jewish mother is required for being a Jew.

There are other biblical stories reflecting such pre-civilizational war code. In Judges 19-21, the rape of the concubine of a Levite by the Benjaminites of the city of Gibeah leads to a blood feud, in the course of which the eleven other Israelite tribes slaughter everyone in Gibeah and set the city on fire, while six hundred Benjaminite warriors have escaped into the desert. Then, as a token of reconciliation, the Israelites decide to provide these Benjaminites with new wives. For that purpose, they attack the Israelite town of Jabesh-Gilead, which had refused to join the punitive expedition, and kill “all males and all those women who have ever slept with a man,” and gather four hundred virgins to offer the Benjaminites.

Long before these stories were written, there were high civilizations in the Fertile Crescent, which behaved with more respect for their enemies. Despite their legendary brutality, the Assyrians did not slaughter the defeated Israelites, but deported and resettled them. Later the Babylonians even allowed their Judean captives to prosper on the riverbanks of the Euphrates.

Yet the Israelites and the Judeans (Jews) chose to record and cherish their gruesome stories of indiscriminate massacre and child-trafficking as part of their sacred traditions. Worse, they decided that, by committing these acts, their ancestors had done nothing but obey the Almighty God, who loves them and hates their enemies.

This makes Israel some kind of living prehistoric fossil, a monster from a bygone age of savagery. With a Bronze-age genocidal maniac as national and religious hero, with tales of barbaric slaughter and razzia of sex slaves as national narrative, with a kill count of 24,681,116 people for the god of Israel[2]—a delusional tribal god who declared himself the only true god, therefore God—, but with a modern army and arsenal, and an unmatched international power of corruption, Israel has grown to be the warmonger of the world, a force for the destruction of every civilizational achievement, such as human rights and international law.

Israel is truly satanic. And it is satanic because its worldview, its traditions, its attitude, its war code and its general behavior toward Gentiles are rooted in ancient Israel and its delusional chosenness. Modern Israel has as primary identity the radical violence of ancient Israel and its prophecies of world domination. The Tanakh is the Israelis’ user manual for their new conquest of the Levant.

When the Zionists claimed that they were restoring ancient Israel, they really meant it. We should have listened when the Chief Secretary of the Lehi, or Stern Gang, claimed that his terrorist organization was “the inheritors of the purest traditions of ancient Israel.”[3] He was right. Israel has always been biblical. But as it grew stronger, it became more and more openly so. And here we are today, with a biblical freak like Itamar Ben-Gvir posting a photo of mass-murderer Baruch Goldstein on his wall, and a government-funded rabbi like Yitzak Shapira (“a great halakhic arbiter” according to Netanyahu) writing in his book Hamelech (“The King's Torah”): “There is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us.”[4] Shapira claims that his edict “is fully justified by the Torah.” He is right, no question about it. The Bible is Israel’s blueprint for genocide: “Remember Amalek!” said Netanyahu when launching his bloody reprisal on Gaza, October 28, 2023.

If we look at Israel’s behavior today, we see Satan at work. But if we look deeply into Israel’s soul, and if we reflect with intellectual integrity upon the source and nature of Israel’s character, we will find that Israel’s satanic soul is in fact Yahweh. Yahweh is not God. Yahweh is actually Satan, and Israel is Satan’s chosen people.

Put down for a moment your “allegorical” or “eschatological” Christian glasses, if you have any, and read the prophecy of Zechariah 14:

And this is the plague with which Yahweh will strike all the nations who have fought against Jerusalem; their flesh will rot while they are still standing on their feet; their eyes will rot in their sockets; their tongues will rot in their mouths. … [Then] the wealth of all the surrounding nations will be heaped together: gold, silver, clothing, in vast quantity. … After this, all the survivors of all the nations which have attacked Jerusalem will come up year after year to worship the King, Yahweh Sabaoth.

Now think what a nation with such a program and nuclear power will do when it thinks God gives the go-ahead.

If the word Satan means anything, then Yahweh, the soul of Israel, is Satan. Israel is a mad dog possessed by a mad god.

My Christian friends resent me for hammering this point. And I hate to disturb their religious hypnosis. But history demands that they wake up from their delusion about holy Israel. There is no longer any excuse for the worshipping of the genocidal god of Israel. Enough theological cop-out, such as “reading the Bible allegorically”!

Take the green pill!

But don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Keep Jesus! We need him more than ever. I don’t think the Saxons and the Frisians really needed Jesus in the eighth century, having their own heroes and no Jewish problem; but we, Europeans and Americans, need to honor Jesus because the story of Jesus is the heroic story of every man destroyed by Rome for having defied Jerusalem. The story of Jesus is the story of the Palestinians. It is the archetypal story that can inspire us with courage in our struggle against Israel. It is the story of the son of God defeating the people of Satan with his own death.

As a matter of fact, Jesus told us what we need to know about Yahweh, when

the devil showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor, and said to him, “I will give you all these, if you kneel down to me and worship me.” Then Jesus replied, “Get behind, Satan!” (Matthew 4:8-10)

Here we have Jesus rejecting the very principle of Yahweh’s covenant with his people, recorded in Deuteronomy and repeated as a leitmotiv throughout the Hebrew scripture: if the Jews worship Yahweh and no other gods, then Yahweh “will raise you higher than every other nation he has made”, and “you will make many nations your subjects, and will be subject to none” (Deuteronomy 26:17-19 and 28:12).

The parallel between Satan’s temptation to Jesus and Yahweh’s covenant with Israel is unmistakable. The temptation story is about Jesus’s role in history. Jesus refuses to be the messianic king that will usher Israel’s glorious supremacy. The story may be legendary, but it was probably built upon memorable words of Jesus. There is another gospel dialog in which Jesus uses the same phrase, generally translated as “get behind me, Satan,” or “Away with you, Satan,” well-known to Catholics in the Latin translation, Vade retro, Satana, but perhaps best rendered today as “Go to hell, Satan!” or “Fuck off, Satan!” The dialog, found in Mark 8:27-33, is about the correct answer to the same question: Is Jesus the Messiah? Here it is, quoted from the Catholic Jerusalem Bible:

27 Now Jesus and his disciples set out for the villages of Caesarea Philippi. Along the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” 28 They said in reply, “John the Baptist, others Elijah, still others one of the prophets.” 29 And he asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter said to him in reply, “You are the Messiah.” … 33 At this he turned around and, looking at his disciples, rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”

Jesus here adamantly denies being the Messiah (Christos in Greek), and it is probably this dialog, the turning point in Mark’s narrative, that is echoed in Matthew’s temptation story (Matthew is in part a rewriting of Mark).

But of course, some of you surely noticed that I have skipped three verses. Here is the full quote with those three verses in italics:

27 Now Jesus and his disciples set out for the villages of Caesarea Philippi. Along the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” 28 They said in reply, “John the Baptist, others Elijah, still others one of the prophets.” 29 And he asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter said to him in reply, “You are the Messiah.” 30 Then he warned them not to tell anyone about him. 31 He began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer greatly and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and rise after three days. 32 He spoke this openly. Then Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. 33 At this he turned around and, looking at his disciples, rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”

Now the passage takes the opposite meaning: Jesus accepts the messianic title, but wants to keep it secret, and Peter is now rebuked for not wanting Jesus to die. A basic historical-critical analysis is here necessary to understand that the notion of Jesus’s predestined death and resurrection is a post-Easter Christological development. Therefore verse 31 and the two verses that frame it (30 and 32) cannot have belonged to the original record of Jesus’s words, and were almost certainly a redactional insertion. They introduce into Jesus’s mouth two fundamental tenets of the doctrine elaborated after Jesus’s death: that Jesus was the Messiah, and that his crucifixion was predestined (and prophesized). Although these two assertions are incompatible from the Jewish point of view (a crucified Messiah is a contradiction in terms), they became an inseparable unit in the doctrine crafted by Mark and later gospel writers.

Verse 30 introduces the motif known to Jesus scholars as the “messianic secret” (first conceptualized in 1901 by William Wrede). The purpose was to respond to an objection: in the early 70s, some people who had followed Jesus or his early disciples had never heard that Jesus claimed to be the Messiah. The gospel’s response was that Jesus had told his disciples to keep it secret. The “messianic secret” motif was introduced to contradict Jesus’s own messianic rejection.

That is just a theory. Let’s face it: we don’t know exactly what Jesus really said, and no one will ever know for sure how to distinguish the words he said from the words that gospels writers and editors made him say. The point is that we have the choice of interpretations. There is only one Jesus, but there are many ways to understand Jesus. Even with the relatively recent “historical Jesus”, there are variations: Jesus the rabbi, Jesus the revolutionary, Jesus the healer, Jesus the apocalyptic preacher, and so on. We can choose to believe that Jesus endorsed Israel’s narcissistic and xenophobic delusion of metaphysical superiority, or that he tried to cure Israel from it. We can choose to believe that Jesus accepted the god of Israel as his Father in Heaven, or that he implicitly identified the god of Israel with Satan. We can choose to believe that Jesus was Israel’s Messiah, or that he vehemently rejected that title as a satanic idea. It is a rational choice, and there are strong scholarly arguments in favor of the second theory. I have presented just one of them.

So there is a way out of the dilemma imposed on us since the Council of Nicaea: if Jesus was the Messiah, then Israel was the chosen people. But that idea of God choosing the Jewish people is the biggest lie in human history, and we urgently need to realize how much and how long we have been had. Jews have never been the chosen people, and that’s why Jesus stressed in the strongest terms that he was not the Messiah.

In other words, there is a rational basis for Marcionism, if we understand by that a vision of Jesus as radically opposed to the ideology of the Old Testament, and a concept of Jesus’s Father as radically opposed to Yahweh. Where is Israel in the Lord’s Prayer, that Jesus taught his disciples?

Marcionism is a heresy? Tertullian condemned it? Who cares! There is no more copyright and no more papal excommunication to fear. We are free to understand and to relate to Jesus as we want. Take example on the great Simone Weil, who saw in Jesus the most sublime ideal of Hellenistic thought and the antithesis of Jewish thought: a Greek son of God, not a Jewish Messiah. That “antisemitic” Jesus will not save us, but he can inspire us with insight, faith and courage in the struggle of our time.

And although we should throw away the pestilential Old Testament bathwater, we should keep Baby Jesus too, the Sun King, reborn every year. It’s a European tradition, called Noël in French, probably derived from noio hel, “new sun”. So Happy Christmas!

---

[1] Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, Oxford UP, 1996, p. 86.

[2] Steve Wells, Drunk With Blood: God’s Killings in the Bible, SAB Books, 2013.

[3] Thomas Suárez, State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel, Skyscraper, 2016, p. 55.

[4] Wyatt Peterson, Perfidy of Zion, 2022, p. 58.