The Hebrew Bible makes frequent reference to the Amorites, a pagan people living on either side of the Jordan River, sometimes appearing to use the term as a catchall for all the non-Israelite residents of ancient Canaan. While there are ample references to the Amorites in other ancient Middle Eastern sources, their language—and thus many questions about their origins—has remained a mystery. A recent scholarly analysis of two Mesopotamian tablets seems to have changed that, writes Nathan Steinmeyer:

While the Amorites—first attested during the third millennium BCE as a nomadic people from Syria and the Levant—eventually became one of the most powerful groups to rule over Mesopotamia, very little evidence of their language has ever been found. . . . The tablets . . . are unprovenanced objects, having likely been illegally removed from Iraq about 30 years ago in the wake of the First Gulf War and subsequently stored in various collections in the United States.

The texts themselves provide important clues to the place and period where and when they were written. Both tablets are written in cuneiform and have linguistic features that strongly suggest they can be dated to the Old Babylonian period (ca. 1894–1595 BCE). In addition, the vocabulary and syntax of the tablets indicate they were likely written in southern Mesopotamia, the region known as Babylonia. Indeed, the language and handwriting used in the two tablets is so similar that they may have been written by the very same scribe or at least in the same scribal school.

Scholars have now confirmed that Amorite was actually a Northwest Semitic language, like Ugaritic, Hebrew, and Aramaic. Specifically, Amorite has striking similarities to the Canaanite language group to which Hebrew and Moabite also belong. Indeed, the Amorite from the tablets is incredibly similar to the Canaanite language found in the 14th-century BCE Amarna Letters, and some of the phrases are even nearly identical to modern Hebrew. It is important to note, however, that the Amorite language itself cannot be understood as Canaanite. Some of its features are much closer to other Semitic languages, like Arabic, rather than Canaanite.

In a recent article, the New York Times Magazine asserts that Benjamin Netanyahu “prolonged the war in Gaza to stay in power.” Niranjan Shankar takes the argument apart piece by piece, showing that for all its careful research, it fails to back up its basic claims. For instance: the article implies that Netanyahu torpedoed a three-point cease-fire proposal supported by the Biden administration in the spring of last year:

First of all, it’s crucial to note that Biden’s supposed “three-point plan” announced in May 2024 was originally an Israeli proposal. Of course, there was some back-and-forth and disagreement over how the Biden administration presented this initially, as Biden failed to emphasize that according to the three-point framework, a permanent cease-fire was conditional on Hamas releasing all of the hostages and stepping down. Regardless, the piece fails to mention that it was Hamas in June 2024 that rejected this framework!

It wasn’t until July 2024 that Hamas made its major concession—dropping its demand that Israel commit up front to a full end to the war, as opposed to doing so at a later stage of cease-fire/negotiations. Even then, U.S. negotiators admitted that both sides were still far from agreeing on a deal.

Even when the Times raises more credible criticisms of Israel—like when it brings up the IDF’s strategy of conducting raids rather than holding territory in the first stage of the war—it offers them in what seems like bad faith:

[W]ould the New York Times prefer that Israel instead started with a massive ground campaign with a “clear-hold-build” strategy from the get-go? Of course, if Israel had done this, there would have been endless criticism, especially under the Biden administration. But when Israel instead tried the “raid-and-clear” strategy, it gets blamed for deliberately dragging the war on.