Noting the tendency of the Bible’s interpreters—from talmudic rabbis to Augustine to Maimonides and Aquinas—to read their own agendas into the text, Benedict Spinoza argued that Scripture must be read exclusively on its own terms, without introducing philosophical concepts. Such an approach prevails among academic Bible scholars today, but Kenneth Seeskin, a philosopher of religion, makes the case for more expansive interpretation:

[I]f part of the meaning of a text is contained in what it says, another part is contained in the direction to which it points. It is as if in addition to giving us a picture of the society in which he lived, an author can put us on a trajectory that leads to something beyond it. With respect to the Bible, it is hard to read the prophets without taking the idea of trajectory seriously. Although there are passages [in Isaiah] that glorify war as much as Homer did, [its author] could still look beyond the prevailing beliefs of his time to a day when the lion would lie down with the lamb. As the Talmud (Ḥaggigah 3a) tells us: “Just as what is planted is fruitful and multiplies, so are the words of the Torah fruitful and multiplying.”

Needless to say, if a text puts us on a trajectory to something new, it does not necessarily follow that the author knows exactly where that trajectory will lead. . . . My claim is simply that looking at where a text leads helps us to gain a perspective from which to appreciate the significance of what it was trying to say. The moment we ask about the direction to which a text points, we have begun to read it philosophically.

[Thus], to understand the opening verses of Genesis, we have to invoke categories like contingency and necessity that have no correlates in biblical Hebrew. To understand the full import of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac, we have to skip millennia and look at the thought of Kant and Kierkegaard. To understand what it means for a people to be holy, we have to take into account ideas that were not fully expressed until the 20th century.

This does not mean that philosophers get the last word on everything, only that they get a word.

For the past 36 hours, I’ve been reading and listening to analyses of the terms and implications of the recent hostage deal. More will appear in the coming days, and I’ll try to put the best of them in this newsletter. But today I want to share a comment made on Tuesday by the Palestinian analyst Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. While he and I would probably disagree on numerous points about the current conflict, this analysis is spot on, and goes entirely against most arguments made by those who consider themselves pro-Palestinian, and certainly those chanting for a cease-fire at all costs:

When a cease-fire in Gaza is announced, Hamas’s fascists will do everything they can to frame this as the ultimate victory; they will wear their military uniforms, emerge from their tunnels, stop hiding in schools and displacement centers, and very quickly reassert their control over the coastal enclave. They’ll even get a few Gazans to celebrate and dance for them.

This, I should note, is exactly what has happened. Alkhatib continues:

The reality is that the Islamist terrorism of Hamas, masquerading as “resistance,” has achieved nothing for the Palestinian people except for billions of dollars in wasted resources and tens of thousands of needless deaths, with Gaza in ruins after twenty years following the withdrawal of settlements in 2005. . . . Hamas’s propaganda machine, run by Qatari state media, Al Jazeera Arabic, will work overtime to help the terror group turn a catastrophic disaster into a victory akin to the battles of Stalingrad and Leningrad.

Hamas will also start punishing anyone who criticized or worked against it, and preparing for its next attack. Perhaps Palestinians would have been better off if, instead of granting them a temporary reprieve, the IDF kept fighting until Hamas was utterly defeated.