University departments of philosophy often exclude the Hebrew Bible from discussions of the history of ethics, treating it as belonging solely to the domain of religious or ancient Near Eastern studies. In his Ethics in Ancient Israel, John Barton, an Anglican priest and Oxford professor, seeks to return the Tanakh to its rightful place as a work of ethical profundity. James Nati sums up his approach:

Barton is particularly motivated by the desire to push back against the idea that the Hebrew Bible simply demands obedience to the deity. [As he puts it:] “There is an almost universal popular belief, supported by much technical biblical scholarship, that biblical morality is the parade example of a divine-command theory of ethics. . . . The Bible thus comes down very clearly on one side of the [question debated in the Plato’s Euthyphro]: what is good is so because God commands it. . . . One aim of this book is to contest this assumption.”

[Barton sets forth] seven ways in which the Hebrew Bible attests to an idea of a moral order that is distinct from positive legislation from the Deity, even if that legislation aligns with the moral order in some instances. . . . He acknowledges that the popular idea which he is combating—that the Hebrew Bible simply demands adherence to divine commands, and that these commands are often irrational—is present in a number of biblical texts. Chapter 5 [of the book] takes up these examples, and seeks to argue that, while they are certainly there, they are not as thoroughly positivistic or irrational as is often assumed.

[T]he book as a whole is a very impressive work of scholarship that takes aim at a widely held and overly simplistic view of ancient Israelite ethics as obedience to divine commands. . . . Perhaps most praiseworthy is the fact that running through it is an effort to combat characterizations of ancient Israelite ethics that have been used as fodder for anti-Semitism. This is an absolutely essential component of any treatment of thought in the Hebrew Bible, and especially, I would argue, for those of us who teach in divinity schools.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.