In his inaugural speech on Wednesday, the new president alluded to the book of Exodus, and quoted a verse from Psalm 30: “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” This psalm—read in full in the traditional Jewish morning liturgy—is one Joe Biden has cited in other speeches as well. Tevi Troy and Stuart Halpern commend such use of the Bible as “part of a welcome, long-running trend toward more religious language in public life”:

[All told], 27 out of 45 presidents have cited the Bible in their inaugural addresses, making a total of 64 biblical references. Forty-four came from the Hebrew Bible and twenty from the New Testament. . . . The tradition of biblical allusions in inaugural addresses dates back to the beginning of the republic, when George Washington made an argument for them. In his first inaugural, Washington referred to Psalm 82. “It would be peculiarly improper,” he said, “to omit in this official act my fervent supplications to that Almighty Being who rules over the universe, who presides in the councils of the nations.”

Although the U.S. has grown increasingly secular and religiously diverse, biblical references were less common earlier in American history. . . . The increased tone of religiosity may reflect a greater comfort with religion in the public square, as Americans have become less concerned over the prospect of state-established religions the likes of which the Pilgrims and other migrants fled.

In citing the Bible in his inaugural address, President Biden has continued a venerable and valuable presidential tradition, one that shaped the country’s cultural vocabulary for more than two centuries. Even in an ever more secular world, there’s still value in referencing such timeless words.

Over the weekend, Elliot Kaufman of the Wall Street Journal reported about a formal letter, signed by five prominent sheikhs from the Judean city of Hebron and addressed to the Israeli economy minister Nir Barkat. The letter proposed that Hebron, one of the West Bank’s largest municipalities, “break out of the Palestinian Authority (PA), establish an emirate of its own, and join the Abraham Accords.” Kaufman spoke with some of the sheikhs, who emphasized their resentment at the PA’s corruption and fecklessness, and their desire for peace.

Responding to these unusual events, Seth Mandel looks back to what he describes as his favorite “‘what if’ moment in the Arab-Israeli conflict,” involving

a plan for the West Bank drawn up in the late 1980s by the former Israeli foreign minister Moshe Arens. The point of the plan was to prioritize local Arab Palestinian leadership instead of facilitating the PLO’s top-down governing approach, which was corrupt and authoritarian from the start.

Mandel, however, is somewhat skeptical about whether such a plan can work in 2025:

Yet, . . . while it is almost surely a better idea than anything the PA has or will come up with, the primary obstacle is not the quality of the plan but its feasibility under current conditions. The Arens plan was a “what if” moment because there was no clear-cut governing structure in the West Bank and the PLO, then led by Yasir Arafat, was trying to direct the Palestinian side of the peace process from abroad (Lebanon, then Tunisia). In fact, Arens’s idea was to hold local elections among the Palestinians in order to build a certain amount of democratic legitimacy into the foundation of the Arab side of the conflict.

Whatever becomes of the Hebron proposal, there is an important lesson for Gaza from the ignored Arens plan: it was a mistake, as one sheikh told Kaufman, to bring in Palestinian leaders who had spent decades in Tunisia and Lebanon to rule the West Bank after Oslo. Likewise, Gaza will do best if led by the people there on the ground, not new leaders imported from the West Bank, Qatar, or anywhere else.