Tomorrow, the weekly Torah reading is focused on the story of Abraham. This reading contains a strange episode in which the biblical patriarch tells the Egyptians that Sarah is not his wife but his sister, after which Pharaoh has her brought to her palace. A similar episode happens in next week’s parashah, and yet again with Abraham’s son Isaac later on. Medieval commentators like Moses Nahmanides and David Kimhi criticized Abraham for his behavior, whereas other rabbinic sources appear to defend him.

Lawrence Schiffman describes the discomfort Second Temple-era Jewish writers felt about this episode, and the ways they tried to interpret it away:

The Genesis Apocryphon, [found among the Dead Sea Scrolls], dealt with this issue by its explanation that Abraham received divine revelation through a dream that essentially commanded him to follow this disingenuous approach. The book of Jubilees, [included in the Scripture of Ethiopian Jews and many Christians], on the other hand, chose to narrate the story fully only once and to abbreviate and/or to skip it in the second and third accounts. Josephus essentially stayed close to the Bible in the first episode, skipped the lying in the second, and essentially omitted the third occurrence.

Clearly, the author of Jubilees also took this approach out of discomfort with Abraham’s behavior. Similar feelings no doubt motivated Josephus.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.