In the Hebrew Bible, God curses Cain after he kills Abel, and tells the Israelites that terrible curses will befall them if they do not follow His laws. Humans also place curses on themselves or others. Scholars of the ancient Middle East have come to understand such curses, which were no less common among the Israelites’ neighbors, as an important part of ancient legal systems, and also as a form of prayer, as Anne Marie Kitz writes (free registration required):

Oaths required petitioners to call upon the deities to punish them should they lie or be unfaithful to the terms of a contract. Such conditional self-curses were not taken lightly. This was especially the case because people were typically made to swear on a weapon that purportedly belonged to the deity. Should an individual violate the oath, the weapon would be used to execute the penalty, usually death, as an expression of divine judgment. . . .

Curses and blessings [are] nothing other than prayers uttered by mortals to the divinities. They are neither commands nor demands, and there is certainly no assumption on the part of the speaker that either will have instantaneous effect. In the end they are little more than strongly articulated wishes. Deities, on the other hand, articulated curses differently. As supreme beings they did not need to invoke a higher power to enact a malediction. Their curses were commands that mortals believed had immediate consequences.

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.