Oaths and Curses in the Ancient Near East

Dec. 11 2014

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.

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More about: Ancient Israel, Ancient Near East, Archaeology, Bible, Paganism

The Democratic Party Is Losing Its Grip on Jews

Since the 1930s, Jews have been one of America’s most solidly Democratic ethnic groups. Although, true to form, a majority again voted for Kamala Harris, something clearly has shifted. John Podhoretz writes:

Over the course of the past thirteen months, Jews in America have been harassed, threatened, seen their ancestral homeland derided as a settler-colonial genocidal state. They have seen Jewish kids mistreated on college campuses. And they have seen the Biden administration kowtow to Muslim populations hostile to Jews and the Jewish state in Michigan. They have heard the criticisms of Israel’s efforts to defend itself, and have noted the silence from the administration when it came to anti-Semitic assaults and the refusal of college presidents to condemn the treatment of Jews and Jewish topics under their ambit.

And Jews have acted.

The initial evidence from last night’s election is that there has been a significant shift in the Jewish vote from previous elections, a delta of anywhere from 10 to 40 percent overall.

Read more at Commentary

More about: 2024 Election, American Jewry, Anti-Semitism, Democrats, U.S. Politics