An excavation in Israel has uncovered a pottery fragment bearing one of the oldest known Hebrew inscriptions. One, containing only the words “Ishbaal son of Beda,” suggests something notable about religion in the time of King David, as Hershel Shanks writes:

The name Ishbaal or, more commonly, Eshbaal, is well known from the Bible. It means “man of Baal” [a storm god worshipped in the area]. The name Beda appears for the first time in this inscription.

Dating to about 1000 BCE, the inscription reads from right to left and consists of whole and partially preserved letters incised into the clay pot before firing. . . . In the Bible, various Baal names appear of people who lived in King David’s time or earlier: Jerubbaal (Judges 6:32), Meribbaal (1 Chronicles 9:40), etc. But the Bible mentions no Baal names after this—neither Baal nor Eshbaal. Baal names simply do not appear in the Bible after David’s time.

The archaeological situation is a bit, but not completely, different. We have more than a thousand seals and seal impressions (bullae) and hundreds of inscriptions from Israel and Judah from the post-David period (the 9th to 6th centuries BCE). The name Eshbaal is not to be found among these names. The situation with the name Baal is slightly different; it does occasionally appear in [northern] Israel—and of course in Philistia, Ammon, and Phoenicia. But not in Judah.

It seems that Baal and Eshbaal were banned in David’s kingdom. One reason may have been that, at least officially, Judah was monotheistic.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.