Until recently, academic scholars have followed the opinion of talmudic sages in reading biblical references to honey as referring not to bees’ honey but to date syrup. Recent discoveries—some of which are now on display at the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv—have led them to revise this understanding, as Bible History Daily reports:

Of the 55 times that honey appears in the Hebrew Bible, only twice does it specify bees’ honey (Judges 14:8–9 and 1 Samuel 14:27)—both of which refer to wild bees. Scholars used to believe that the other mentions of honey always referred to fruit honey, which was the common sweetener in ancient times. . . .

However, recent archaeological discoveries show that the ancient Israelites did indeed keep bees. This, coupled with new readings of these Biblical passages, has caused many to reevaluate the accepted interpretation. It seems that some of the 53 appearances of honey in the Hebrew Bible once thought to mean fruit honey actually mean bees’ honey.

Tel Reḥov, a site in the northern Jordan Valley, . . . has yielded discoveries from the 10th and 9th centuries BCE, the time alluded to in the Bible as that of David, Solomon, and the first kings of the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Among these discoveries was an apiary—the only [apiary] ever discovered in an archaeological excavation—with remains of bees imported from Anatolia inside the clay hives.

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.