While eclipses may not be mentioned explicitly in the Hebrew Bible, Frederick Baltz suggests there might be an oblique, and perhaps unwitting, reference to one in the story of King Hezekiah, a heroic figure who saved his people from the Assyrian onslaught and led them away from idolatry. The books of Kings, Isaiah, and Chronicles all tell of Hezekiah’s illness and miraculous recovery:

The biblical account relates that Isaiah the prophet was sent to Hezekiah to inform him that he would die from his illness. Hezekiah prayed for healing, and Isaiah had not yet left the palace when he was sent back to the king with a different message: the Lord would heal him and give him another fifteen years of life. A sign was to confirm the healing. A shadow could move forward or backward on an outdoor stairway. Hezekiah chose for the shadow to move backward, [and so it did]. (2 Kings 20:10).

On March 5, 702 BCE, the sixteenth year before Hezekiah’s death, a prominent solar eclipse appeared over the Middle East. Its path crossed the Arabian Peninsula, and the obscuration of the sun over Israel was more than 60 percent.

If a stairway had been engulfed in darkness and then restored to daylight, the shadow would have appeared to retreat. A shadow wave, produced by an eclipse, may also have given the appearance of a shadow retreating. If you are in the path of the eclipse on August 21, you, too, may be able to see this rare biblical sign.

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.