Seeking a way out of futile debates over the discrepancies between the conclusions of modern science and the Bible, Jeremy England suggests a novel approach that begins with the way the biblical account of creation understands language:

What does it mean to “create the heavens and the earth”? . . . . From [the first chapter of Genesis] we can already infer that creation ([denoted] in Hebrew [by the verb] bara) is first and foremost about giving names to things that are distinguished by recognizable properties. A few chapters later, this inference is resoundingly confirmed: “When God created man, He made him in the likeness of God; male and female He created them. And on the day of their creation (hibaram), He blessed them and called them Man” (Genesis 5:1–2). As before, naming goes hand in hand with creation, this time at the moment when the clearest and brightest distinction is being drawn between different kinds of humans. Another riff on the same idea plays out in the Garden of Eden, when the first human being is tasked by God with naming all the animals in the world while in search of an “opposite companion” (Genesis 2:18).

This role granted to people in giving names to living creatures is worth dwelling on, for it reverberates backward to the very first moments described in Genesis. It is by having the capacity for language that man is able to join God as a fully fledged participant in the work of creation—for it is through language that man develops the taxonomy that allows the naming of diverse phenomena. It should come as no surprise, then, that the first recorded action taken by the Creator at the beginning of the world is to speak: “God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light” (Genesis 1:3). We have heard this phrase so many times that by the time we are old enough to ponder it, we easily miss its simplest point: the light by which we see the world comes from the way we talk about it.

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.