University departments of philosophy often exclude the Hebrew Bible from discussions of the history of ethics, treating it as belonging solely to the domain of religious or ancient Near Eastern studies. In his Ethics in Ancient Israel, John Barton, an Anglican priest and Oxford professor, seeks to return the Tanakh to its rightful place as a work of ethical profundity. James Nati sums up his approach:

Barton is particularly motivated by the desire to push back against the idea that the Hebrew Bible simply demands obedience to the deity. [As he puts it:] “There is an almost universal popular belief, supported by much technical biblical scholarship, that biblical morality is the parade example of a divine-command theory of ethics. . . . The Bible thus comes down very clearly on one side of the [question debated in the Plato’s Euthyphro]: what is good is so because God commands it. . . . One aim of this book is to contest this assumption.”

[Barton sets forth] seven ways in which the Hebrew Bible attests to an idea of a moral order that is distinct from positive legislation from the Deity, even if that legislation aligns with the moral order in some instances. . . . He acknowledges that the popular idea which he is combating—that the Hebrew Bible simply demands adherence to divine commands, and that these commands are often irrational—is present in a number of biblical texts. Chapter 5 [of the book] takes up these examples, and seeks to argue that, while they are certainly there, they are not as thoroughly positivistic or irrational as is often assumed.

[T]he book as a whole is a very impressive work of scholarship that takes aim at a widely held and overly simplistic view of ancient Israelite ethics as obedience to divine commands. . . . Perhaps most praiseworthy is the fact that running through it is an effort to combat characterizations of ancient Israelite ethics that have been used as fodder for anti-Semitism. This is an absolutely essential component of any treatment of thought in the Hebrew Bible, and especially, I would argue, for those of us who teach in divinity schools.

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.