What is antisemitism and what is the true spiritual origin of anti-Semitism? - Podcast Episode 181

The Biblical Roots of Anti-Semitism

Welcome to the Got Questions podcast. Today, Jeff, who is the administrator of BibleRef .com, and Kevin, the managing editor of Got Questions Ministries, are joining me. We're gonna be kind of continuing a conversation we've been having about Israel, stirred up by the conflict between Israel and Hamas and in Gaza, but we'd encourage you to watch the previous two episodes on this topic, because again, a lot of what we're gonna discuss today is built on that.

But today's episode, we specifically wanna talk about anti-Semitism. There's a lot of confusion about what exactly it is. So we're gonna be talking about examples of anti-Semitism in the Bible and history and really try to pinpoint what is the ultimate cause of all this, because it's, in a sense, permeated world culture for thousands of years.

This is not something that's new. And so there's these different spiritual dimension that we wanna hone in on. But the word anti-Semitism itself, the word Semitism, refers to one of the three sons of Noah, Shem.

So all the descendants of Shem are known as Semites. And it's interesting. Today, the term Semitism or anti-Semitism is used almost to refer exclusively to Jews, to ethnic Israelis, Hebrews. But in reality, the descendants of Shem would include most of people in the Middle East.

So most of the people referred to as Arabs today are also Semites. But anti-Semitism today, the term, again, is used almost exclusively to refer to hatred, dislike, discrimination against Jews. That's what we're covering today.

Anti-Semitism in Scripture and Ancient History

But before we jump in any further, I just wanted Kevin to just give a chance of examples of anti-Semitism in the Bible, just to reinforce the fact that this is not something new. What we're seeing today is not something that is foreign to Bibles, not something that God wasn't aware of, that the people of Israel, the Jews, have only recently experienced.

This has been something going on for a long time, all the way back to recorded in Scripture. So Kevin, start us off here. What are some examples of anti-Semitism that you see in Scripture?

Yeah, Shay, you're right that it goes all the way back, as soon as God started choosing his people, really, and choosing the family of Abraham, we start seeing conflict, start seeing hatred. You can go all the way back to Isaac and Ishmael, the conflict that was there, and then Isaac's sons, Jacob and Esau, there was conflict there, and in fact, a murderous hatred that Esau had for Jacob, at least for a while.

But then as God started creating his new nation, this chosen people of the Jews, in that time of slavery in Egypt, God brought them out of Egypt, brought them out of slavery under Moses, and they start heading towards the promised land.

And along the way, they run into all kinds of resistance from other peoples. And so they come up to the Edomites in Numbers chapter 20, and they say, can we pass through your land? We will pay for everything that we consume there.

All we want is access along this road. And the Edomites say, no, can't do it, resistant to this. In the very next chapter, Numbers 21, they come to the land of the Amorites, and the Amorites say the same thing.

No, you cannot pass through our land, even we're not gonna sell you anything, we're not gonna help you in any way. In fact, the Amorites then send out an army, and they do battle against the Israelites, and God grants the Israelites victory in that.

But then, all through history then, as Israel was in the promised land, we see continued attempts to wipe out the people of Israel. One was under Zerubbabel's enemies, as Zerubbabel is rebuilding the temple of Jerusalem after the return from the Babylonian captivity.

Zerubbabel's enemies send a letter to the king of Persia, saying, hey, these people are rebellious, and they're trying to establish a nation apart from Persia, and you need to do something about it. So they tried to get the king of Persia to quash this new nation that was being reestablished.

A big one was Haman, though, in the nation of Persia. Haman, in Esther chapter three, goes to King Xerxes, and he says, there is a, this is Esther three, verses eight and nine, there is a certain people dispersed among the peoples in all the provinces of your kingdom who keep themselves separate.

Their customs are different from all the other people. They do not obey the king's laws. It is not the king's best interest to tolerate them. And if it pleases the king, let him issue an edict to destroy them.

And so that's exactly what the king does. He issues this edict that they can kill and annihilate every Jew in the entire kingdom, which would have, in fact, been every Jew in the world. This was genocide that was on Haman's mind.

The reasons that he gives, we still see today among anti-Semites. He says they keep themselves separate, so they're not like us. They don't intermarry, they don't eat our food, they don't wear our clothes, they don't trim their beards.

Everything is different about them and it's offensive to us. And then they also say they have different customs. And then he says they don't obey the king's laws. And this was really stretching it. Haman had one example of one Jew who did not follow the king's edict, that was Mordecai.

He refused to bow the knee to Haman. And so Haman takes that one example and just applies it to all the Jews and say, these are rebellious people and they all need to be wiped out. And then when we get to the New Testament, we see that when Paul and Silas go to Philippi and the gospel starts taking root there and people start getting saved, hearts start being changed, the people of Philippi arrest Paul and Silas.

In Acts chapter 16, they dragged them before the marketplace to face the authorities. They brought them before the magistrates and they said, these men are Jews and are throwing our city into an uproar by advocating customs unlawful for us Romans to accept or practice.

So again, we have the excuse of, they've got these strange customs, they're offensive to us. The New American Standard Version actually puts it like this. These men, Jews as they are, are causing trouble.

The antisemitism is just dripping in this accusation here in these words. It's these, they are anti-Roman, they're keeping anti-Roman customs, they are promoting anti-Romanness, even though Paul and Silas were themselves Roman citizens, didn't stop the accusations.

So through biblical history, we've seen many attempts to annihilate Israel from the Assyrians under Sennacherib, the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar, the Persians under Xerxes, the Greeks under Antiochus IV, that was an intertestamental period, and then the Romans under Titus in AD 70.

Over and over, people have tried to wipe out the Jewish people, antisemitism in the extreme, and it's not a new thing.

Separation, Scapegoating, and the Long History of Persecution

No, it's not only not a new thing, but the themes that you're talking about have been very consistent. Kevin, I appreciate that you brought up the idea of separation. It seems like if we were to point to one thing from a secular perspective that seems to drive antisemitism, obviously not as an excuse, but sort of a pointer.

Separation is one of them. The Jewish people have always been what God has called them to be when they're at their best, which is a separated people. A lot of the things that God asked them to do in Old Testament law, he asked them to do explicitly because he wanted to differentiate them from other people in the world.

And in our world, we can claim that it's not this way in the modern world, but it is. Separation and differentness makes it easier for people to justify prejudice and fear and hatred and so on and so forth.

So again, just to clarify, that's not to say that Jewish separation is somehow a driver or it's the cause of antisemitism or it's an excuse for antisemitism, but you can see it as being a factor in why people sometimes respond the way they do.

And after the biblical period, you see that multiplied. Another thing that I think comes in that's good to look at from a historical perspective is how discrimination can become association. Some of the themes that we see throughout history and even to today are sort of self-fulfilling prophecies.

A very common theme that we see back in ancient history is Jewish people being barred from doing most professions, a lot of professions. And the only things that they're allowed to do in some circumstances are things that society thinks of as distasteful.

Well, you do that for a generation and then you start to associate Jewish people with that distasteful thing. And money lending would be an example. There were times in Christian medieval Europe where lending money at interest was not something that Christians were supposed to do.

Jewish people were allowed to lend money at interest to non-Jews, and they were also told you can't do things like have this business or that business or that business. So then you wind up with a lot of the people who are handling money are Jewish people, not because they're greedy, but because you won't let them do anything else.

And it just turns into this self-fulfilling prophecy that rolls around. But we've seen this persecution happen for a long time. Probably the modern sense of antisemitism that we see now, obviously there's been bits and pieces of that throughout all of history.

But right around the time of the first crusade was one of the first times that we saw something that sort of looked like the modern-ish version of antisemitism. And a lot of that had to do with what was called the People's Crusade.

That was one of the individual groups that was participating. And they sort of had an attitude that said, why would we go and fight God's enemies all the way in Jerusalem when we could fight God's enemies on the way or fight them here?

Now, that's not something that was sanctioned even by the Roman Catholic Church, but it was sort of a popular view. So in about 1096, you had a lot of that style of persecution happening. In the late 1200s, you had Jewish people expelled from England.

There's an actual decree that says they all have to leave, they all have to get out. In the mid 1300s, you had the Black Death that went around. And here again is where understanding the factors behind something does not mean that we are excusing it.

But again, Jewish people are following different practices of hygiene. They live separately from other people. And that means that a lot of Jewish communities didn't get hit as hard by the Black Death.

So what does that do? That makes people say, oh, well, they're separate, they're different. They're not suffering as much as we think they should, therefore, maybe it's their fault or they're causing it.

That's one of the places that we get the racist anti-Semitic meme of them poisoning wells, for example, or kidnapping children to use in sacrifice. In the late 1390s, you have a lot of forced conversions in Spain.

In 1492, you have the Spanish expulsion where they did the same thing England did just on a larger scale and said, they all have to leave. We're gonna throw all the Jews out of our country. And estimates are argued about, but maybe there's 100 ,000 people in that phase.

You get into the time of the Reformation. You have major figures in Western history who have a really complicated relationship with that. Martin Luther being one of them. Unfortunately, a lot of things that Martin Luther wrote centuries later turned into major cornerstones of propaganda used against Jewish persons.

Now, when you read a lot of what he had to say in context, he's primarily focused, this is Luther, he's primarily focused on the religious and the spiritual aspects, but you can't get away from the cultural and the personal bitterness that sort of develops during his life.

We even see that with writers in the 1600s. Shakespeare has a character in The Merchant of Venice called Shylock. And there again, there's controversy. How much of that was meant to be negative? Is he supposed to be a purely evil character?

Is he supposed to be tragic? Well, one way or the other, that got used as a propaganda piece. 1600s, 1700s, even through the Enlightenment, we see phases where people are just constantly turning on the Jewish people and blaming them for problems and attacking them and destroying them and forcing them out.

In the 1800s, you get a series of pogroms in Russia. And those are basically mob violence. Most of that was not really controlled by the government, but it was the same thing. As a cultural point for people in my generation, if you remember the animated movie, An American Tale about the little mouse whose family comes here, that's in the context of some of these pogroms where people are fleeing to try to escape.

You have writing from men like Marx and Wagner who are espousing these anti-Semitic ideas. Then in 1903, you get this book that gets published and it's called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And it is blatant falsehood and a complete ripoff.

And it basically poses that there is this international Jewish conspiracy to control the world. And there's a lot of similarities between the protocols and anti-Semitism as compared to something like, say, the modern hyper anti-vaccination movement in that there was one study published that made some controversial claims that was quickly debunked and then retracted, and yet the damage was done.

And then people just ran with it and used that as the basis of a conspiracy theory that's still causing problems today. Well, Protocols of the Elders of Zion was the same thing. It was maybe 18 years after it was published that scholars were coming out and saying, there's absolutely nothing in this that's even remotely true.

But it helped to feed a lot of what happened in the 1930s and 40s. Now we're getting into Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. In terms of like an overt sense, that's probably about as overtly, directly anti-Semitic as we've ever seen in human history.

Not that things before hadn't been bad, but that was probably the largest scale that we saw with that. So we have the Holocaust, we have everything that happens with that. Then we see this shift that happens, and that is really what happens after World War II.

After World War II, when Israel and the Arab nations around them are dissenting over the land that Israel is occupying now, that's where you sort of see this shift. And in broad strokes, the focus of anti-Semitism has sort of gone from this general global conspiracy of Jewish people behind the scenes to now it's mostly focused in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

You could sort of think of it as a proxy war. Like that's the modern pop culture thing that basically represents a lot of the anti-Semitism. That doesn't mean that just because somebody criticizes Israel that they're anti-Semitic, but that has become sort of the battlefield where all that has happened.

And the shift has also happened in the Arab and Islamic world, where if you look at their history, they also, during this time, they were also participating in expulsions and pogroms and genocides against Israeli people.

But by and large, if you read their writings, their attitude towards Jewish people was more one of contempt. You know, they didn't see Jewish people really as a threat. They just sort of sneered at them.

But then after the war, now it has sort of shifted into something that's, for lack of better term, more Hitler-esque. It's more of this deep-seated, hateful, genocidal attitude towards the people. And that expresses itself in a lot of different ways today, but it's been oddly consistent for a thousand years, at least, in how people handled the Jewish nation.

Theories About Anti-Semitism and Why They Fall Short

Well said, Jeff. Great job covering, I don't know, nearly 2 ,000 years of human history in less than 10 minutes. So good on you for that one.

I'm sure our internet commenters will compliment me on how perfectly I nailed all that.

I'm sure they won't. But great thoughts in just kind of giving a picture of not only did this happen in the Bible, as Kevin outlined, and we'll talk about in the end times here in a minute, but also throughout human history, this has been something that's constant.

I thought you can read this more in depth in the article on Got Questions about what is the cause of all the anti-Semitism in the world. But I thought if we just went through the different theories they are, and you'll see each of these theories and the things that we've already talked about.

So there's maybe six primary theories. There's the racial theory, the Jews are hated because they are an inferior race. There's the economic theory, the Jews are hated because they possess too much wealth and power.

There's the outsider's theory, the Jews are hated because they are different from everyone else. The scapegoat theory, that the Jews are hated because they are the cause of all the world's problems. The deicide or the killing of God theory, which is the Jews are hated because they killed Jesus Christ.

And then the chosen people theory, the Jews are hated because they arrogantly declared themselves to be the chosen ones of God. I think you've heard almost all of these mentioned just in the things we've already talked about.

But none of these theories hold any weight, I mean, biblically speaking for sure, other than the fact that yes, God did and still does have a plan for the nation of Israel. And perhaps that makes some people spiritually jealous.

But ultimately, we don't think any of these actually truly get to the heart of the matter. And we'll jump straight into that. But first I want Kevin to talk just briefly about what the Bible says about anti-Semitism, persecution of Jews in the end times, because I think that'll segue really well into what we conclude this episode with.

So please, Kevin, please go ahead.

Anti-Semitism in the Tribulation and the Return of Christ

Yes, as you said, God still has a plan for Israel. And we see that in the all through scripture, book of Daniel, book of Revelation, and really all of the prophets of the Old Testament mentioned this as well, that there's coming a time of purification and purging for Israel, time of Jacob's trouble.

And we call this the tribulation period. That what starts the tribulation period is actually the signing of a peace treaty between the Antichrist or the beast and the nation of Israel. We read about that in Daniel chapter nine.

And then halfway through that covenant period, three and a half years into the tribulation, the Antichrist breaks the covenant. And then he commits an atrocity in the temple, the rebuilt temple. And he will set up some type of blasphemous image.

He'll do something that is desecrating to the temple's holiness. And he shows his true colors as a hater of Israel. And he sets himself up actually to be God. Second Thessalonians two and verse four says, he sits as God in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God.

He's trying to take the place of God. And he's using the Jewish temple to do that. But this Antichrist, this beast is of course, empowered by Satan. And in Revelation chapter 12, there's an allegorical representation of this whole battle, this whole fight between Satan and Israel.

Satan is pictured as a dragon, very obvious representation there. And then the dragon attacks a woman who gives birth to a son. The dragon's intention is to devour the son, to destroy the son as soon as he's born.

So we would say that we interpret this as the son being the Messiah, the Christ, our Lord Jesus. And then the woman who gives birth to him is Israel. And so the dragon is thwarted in his attempt to destroy the son.

And so he turns his wrath on the woman herself. And this is Revelation 12, verse 17. The dragon was enraged at the woman and went off to wage war against the rest of her offspring.

Couldn't get Jesus.

And so he turned his attention to the rest of her offspring, the rest of the Jews. And we see this in the tribulation period, and especially in that second half of the tribulation where the Antichrist desecrates the temple and he starts a waging war against all of the saints, including the Jewish people who are at that point turning back to God.

144 ,000 witnesses who are Jewish people sealed by God and Antichrist is hating them. And there's going to be a final battle. Antichrist gathers all of his allies there to a place called Armageddon to march on Jerusalem and destroy Jerusalem.

Well, actually the city does fall, scripture says, but there's a remnant of Jews that escapes and flees south and out into the wilderness. And the Antichrist, it looks like he pursues them to totally eradicate the Jews once and for all to do what all these other evil men through history could never do, that he thinks he's gonna do it.

And that's where the Lord returns at the second coming. He defeats the Antichrist and his forces, he saves his people, and then he sets up his kingdom. Part of that setting up of the kingdom includes a judgment of what we call the judgment of the sheep and the goats,.

Matthew chapter 25.

And in that judgment, there are three distinct people groups. There is Jesus' brothers and sisters, and then there are the sheep and the goats. So Jesus' brothers and sisters, we would interpret that as being Jesus' brothers in the flesh, the Jews.

The sheep are those who gave aid and comfort to the Jews during the tribulation period. So they bucked the Antichrist's edicts and they reached out to the Jewish people in order to help preserve them during their time of trouble.

The goats, then, are those who turned their back on the Jews during the tribulation period. They did not help Jesus' brothers and sisters, and they are judged accordingly. And so the goats, then, at this judgment in Matthew 25, are those who were anti-Semitic during the tribulation, anti-Semitic to the point of not caring if the Jews survived, just saying, basically, let them die, better them than me, some sort of attitude like that.

But they refused to help God's people during that time.

Discernment, Israel, and the Spiritual Nature of Anti-Semitism

Yeah, it's interesting, Kevin, to see that there's going to be a lot of that stuff going on in the end times. And I think, we look at those things and we think, okay, Satan going directly after the people and there's the beast and the rapture and the tribulation and those things.

But I think even today we can see some aspects of anti-Semitism that are worth looking at and understanding. And I think that when we look at those different causes of anti-Semitism, some of those, I think, are fairly labeled as truly anti-Semitic, some not necessarily.

I think it's possible to have religious objections to Israel or to Judaism as you would with any other religion and not have anything personally against those people. But it does seem like there is this common theme of this spiritual, satanic, irrational hatred for these people.

And I think you see it on both sides of that. I think in one sense you see that expressed in the way people irrationally hate Israel. I think you also see it sort of irrationally expressed in the way that anytime a person attempts to rightly criticize Israel, especially the modern nation of Israel, that Satan likes to work that up into accusations of anti-Semitism almost as a way of just distracting from or diluting the real anti-Semitism that exists out there.

Some of it people don't even realize. There's been some controversy recently over an expression of the river to the sea. And people don't realize that that has deeply anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic roots because it's suggesting that the only way for that particular region to be free or to be correct is the eradication of a certain people group from the literal river, which is the Jordan, to the literal sea, which is the Mediterranean.

I think sometimes you see it in the way that we react to things that happen. And again, it's okay for us to criticize some things that Israel do. If I say, for example, that I think Israel was too harsh in their treatment of Gaza leading up to everything that happened, that's not anti-Semitic.

It's not a criticism of the Jewish people. That's not a criticism of Israel's right to exist. It just means that, okay, I guess in my opinion, I don't think that they did things the way that they ought to do.

But then we see something like the recent bombing, supposedly, of a hospital in Gaza. There was an explosion. There were claims about how many people died and what happened. And it seemed like the general consensus right off the bat was just condemnation of Israel.

This is a war crime. This is awful. This is terrible. They deliberately dropped a bomb on a hospital. They killed all of these innocents and so on and so forth. And then as more evidence came out, it became extremely obvious that this was not Israel who did this and that it was probably a failed launch, not even by Hamas, but by some other fourth or fifth rate D-grade militant group who tried to launch a rocket and it failed.

Now, if we had looked at it with a lot of reason, you would have said, dad, that kind of makes sense. Israel's modus operandi has not been targeting hospitals on purpose. And why is the hospital still standing if the Israeli Air Force is bombing it and so on and so forth.

But the way that the world reacted in general was this immediate hateful, it's just this terrible, awful thing that Israel has done. And we see, I think, the same thing going on now is when Israel does something, anything, and this is what I mean by this has sort of become the proxy war.

There's this immediate high level criticism. We even see that at the highest levels of world government, the United Nations has criticized Israel in resolution after resolution about human rights. And they have not done that with nearly the same fervor to countries like North Korea and China and Saudi Arabia and other places that have been just stomping all over people's human rights.

But they are more than happy to drop those sorts of accusations on Israel. And obviously we can see how all of these things become very political very quickly. There's no way to talk about these things without stepping on somebody's toes in that.

And there's another place where I think Satan gets involved is instead of us confronting the idea that hey, maybe some of this hate has less to do with legitimate political concerns, and maybe some of this is really driven by something else.

There is some other active force that's making people just at the core of their being feel like they must, they have to say that anything involving Jews, anything involving Israel has to be criticized and attacked.

So I think it's good for us to try to make sure that we differentiate between those. We don't want to on one hand give in to this automatic criticism of Israel. But at the same time, we do not wanna be afraid to stand up for things that are morally correct and speak out against things that are morally incorrect when they happen.

If we as believers think that some particular thing that Israel, either as a nation or a people is doing is not correct, it is okay for us to say, no, I don't think that's the right step. And to say that's not the same thing as being anti-Semitic.

What's anti-Semitic is the people who are saying that Israel has no right to exist, or that they're somehow secretly controlling the world, or that everything they do is evil. They should be easy to tell apart, but sometimes they're not.

And a lot of that's because of the way propaganda media, social media, handles this issue in the world today.

Satanic Hatred of Israel and the Limits of Political Critique

Again, well said, Jeff. And we could talk about those who deny the Holocaust in an attempt to take away the reasoning a lot of people give for the nation of Israel even being established to begin with.

We can look at the fact that if any other nation was attacked the way that Israel was, everyone else in the world would come alongside us. You have the right to defend yourself and to destroy this organization that did this, and yet Israel is immediately criticized for wanting to basically do anything in response to it.

They're basically, you just need to take it because it's your fault. What other nation in the world has ever been attacked like that and required by the rest of the world to not react? It's ridiculous, it's absurd, and yet this is what happens to Israel over and over again.

Ultimately, I think what Kevin pointed out in talking about Revelation chapter 12, ultimately, I think our main point here today is that there's no other adequate explanation for what we've seen in the Bible and in world history, what we're seeing today, all the anti-Semitism, all the hatred towards Jews, towards the nation of Israel, other than it being a spiritual issue.

And ultimately, Satan wants to destroy Israel. He wants to annihilate the Jews. He's made it clear that is his plan multiple, multiple times. It's still his plan today. And Satan is influencing people and nations with this irrational, absurd hatred of Jews, accusing them of things of which they're entirely innocent, questioning every decision they make, trying to the worst possible light on all of these things, because ultimately, Satan wants to destroy the nation of Israel.

And ultimately, we here at GotQuestions believe that there's no other explanation for the anti-Semitism, at least the strength of it, than there being a spiritual component, than satanic, demonic influence, which is driving a lot of this, because what else could lead people to such a passionate hatred of a people of a nation who otherwise are peaceful, otherwise are contributing to the world in so many ways, in so many positive ways, are having such a good impact, who are at peace other than when they are attacked or severely threatened.

And it's, I keep watching this, I watch the news, I see people celebrating with babies being murdered. It's like, I, in my heart and my mind and my study of scripture and everything I know about theology, I cannot think of anything that would cause people to celebrate such horrific murders other than there being a satanic component to it.

So ultimately, anti-Semitism is satanic. And like Jeff was saying, anti-Semitism is not criticizing Israel. It's not criticizing some of the decisions we've made. In the last podcast episode we published, some people were criticizing us for being a little too harsh on Israel, been accusing us of being anti-Semitic.

But again, if you read through the Old Testament, God criticizes the nation of Israel for their behavior countless times. So criticizing the specific decisions, actions Israel has taken is not anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitism is believing the Jews as a people do not have a right to exist or the nation of Israel should be destroyed or the things we're seeing in Hamas and Hezbollah and the other Arabic neighbors who want to destroy Israel.

And if they had the ability to, if Israel were not the most powerful military in that region, it would have happened a long time ago. So pray for the peace of Israel, but ultimately realize this is not a matter of flesh and blood, weapons of warfare.

This is a spiritual issue. And the primary reason for the hatred we've seen of Jews, of Israel throughout, what is it now? 3 ,400 years of its history is ultimately a spiritual issue driven by Satan with the desire to annihilate the people of God and to thereby thwart God's plan.

But ultimately, no, that won't happen. God will preserve his people as he always has, but it's important for us to remember what is the ultimate cause of that because that enables us to engage in warfare on the right level, realizing what the ultimate source of this anti-Semitism we've seen throughout world history truly is.

I just think that it's difficult as a person who likes to think in terms of reason to wrap your mind around some of these ideas, even when it comes to the modern nation of Israel. I look at that nation and I see that they have, there is Arabic representation in the Israeli government and you don't see anything remotely parallel to that in the wider Arabic world extended towards Jewish persons.

Just as an example, the fact that there are so many people, even the history that we talked about of the region. I saw recently an old clip, I think it was Golda Meir who was discussing how when she was younger, she was an early prime minister of Israel, that Palestinian was a regional term and it referred to Jewish persons and Arab persons.

And that obviously is not to dismiss the plight of what people are going through, but again, it's a way of saying you just, you see that there's, you wanna choose my words carefully, you see this very interesting perspective that's hard to rationally justify for what's happening in this particular conflict in general and against Israel at all.

And I am not the type of person who jumps immediately to hyper-spiritualized explanations, but I know that Satan has influence, he has the ability to work on people and to do things to people. And I think this is one of those where he's working hard to make people hate the Jews for no better reason than he hates the Jews.

During our discussion, I just started thinking about Fiddler on the Roof of all things, the musical, and how at the end of that musical, as the Jews are having to relocate again, Tevye, who has been having a conversation with God through the whole play, he stops, he looks up and he says, I know, I know, we are your chosen people, but for maybe just once, could you choose someone else?

And I just, I think that quote is kind of wonderfully summarizes the history of the Jewish people. They have a very privileged and special place in God's plan as God's chosen people. And yet, as we've seen through history, it's come at a very high cost to the Jewish people.

Closing Appeal: Pray for Israel and Recognize the Spiritual Battle

Amen, well said, Kevin and Jeff. Thank you for joining me for this difficult conversation. And it's painful just to watch the news and to see what's happening. And our hearts go out, again, to the Palestinian civilians in Gaza who are suffering as a result of this conflict initiated by Hamas.

And just remember, God promised Abraham, I will bless those who bless you, I will curse those who curse you. That God still has a plan for the nation of Israel. God still loves the nation of Israel and God's plan will not be thwarted, but that does not stop Satan from doing everything he can to thwart that plan.

And Satan's ultimate goal is to annihilate the Jewish race, annihilate the nation of Israel, and he will stop at nothing to accomplish that, including influencing people and nations with the irrational and absurd hatred for the Jewish people.

So hope our conversation today about what is anti-Semitism and why is there anti-Semitism has been helpful to you. Maybe reorient your thinking about what is actually going on based on what scripture says about the people of Israel and God's plan for the nation of Israel.

So got questions? The Bible has answers and we'll help you find them.