When we read the story of Amalek's attack on the newly liberated Israelites wandering in the wilderness,

traditional readers of the Hebrew Bible have been reading chapter after chapter of God's

miraculous interventions in nature, about God's redemptive and covenant

to love for the Jewish people, and about the gradually unspooling moral vision that the Bible

has been setting forth from the earliest chapters of Genesis. By the time we reached chapter 17

of Exodus, where this paradigmatic attack of the strong against the weak, occurs,

were meant to be shocked and horrified. But that shock and that horror is in a way a sign that

the moral instruction that's been carried by the text up until that point has been successful.

We're only horrified by this kind of violence if we've come to see it

as a departure from a better way, from God's way, from a moral orientation towards our neighbors

and towards ourselves that God discloses in the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

What if we zoom out of Exodus 17 and zoom back in from a different

point of view? Without the benefit of Genesis and the early chapters of Exodus, but instead,

from the perspective of nature itself, what would we see then? We would see that Amalek's bloodlust,

cruelty, the exploitation of the weak, and the exaltation of the strong,

these are not unnatural, but in fact the way of uninstructed nature itself. It's not the Amalekites

who are shocking for their sacralized violence. It's the Israelites who are shocking for their

ability to quiet that darker natural impulse and live out a very different moral code.

Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver. That is the thought that frames an essay called Civilization is from the Jews, published on May 25, 2024 by Andrew Doran, a senior research fellow with the Philos Project,

formerly a member of the policy planning staff at the U.S. State Department.

Andrew's our guest today, and we discuss his contention that what we think of as civilization

came into the drama of human history in no other way than with God's covenantal promise with Abraham

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