printTHE NEW COLUMN IS “Busting Statist and Scripture-Based Fibs for a Borderless America,” now on the Unz Review. Or, WND.com. An excerpt:
When preaching immigration leniency and lawlessness in America, immigration bleeding hearts should lay off the Hebrew Bible, Leviticus 19:34, in particular.
The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as the home-born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.
One Rev. Ryan M. Eller, on Tucker Carlson’s show, gave a dissembling and misleading reading of the tract, in mitigation of the immigration status of Kate Steinle’s killer.
The reverend glibly translated the word “sojourn” to mean citizens living among you, the latter having created, presumably, an immutable reality on the ground.
In appropriating the Hebrew text to his humanistic ends, Rev. Eller left-out that Leviticus 19:34 is a reference to strangers who are temporarily in your country.
A “sojourn” is a “temporary stay; a brief period of residence.” The Hebrew word “ger” means alien, stranger, not citizen.
The Hebrew Testament is not the New Testament. It’s not the text you want to use in spreading the Christian, “We Are The World” dogma. For it revolves around distinguishing the Jews and their homeland from the nations of the world.
What is commonly called the Old Testament, I read in the Hebrew, free of the bowdlerization that often accompanies the Christianized translations. As I read it, our Bible was not meant to meld the Jewish People with the world.
The opposite is true.
While it evinces ground-breaking exploration of natural, universal justice—and a lot of not-so-merciful meting out of “justice”—the Hebrew Bible is something of a parochial document.
Undergirding what Christians call the Old Testament is a message of particularism, not universalism. The ancient Hebrews would have been appalled by many a modern, left-liberal Jew who has betrayed the nationalistic message underlying the 24 best-written books ever.
Mercy and justice are all Leviticus 19:34 exhorts. The tract reminds the Hebrews only that they suffered in Egypt as slaves to the Egyptians. Consequently, the people of Israel are to be kind to the strangers living temporarily among them.
Were the biblical author to have added a parenthetic statement, it would’ve been: “Fear not, the stranger will soon be on his way, or chased away.”
The Christian Saint Joan of Arc was certainly steeped in a sturdy nativism. …
… READ THE REST. “Busting Statist and Scripture-Based Fibs for a Borderless America” is now on the Unz Review. Or WND.com.