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Were the Biblical Prophets Antisemitic?

Were the Biblical Prophets Antisemitic?

Last updated on: October 7, 2026 at 7:47 pm by Stuart Delony

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Were the Biblical Prophets Antisemitic? 2026-10-07T19:47:09-04:00 Stuart Delony

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An ancient scroll labeled “AMOS” sits in a gray airport customs bin with a red “HOLD” tag, while a nearby folder labeled “BIBLICAL PROMISES” is stamped “APPROVED.”

DALL-E

Apparently I’m antisemitic.

I discovered this after making what I thought was a fairly pedestrian historical and theological observation: the modern State of Israel was established on May 14, 1948, and it is not the same political entity as the Israel described in the Bible.

I said nothing about Jewish people. I wasn’t arguing about Israeli military policy, Gaza, settlements, borders, or Benjamin Netanyahu. I distinguished a twentieth-century nation-state from ancient kingdoms that existed thousands of years earlier.

Whether someone believes the modern state also carries the covenantal identity, promises, or prophetic significance of biblical Israel is theology. You can build a theology around that continuity, but you cannot turn theology into a time machine. And yet certain forms of Christian Zionism routinely blur those categories, which creates one of the stranger problems in contemporary Christian arguments about Israel.

Which Israel Are We Talking About?

The word Israel does an absurd amount of work.

In the Bible, Israel can refer to Jacob, the people descended from him, the covenant people, or the northern kingdom that separated from Judah. Today, Israel usually means the State of Israel, sometimes its government, and occasionally Israelis collectively.

Those meanings are historically and religiously connected. Treating them as interchangeable is another matter.

Jeremiah did not have an Israeli passport. The Knesset did not exist when Amos was preaching. Netanyahu is not sitting on David’s throne.

This should be obvious until biblical prophecy enters the conversation. Then promises made to ancient Israel can suddenly become promises made directly to the modern State of Israel. “Blessing Israel” becomes a contemporary foreign-policy position. Wars and elections become pieces in an eschatological timeline. A modern nation-state acquires a biblical identity whenever that identity confers divine significance.

Fine. But the Bible has more in it than promises.

You Don’t Get the Promises Without the Prophets

This argument is conditional, and the condition is yours.

If your theology identifies the modern State of Israel closely enough with biblical Israel that ancient covenant promises transfer directly to it, then the prophetic tradition comes along too.

You don’t get Genesis 12 without Amos 5.

Actually, Amos makes the point better than I can.

The book opens with Amos announcing judgment against the surrounding nations. Damascus first. Then Gaza. Tyre. Edom. Ammon. Moab. After working his way through Israel’s neighbors, he turns to Judah.

You can almost hear everybody nodding. Yes, Amos. Finally someone is saying it. Damascus? Awful. Tyre? Obviously. Edom? Don’t get me started.

And then Amos gets to Israel.

The sermon everyone thought was about somebody else suddenly changes direction. From Amos 2 onward, Israel becomes the primary target. It’s one of the oldest bait-and-switches in religious history.

By Amos 5:21–24, God is rejecting religious festivals, assemblies, offerings, and songs because worship is continuing comfortably alongside injustice.

Isaiah 1:23 goes after corrupt rulers who associate with thieves and neglect the vulnerable.

Jeremiah 7:4 warns people against repeating “the temple of the LORD” as though possession of a sacred institution guarantees divine protection.

Then Micah 3:11 delivers a line that should make anyone nervous about attaching God too tightly to national power: leaders take bribes, priests teach for money, prophets work for profit, and everyone still reassures themselves that the Lord is among them.

The prophets spend an extraordinary amount of time scrutinizing their own rulers, institutions, religious practices, economics, violence, and treatment of vulnerable people. Chosenness does not remove accountability from the story; it intensifies it.

So if your Christian theology takes the promises addressed to biblical Israel and deposits them directly into the account of a contemporary nation-state, there’s paperwork attached. If you’re going to import the promises, you don’t get to leave the prophets at customs.

Christians Have Done This Badly Before

Christianity has a long and ugly history of taking Jewish scripture and turning it against Jewish people. For centuries, Christian anti-Judaism portrayed Jews as spiritually blind, collectively guilty for the death of Jesus, rejected by God, or displaced by the Church. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum traces the role Christian teachings played in developing and spreading anti-Jewish ideas in Europe, including supersessionism—the claim that Christianity had replaced Judaism and Jews were no longer God’s chosen people.

That history makes the direction of this argument important. I’m using the prophets to interrogate Christian theology that assigns a modern nation-state biblical status and then treats that status as protection from criticism.

There is an old Christian tradition of opening Jewish scripture and explaining to Jews why Christians understand their own covenant better than they do.

We’ve tried that before. The reviews were poor.

Antisemitism Still Means Something

None of this makes antisemitism imaginary or harmless. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition includes circumstances where Israel is targeted as a stand-in for Jews collectively. It also explicitly says that criticism of Israel comparable to criticism directed at another country cannot simply be regarded as antisemitic.

Blaming Jews collectively for decisions made by the Israeli government is antisemitic. So are conspiracies about Jews secretly controlling banks, governments, media, or world events. Treating a Jewish coworker in Ohio as personally responsible for something done by the Israeli government is prejudice.

Actual antisemitism has an enormous body count. Jewish communities have endured centuries of discriminatory laws, expulsions, conspiracy theories, forced conversions, pogroms, massacres, and genocide. Those ideas survived the Holocaust and still appear across political and religious movements.

That history deserves language capable of identifying it. Using antisemitism as a conversational eject button whenever someone disputes an Israeli policy, a political ideology, or a Christian theological claim makes the category less clear at exactly the moment clarity matters.

Sometimes the accusation gets stretched even further. Apparently saying that a country established in 1948 is not literally an ancient biblical kingdom can qualify.

And Amos Is Still Here

If modern Israel is a contemporary nation-state, evaluate it the way you would evaluate any contemporary nation-state.

But if your theology insists that this contemporary state inherits the identity and divine promises of biblical Israel, you’ve made a different argument.

And Amos is coming with it.

He was terrible for the brand.

Evangelical

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About Stuart Delony

I’m Stuart Delony, a former pastor who walked out of the church but couldn’t shake the ways of Jesus. These days, I host Snarky Faith—a podcast and platform that wrestles with faith, culture, and meaning from the fringe. I’m not here to fix Christianity. I’m here to name what’s broken, find what’s still worth keeping, and hold space for the questions that don’t have clean answers. If you’ve been burned, disillusioned, or just done with the noise—welcome. You’re in good company. You can read more about the author here.

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