Antisemitism is not a sophisticated theological disagreement. It is a prejudice that has, across centuries, clothed itself in the language of scripture in order to justify expulsions, pogroms, blood libels, and industrial murder.

In our own time it reappears with tiresome predictability: in conspiracy theories about global finance, in campus chants that erase Jewish self-determination, in online tracts that declare the Jews “cast off” by God. Those who hate Jews frequently reach for the Bible not to understand it but to conscript it. They claim that because the Jews broke one covenant, all the covenants are void; that the people of Abraham have been superseded and therefore may be despised with divine license.

This is a profound misunderstanding of the biblical text itself—specifically of the Abrahamic, Mosaic, and Davidic covenants—and it reveals more about the haters than about the God they invoke.

A clear-eyed reading of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament shows three distinct covenants that cannot be collapsed into a single disposable contract. Confusing them is the intellectual error that underwrites much religiously flavored antisemitism. Correcting that error does not require converting anyone to Judaism or to any particular Christian denomination. It requires only the elementary honesty of distinguishing one promise from another.

Begin with the Abrahamic covenant. In Genesis, God establishes a relationship with Abraham that is repeatedly described as everlasting. God promises land, innumerable descendants, and that through Abraham’s seed the nations of the earth will be blessed. The language is unilateral and emphatic: “I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant… And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession.” Circumcision is instituted as a token of this covenant, again called everlasting. The promises are not conditioned on perfect national obedience in every generation. God binds himself. Later narratives repeatedly show God remembering this covenant even when Abraham’s descendants are in bondage or under judgment. To treat the Abrahamic covenant as provisional is to ignore the plain wording of the text.

The Mosaic covenant is different in character and in purpose. At Sinai, God enters into a conditional national agreement with the people who have come out of Egypt. The terms are explicit: if the people obey the commandments, they will be a treasured people; if they do not, curses will follow. The long catalogues of blessing and curse in Deuteronomy make the conditionality unmistakable. This covenant functions as a legal and cultic constitution for a particular people in a particular land under a particular historical administration. When the prophets later announce a “new covenant,” they contrast it specifically with the one made at the time of the exodus. The Mosaic arrangement is the one that is described as having been broken by the people and therefore subject to replacement in its administrative form. It is not the same instrument as the earlier promise to Abraham.

The Davidic covenant stands in a third category. In 2 Samuel, God promises David that his house, his kingdom, and his throne will be established forever. The language again carries the weight of permanence: the dynasty will not be cut off in the way human dynasties ordinarily are. Later psalms and prophetic texts return to this promise, treating the Davidic line as the vehicle of enduring royal purpose. Whatever one’s view of messianic fulfillment, the textual claim is that God’s commitment to David’s seed is not erased by the failures of individual kings or by the exile of the people. The Davidic covenant, like the Abrahamic, is framed as lasting.

Antisemites who wave the Bible typically erase these distinctions. They collapse everything into the Mosaic covenant, note that Israel broke it, and then declare the entire people permanently rejected. From that premise they leap to the conclusion that contemporary Jews have no continuing biblical standing, no legitimate connection to the land promises, and no claim on the moral consideration owed to other peoples. The leap is illegitimate. National failure under the conditional Mosaic terms brings discipline—exile, foreign domination, loss of sovereignty—exactly as the text predicts. It does not cancel the earlier and later unconditional or everlasting promises. The prophets themselves never treat the Abrahamic or Davidic commitments as revoked when they call Israel to account for Mosaic violations. On the contrary, they often appeal to those earlier promises as the ground of eventual restoration.

Christian readers who accept the New Testament as authoritative have additional reason to reject the antisemitic caricature. The apostle Paul, writing as a Jew of the tribe of Benjamin, asks whether God has cast away his people and answers with an emphatic negation. He affirms the ongoing significance of ethnic Israel even while arguing for the inclusion of the nations. The new covenant is presented as made with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not as a warrant for erasing them. Whatever one’s theology of fulfillment or supersession in the sphere of religious practice, the text does not authorize hatred of Jews as a people. Those who extract such authorization are not reading carefully; they are hunting for permission.

The practical consequences of the misunderstanding are ugly and familiar. If the Jews are imagined as a people whose covenant has been irrevocably broken, then their suffering can be reframed as deserved, their success as suspicious, and their national aspirations as presumptuous. History is littered with the results of that reframing. Medieval expulsions, the Russian Pale, the Nuremberg Laws, and the gas chambers all drew, at various points, on theological rhetoric that treated Jews as a rejected people. Contemporary versions recycle the same rhetoric with updated packaging: Jews as perpetual outsiders, Jews as controllers of media or banks, Jews as the obstacle to peace. The common thread is the refusal to grant Jews the ordinary dignity of peoplehood that is granted without controversy to others.

None of this requires romanticizing Jewish history or Jewish politics. Jews, like every other people, have produced saints and sinners, visionaries and demagogues. The State of Israel, like every other state, is subject to moral scrutiny and political criticism. Legitimate criticism of Israeli policy is not antisemitism. Demanding that Jews alone among the nations justify their existence, or treating Jewish self-defense as uniquely illegitimate, or invoking ancient curses to explain modern events, is something else entirely. The distinction is not difficult once the covenants are kept in their proper places.A serious engagement with the biblical material yields a different picture. God makes an everlasting commitment to Abraham and his seed. God later institutes a conditional national law that the people fail to keep, with predictable consequences. God also makes an everlasting commitment regarding David’s house. The new covenant is announced as a transformation of the Mosaic arrangement for the same houses of Israel and Judah. Nowhere does the text authorize the conclusion that Jews as a people may be hated with a clear conscience. Those who reach that conclusion are not defending the integrity of scripture; they are abusing it.

Antisemitism remains what it has always been: a prejudice that finds whatever intellectual costume is fashionable in a given age. In a secular age it wears conspiracy theories. In a religious age it wears selective proof-texts. The costume does not change the underlying vice. Jews are not required to be perfect in order to be free from collective demonization. No people is. The Bible’s own distinctions among the covenants, read without malice, offer no warrant for the opposite claim. Those who insist otherwise should be answered not with reciprocal hatred but with the simple demand that they read more carefully and hate less freely. The world has seen enough of what happens when they do not.

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