Fr David Neuhaus: ‘Bible is abused to create hell for people’

By Terence Creamer – “The Bible has been a source of absolute poison and venom” in the ongoing conflict in Gaza that has left the territory in ruins and its people starving, a leading Catholic biblical scholar and teacher lamented during a presentation at the Holy Trinity church in Braamfontein, Johannesburg.

Jesuit Father David Neuhaus, an Israeli citizen currently serving at academic institutions in both Jerusalem and Bethlehem as well as at the Jesuit Institute South Africa in Johannesburg, where he was born and raised, has taught the Bible in Palestine/Israel for 25 years, including to Arabic-speaking Catholic seminarians and Hebrew-speaking rabbinical students.

“I have a great love for scripture. I adore teaching scripture,” Fr Neuhaus said. “But we need to recognise that our sacred texts have been used, abused and manipulated to create hell for people.”

Noting that at first he had been reluctant to conclude that Israel’s actions in Gaza amounted to genocide in the immediate aftermath of the brutal October 7 attack on Israel, during which more than 1 200 people were killed and 251 mostly civilian hostages were taken, Fr Neuhaus used objective criteria to explain his current view that the charge of genocide was undeniable.

These include:

• The ongoing direct and indirect killing of Gazans, including through bombings, shootings, starvation, and the reality that there are insufficient health facilities to treat the wounded and chronically ill after the bombing of hospitals and clinics.
• Evidence of “domicide”, or the destruction of homes and social infrastructure that simultaneously made it impossible for Palestinians to make a living off the land.
• The repeated expulsion of people from their homes, leading to mass internal displacements and, more recently, the plan to conduct an active military campaign to ‘conquer’ remaining areas not yet under direct Israeli control.
• The destruction of the political, social, educational, cultural, journalistic, religious and, crucially, health structures required for a functioning society.

These actions were underpinned by a “genocidal intent”, which had been confirmed in numerous statements by senior Israeli politicians, who sought to justify these statements not only on security grounds but also through references to Biblical texts.

“Did God not give this land to Israel? Is Israel not called to genocide?” Neuhaus asked provocatively, citing Deuteronomy: “But as for the towns of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall annihilate them – the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites – just as the Lord your God has commanded” (20:16-17).

Neuhaus highlighted, too, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reference to “Amalek” at the start of Israel’s campaign in Gaza; a term drawn from Exodus 17, which refers to the archetypal enemy of the Israelites, who they are commanded to wipe out.

Those committing acts of violence against Palestinians continually draw on terminology from the Bible to justify their actions, including through frequent references to the Book of Joshua, which tells how the Israelites destroyed their enemies in Canaan, Fr Neuhaus noted.

He stressed that such references, while a distortion, were not new, recalling how even before he became prime minister, David Ben Gurion claimed that the “Bible is our Mandate”. And despite not being religious, Ben Gurion saw the Book of Joshua as a historical blueprint for the conquest of the “Land of the Bible by the People of the Bible”.

Christian Zionism, with its fundamentalist reading of the Bible, had reinforced and legitimised Israel’s claims over the territories referred to in the Bible, viewing Israel’s military action and the seizing of Palestinian land in the illegally occupied West Bank by settlers as part of a divine battle supported by God.

“We have a huge job of reading our religious texts properly so that they are ‘Good News’ for life, dignity, freedom, equality; all the values that we know our God and Creator would like us to promote,” Fr Neuhaus said.

“Instead, the Bible has often served — during apartheid in South Africa and in many other countries — as a text to imprison and enslave,” the priest said. He noted how the Church used the Bible during the Crusades and how it is still used by some Christians to stoke and rationalise Islamophobia.

The Catholic Church, he noted, called on the faithful to read and interpret Holy Scripture “in the sacred spirit in which it was written”, which reveals values of equality, justice and peace, rather than a justification for war and death.

“We need to read the Word of God so that it is not — again — manipulated and exploited to commit genocide,” Fr Neuhaus concluded.