Israelites
Article
Israelites is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between November 17, 2023 and September 15, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “He got the Israelites to obsess over these examples”; “When the Israelites stopped obeying the commandments”. It most often appears alongside America, Bible, Israel.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: November 17, 2023
- Last seen: September 15, 2025
Appears In
Related Pages
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- America (2 shared issues)
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- Bible (2 shared issues)
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- Israel (2 shared issues)
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- Abel (1 shared issues)
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- Adam and Eve (1 shared issues)
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- ADL (1 shared issues)
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- Ann Arbor (1 shared issues)
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- Apollonius of Tyana (1 shared issues)
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- Arab (1 shared issues)
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- Astralcodexten Com (1 shared issues)
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- Athens (1 shared issues)
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- Babylonian Captivity (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
He contrasts this with the Bible. Lots of Bible stories also fit the pattern. As in Babylonian and Norse mythology, the world begins with a primordial murder: Cain kills Abel. But the clearest example is the story of Joseph and his brothers. Joseph’s brothers grow jealous of him, coveting his beautiful multi-colored coat. They form a mob, gang up on him, and are about to kill him, when a slave caravan comes by and they decide to sell him as a slave instead. Then Joseph becomes as close to a god as the monotheistic Israelites are willing to accept (Prime Minister of Egypt) and founds the next stage of Israelite civilization as some kind of culture-hero figure.
So how does the Hebrew Bible escape this failure mode? Girard says divine intervention. God (here meaning literal God, exactly as the average churchgoer understands Him) tried to break the reign of Satan (here meaning metaphorical Satan, the single-victim process) over the Jewish people, by constantly providing them with examples of the single-victim process being bad and ensuring those examples were written up accurately. He got the Israelites to obsess over these examples and worship them as a holy text, trying to hammer the whole thing into their heads. Finally, He sent His only begotten Son as the perfect victim, who would undergo the process in its entirety and have it be written up with unprecedented attention to detail. This extra-compelling example finally penetrated the Israelites’ thick skulls. Although Peter and the other disciples sort of joined the mob in denying Jesus at the beginning, after the Resurrection they started thinking previously barely-thinkable thoughts, like “what if our mob was in the wrong?” and “what if mob violence is bad?”
Or what about Numbers 25? The Israelites intermarry with the idolatrous Moabites. God sends a plague as punishment. 24,000 people die. Then Phinehas kills the leader of the intermarriers, and the plague ends.
To posit Trump's divine election is not to imply he has any positive qualities. When the Israelites stopped obeying the commandments, God punished them by raising an incompetent idolator named Jeroboam to the throne. Jeroboam started a disastrous war that killed 500,000 of his own men, after which his dynasty collapsed and his entire family was slain. Jeroboam was chosen by God to crush and humiliate Israel. But he was chosen by God. Has America been obeying the commandments lately?