A look at how one small biblical prophecy against ancient Gaza opens onto names that keep getting invoked in twenty-first-century arguments — and why most of those invocations don’t hold up historically.

When people argue over Gaza today, they sometimes reach for names that are three thousand years old — Philistia, Amalek, Palestine — as though they all refer to the same people. They don’t. Untangling them doesn’t resolve any modern political dispute, but it does clear away a layer of confusion that sits underneath several of them.

Tucked into the minor prophets is a short, easy-to-miss oracle: Zephaniah 2:4–7. Zephaniah prophesied under King Josiah of Judah in the late 7th century BCE, and this passage sits inside a larger run of judgments against Judah’s neighbors — Philistia, Moab, Ammon, Cush, Assyria — before the book turns back to Judah’s own reckoning.

Before you trust someone who claims to be speaking for God, the Bible offers a story worth remembering: the time four hundred prophets agreed on the same message, and every single one of them was wrong.

In 1 Kings 22, King Ahab of Israel wants to go to war against Ramoth-gilead, and before committing, he does something that sounds, on its face, like due diligence: he consults his prophets. Four hundred of them. Every one tells him what he wants to hear — go up, attack, the Lord will give the city into your hand. It’s unanimous. It’s confident. It has the full institutional weight of Ahab’s court behind it.

Jehoshaphat, the allied king standing next to Ahab, isn’t satisfied. He asks a pointed question: is there not still another prophet of the Lord we might inquire of? Ahab’s answer is telling all by itself: there is one more, Micaiah son of Imlah — “but I hate him, for he never prophesies good concerning me, but always evil.”

There’s a simple historical test for whether an institution actually believes the rule it’s enforcing, or is just enforcing it selectively: watch what happens when the rule gets in the way of someone powerful.

The pattern that emerges from this history isn’t just “rules get bent for kings.” It’s something a little sharper: the same institutions that built elaborate, strictly-enforced sexual and marital rules for ordinary people also maintained mechanisms for making exceptions to those rules — and those mechanisms tended to work most smoothly for the politically powerful, whose sins were also the most politically inconvenient to name plainly. What trickles down to everyone else is the strict version of the rule, presented as timeless and non-negotiable. What the powerful actually lived under was something closer to a rule with a well-used side door.

Canon law didn’t treat every forbidden marriage the same way. It distinguished between consanguinity — being related by blood — and affinity, relationships created through marriage rather than birth. Both were treated as impediments requiring dispensation, but they were legally distinct categories, and that distinction was taken seriously on paper: the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 set the boundary for blood relatives at the fourth degree, meaning couples who shared a great-grandparent needed special permission to marry.

There’s a detail in the story of David and Bathsheba that gets skipped over almost every time the story is retold: the text never says the sin was seeing her.

It’s worth going back and reading exactly what’s there, because the gap between the narrative and what most people remember about it is a clean, checkable example of the same pattern this whole discussion keeps running into — a text making a narrow, specific point, and a later tradition quietly expanding it into something broader.

In 2 Samuel 11, David sees Bathsheba bathing from his rooftop. That moment — a man seeing an unrelated, unclothed woman — is never singled out and named as wrongdoing in the text itself. It isn’t praised either; the narrative simply doesn’t pause to evaluate the seeing as its own act, separate from what follows.

There’s a move that shows up again and again whenever a society decides to police what women wear: someone insists the rule is old. Sacred, even. Untouchable, because it predates you, predates your government, predates your century. Question it, and you’re not arguing with a policy — you’re arguing with God, or with civilization itself.

It’s a powerful move, and it’s not simply false — both of the traditions below really do have ancient roots. But in both cases, the specific, standardized, highly visible system now presented as timeless was actually consolidated, politicized, and spread within living memory. The underlying practice is old. The uniform is new.

Veiling itself is genuinely ancient. Head and face coverings appear in Mesopotamia and across the ancient Mediterranean centuries before Islam existed, and they carried a range of meanings — status, marital position, piety, modesty, regional custom — not one fixed idea. In several ancient Near Eastern societies, veiling distinguished respectable or elite women from enslaved women and women classified as prostitutes; similar status distinctions continued to shape veiling in the societies from which early Islam emerged.

Right now, in at least 34 states, thousands of Americans are living through something that sounds like a bad joke until it’s happening to you: sudden, watery, “explosive” diarrhea that can last for weeks, relapse just when you think it’s over, and land you in a hospital bed hooked up to fluids. The culprit is a microscopic parasite called Cyclospora. Nearly 7,000 cases have been reported since May. That’s roughly 28 times the number the country saw by this point last year.

The source is still unknown. Investigators suspect lettuce. Or berries. Or herbs. Or some combination of a food supply chain nobody can fully trace anymore. Taco Bell has quietly pulled ingredients from some locations. Grocery aisles have turned into a minefield of guesswork. And the honest answer from public health officials, more than two months in, is: we don’t know yet.

That “don’t know yet” is the real story.

This week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the U.S. military will begin annually screening testosterone levels in service members 30 and older, offering hormone replacement therapy to anyone whose numbers come back low. He posted the news in a video captioned “The High-T Department of War,” describing troops as the military’s “most decisive tactical advantage” and framing the initiative as “restoring and optimizing your natural capabilities” rather than performance enhancement.

It’s a strange, only-slightly-satirical-sounding headline. But underneath the branding is a genuinely interesting — and genuinely unsettled — scientific question: what does testosterone actually do for people operating under severe, sustained stress? Is there real science behind the idea that keeping testosterone levels up helps warfighters perform better, or is this mostly vibes wrapped in a lab test?

Here’s what the announcement actually says, and what the research does and doesn’t support.

Let’s start with what Doug Wilson actually said, out loud, on tape, to a national audience.

Asked by NPR’s Leila Fadel about repealing the 19th Amendment, Wilson didn’t dodge. He laughed and called it “a good idea.” His replacement plan is what he calls household voting: one vote per household, cast by the head of that household, who in the overwhelming majority of cases will be the husband. Fadel — a woman, unmarried, Muslim — asked what her role in his imagined Christian theocracy would be. Wilson told her she couldn’t hold office because she couldn’t swear to uphold his “Christian Constitution,” and that whether she could vote at all would depend on the state.

This is not a slip of the tongue. It is not a gotcha clip stripped of context. Wilson has been saying versions of this for years, he runs a church network that already practices it, and he told Fadel his congregation already casts about 93 percent of its votes through men. He is not being misunderstood. He is being understood perfectly, and what he wants is for married women to lose the right to a vote of their own.

I had to look up the word “abrogated.” It means to repeal, void, or officially end something — usually a law, treaty, or agreement — by the authority of one party, sometimes without the consent of the other.

Once I understood the word, I couldn’t stop seeing the pattern behind it. It’s the same shape as a company changing your user agreement whenever it wants, with your only choice being to accept the new terms or stop being a customer. It’s the same shape the U.S. government has claimed for over a century when dealing with Native nations — the legal position that Congress can unilaterally override treaty provisions, no renegotiation required. And it’s a pattern that shows up right now, in real time, whenever two parties both claim a “peace agreement” is in effect while each accuses the other of breaking it the moment it’s inconvenient.

The more I sat with the word, the more it seemed like a very old problem wearing a modern legal vocabulary. So I want to trace it back — through the Old Testament’s idea of covenant, through Jesus’s own words about oaths and promises — because it turns out this question (who gets to break a promise, and under what conditions) is one of the oldest moral questions there is.

Lindsey Graham died this weekend after 23 years in the Senate, and the tributes are already writing him into legend: dealmaker, foreign policy hawk, the president’s golf buddy and confidant. What they won’t say plainly is the thing that actually defined his career — a near-perfect record of saying one thing when it cost him nothing, and doing the opposite the moment it cost him something.

That’s worth examining now, not because the dead deserve cruelty, but because the pattern he modeled is still being copied by the living. And there’s an old, unfashionable framework for thinking about it that modern politics has mostly discarded: the idea that God notices the gap between what a leader claims to believe and how he actually treats the people under his power — and that “it’s just politics” was never a defense that held up in front of Him.

Graham’s national career was launched, more or less, by playing prosecutor. As a House impeachment manager during Bill Clinton’s 1998–99 trial, Graham built his early national brand on a simple, morally confident premise: character counts, private conduct has public consequences, and a president who lies about his personal life forfeits the public’s trust. It was a good story, and it worked. It vaulted a little-known South Carolina congressman into a Senate seat in 2003 and, eventually, a national platform.

There’s a phrase people reach for at almost every funeral, every eulogy, every awkward moment when someone’s obituary needs softening: “You shouldn’t speak ill of the dead.” Somebody’s cousin will invoke it like it’s Exodus 21. It isn’t. It’s Sparta.

This is the latest entry in a series I keep stumbling into by accident: sayings that feel biblical, get quoted like they’re biblical, and turn out to have absolutely nothing to do with the Bible.

The idea traces back to Chilon of Sparta, one of the semi-legendary Seven Sages of Greece, writing in the 6th century BCE. His original line, preserved in Greek, was blunt: τὸν τεθνηκóτα μὴ κακολογεῖν — “Of the dead, do not speak ill.”

Last week I walked into a Best Buy to get my daughter a laptop for college. We found one for $650 — fast processor, plenty of memory, everything she needs for coursework. The only problem: it wouldn’t run Fortnite.

So the salesperson steered us toward an $800 “gaming” laptop instead. Except it wasn’t actually a gaming laptop — it was a bait-and-switch dressed up as an upgrade. It had 8GB of RAM, half of what the $650 homework machine had, and an RTX 3050, a graphics card that was already several years old. In other words: slower for everyday work than the cheaper computer, while only barely capable of modern gaming. The real gaming PCs in the store started at $1,000. My own laptop, which handles AAA titles without issue, cost around $1,200. The $800 model wasn’t a gaming laptop at all — it was a worse laptop with a gaming label stapled on, priced to sit exactly in the gap between what we’d already found acceptable and what we’d need to spend to get what we were actually being sold.

Before we could leave, the salesperson tried to hand us a “needs assessment” survey to find us the “right” laptop. I already knew the right laptop. I’d found it. His actual job, in that moment, was to persuade me that spending another $150 was reasonable. Nobody in that store was tasked with persuading Best Buy that earning $150 less on the sale was reasonable, or that paying their employees $150 more per week or month was reasonable. Every conversation happening in that store assumed my budget was flexible. None of them assumed the company’s profit target was, or that the people working there might deserve a share of it.

Seven years ago, my boss got my girlfriend’s name wrong. He thought it was Veronica. It wasn’t — her name was Victoria — but he called her “Ronny” anyway, confidently, like a man who’d never once been corrected in his life. It stuck as a joke between us for years.

More recently, I was in a car with someone whose friends call her Nessa. I call her Vanessa. I asked what name she liked to be called and joked, “My friends call me Nessa, but he calls me Vanessa, because he’s an asshole.” I was quoting my own bit back at her, except the joke had traveled seven years and rearranged itself into something new. She told me she actually likes being called Vanessa. So I kept it.

That’s where my book, My Name is Veronica, came from. Not from a prompt. From a wrong name in an office seven years ago, and a right answer in a car a few weeks ago, and a decade of paying attention to the way people’s names bend depending on who’s saying them and why. Ronny is a joke that means “I never really knew you.” Vanessa, chosen on purpose, is a name that means “I asked.”

There’s a new federal policy, effective this month, that cuts off student loans to college programs whose graduates earn less than the average high school diploma holder four years out. The Department of Education now compares graduates’ earnings against the median earnings of workers whose education stopped with a high school diploma — the logic being that if a degree doesn’t outperform not having one, the loan program shouldn’t be underwriting it. Over 800 programs got flagged. Juilliard music. Cooper Union fine arts. Bard’s liberal arts track. The framing in the press has been triumphant — finally, some accountability, some rigor, some grown-up math applied to a system that’s spent decades burying teenagers in debt for degrees that don’t pay off.

Here’s the part nobody’s saying out loud: the “average high school graduate” baseline they’re measuring against is also often not enough to afford a home in most of the country anymore. So the policy isn’t asking “does this degree clear the bar for a dignified, stable adult life.” It’s asking “does this degree beat a bar that’s already broken.” And when you build a rigorous-sounding accountability system on top of a broken baseline, you get something that looks like discipline and functions like a shell game — reshuffling which 22-year-olds get to be disappointed, without touching why so many of them are disappointed in the first place.

Somewhere in the last two generations, American life quietly organized itself around a deal. Nobody signed anything. Nobody voted on it. But the deal was everywhere — in guidance counselor offices, in parents’ voices, in every graduation speech: do the right things, in the right order, and the outcome takes care of itself.

Servings: 4
Prep Time: 5 minutes
Cook Time: 1 hour
Total Time: 1 hour 5 minutes

4 sweet potatoes (about 6 ounces each), washed

1/2 cup butter, softened

Every Fourth of July, someone reposts a graphic claiming America was “founded on biblical principles” and the Ten Commandments are “the basis of our legal system.” It’s a comforting story. It’s also mostly wrong — or at least much thinner than the graphic suggests.

That doesn’t mean the Bible was irrelevant to the founding era. It was everywhere, culturally. Founding-era Americans quoted it constantly, preached from it, and absorbed its language into their political vocabulary. But there’s a difference between a text being culturally ambient and a text being the source of a nation’s laws. When you actually trace the documents, the debates, and the court records, the specifically biblical foundation turns out to be a lot thinner than “Judeo-Christian nation” rhetoric implies.

Start with the most-quoted line in American political history: “all men are created equal... endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” People hear “Creator” and assume Genesis. But Thomas Jefferson, who wrote it, rejected many core Christian doctrines — the Trinity, biblical miracles, the divinity of Christ — and is commonly described by historians as a Deist or “theistic rationalist,” terms for someone who believed in a distant, providential God without much use for revelation or scripture as authoritative. Similar heterodox labels get applied to Franklin, Madison, and arguably Washington.

Russell Moore had a line in Christianity Today this week that I can’t stop turning over: Christians can love America, he wrote, “with all of its flaws and failures,” precisely because we don’t expect it to be the Kingdom of God. He goes on to warn against both Christian nationalism and progressive utopianism, and to argue for a kingdom-first faith that frees people to love God and country without confusing the two.

I don’t think Moore is trying to excuse anything. I think he’s trying to protect something real: a way to stay engaged without either despairing or deifying the state, a guardrail against exactly the utopian politics — left or right — that treats a government as the vehicle of ultimate salvation. That’s a legitimate worry and he’s right to have it. But I want to sit with the word he reached for, “flaws,” because I think it’s doing something it was never built to do, and that thing is worth naming before we go any further.

“Flaws and failures” is a phrase built for a nation that sometimes falls short of its ideals. It is not built for a nation that is, today, conducting lethal military strikes on people who were never charged with, let alone convicted of, a crime. It is not built for a detention system where more people died last year than in the previous four combined. Once “flaws and failures” is asked to cover both categories — the ordinary shortfalls of a real country and the specific, chosen, ongoing infliction of death — something has quietly gone wrong. You’ve confused the ultimate and the proximate, the very move Moore warns against, just run in the other direction: not by treating the nation as holy, but by making its conduct sound mild enough that loving it “anyway” requires no reckoning at all.

A few days ago, Christianity Today ran a piece comparing George Washington’s Farewell Address to Moses’ final words to Israel. The pairing makes intuitive sense: both are addressed to a people about to be tested by their own success, both warn that the real danger isn’t an outside enemy but internal rot, and both lean hard on a single load-bearing idea — that a nation cannot govern itself by law alone. It needs a moral floor underneath the law, or the law eventually gives way.

It’s a good argument. It’s also one Americans have been making about their own country since before there was a country, and it’s worth actually sitting with what these men meant by “moral,” because I don’t think we do. We like quoting the warning. We’re much less interested in the content of the thing we were warned to keep.

Deuteronomy is framed as Moses’ farewell — his final address to Israel on the plains of Moab, delivered knowing he would die before crossing into the land he’d spent forty years walking toward. The core of it, chapters 28 through 30, lays out blessing and curse in stark, almost legal terms: obedience brings prosperity, unfaithfulness brings exile. “This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life.”

Stephen A. Smith spent part of this week telling his audience that the Los Angeles Lakers cannot win a championship with three White stars atop the roster, because — in his words — no team has ever done it. He didn’t stop there. He extended the logic to golf. He said it “had to be said.” When the backlash came, he didn’t walk it back. He doubled down, calling it “just facts.”

It is worth taking the claim seriously enough to actually check it, because Smith didn’t, and neither did the columnist who wrote the outraged response to him. Both of them skipped the part where you look at the data.

So let’s look at it.

There is a very specific kind of American genius on display this week in Washington, D.C., and it has nothing to do with fireworks. It’s the genius of taking an event that has been on the calendar since roughly the Obama administration and still finding a way to turn it into a scramble.

The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence was never a surprise. Congress chartered a bipartisan commission — America250 — a full decade ago to plan it. Ten years. That’s enough time to plan a moon landing, build a stadium, or raise a child through most of grade school. It is, in theory, more than enough time to plan a birthday party for a 250-year-old country that, last anyone checked, was not going to sneak up on anybody.

And yet here we are, 48 hours out, with a rebranded, White House-aligned rival organization called Freedom 250 running the actual show; a fireworks display delayed past 10 p.m. to make room for a speech; a heat advisory; a pollution advisory; and a felony indictment against a retired Olympic athlete for allegedly touching some peeling paint.