{"id":75362,"date":"2020-05-30T22:52:47","date_gmt":"2020-05-30T19:52:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/?p=75362"},"modified":"2020-05-30T22:52:47","modified_gmt":"2020-05-30T19:52:47","slug":"a-disarming-text","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/a-disarming-text\/","title":{"rendered":"A Disarming Text"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"entry-content\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[281],"tags":[],"acf":{"old_id":"75362","type":"no","iframe":"","writer":34243,"related_cahpter":"491","type_929":"2","show_author_image":false,"old_create_date":"","old_url":"","post_main_content":{"description":"Righty, tighty, lefty, loosy\r\n\r\n","content":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Most curiously, our chapter begins with the same message that began the previous chapter: God instructing Ezekiel to say to Gog, the ruler of Magog, that He will force him to come from the \u201cfar north and lead you toward the mountains of Israel\u201d (39:2). Why the repetition?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">To Malbim, it indicated not redundancy but recurrence: Gog would launch two attacks:<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You will launch a second attack against the mountains of Israel. The first time it said: \u201cOn the day that Gog arrives in the land of Israel\u201d (38:18), i.e., his downfall will be immediately upon his crossing their border and arriving in their territory. The second time, however, he will reach the mountains of Israel, besiege Jerusalem, and then\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Malbim\u2019s closing \u201cand then\u2026\u201d alludes to the consequences, described in the next verse, that will befall Gog: \u201cI will strike your bow from your left hand and I will loosen the arrows from your right hand\u201d (3). While right and left sometimes appear as poetic synonyms rather than distinctly opposite sides (cf. Proverbs 3:16, 4:27, Ecclesiastes 10:2), here even Radak, who regularly remarks: \u201cthe same idea is expressed through different words\u201d (cf. Ezekiel 20:8, 21:3, 22:4), took the distinction literally:<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I will strike him until I knock it out of his left hand, because the bow is held in the left hand and the arrows are strung with the right hand and the bowstring is pulled with the right. The intent is to declare that none of his weapons will avail him; they will be as though there were none.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If you have ever entered through the main gate of an ancient city (like the Jaffa Gate of Jerusalem, or Caesarea), you might recall that immediately upon passing through the gate (not the breach in the wall through which most people enter today) you were forced to make a tight left turn. This was a strategic defensive ploy that assumed, like Radak, that archers held their bows in their left hands. By forcing attackers to turn sharply to the left, two things were accomplished: their bows were pointed towards the outer wall of the city rendering them offensively ineffectual, and it exposed their unarmed right flank to the defenders inside.<\/span><\/p>\n","image":{"ID":75366,"id":75366,"title":"ez39-archer","filename":"ez39-archer.png","filesize":0,"url":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/ez39-archer.png","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/a-disarming-text\/ez39-archer\/","alt":"","author":"7","description":"","caption":"","name":"ez39-archer","status":"inherit","uploaded_to":75362,"date":"2020-05-30 19:52:32","modified":"2020-05-30 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