Deuteronomy and the Long Struggle to Align Power with the Good

This piece appeared as an op/ed in newspapers in early December, 2025.

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The Bible’s Book of Deuteronomy presents a terrifying world — one where conquerors, with no provocation, often seized another people’s land, slaughtering all the men among the vanquished and enslaving all the women and children.

God Himself commands His people to do just that.

Why would a moral people consider such barbarism righteous?

Because in the anarchy that prevailed among the first civilized societies, survival required power. Only those societies willing and able to do what was required to prevail in anarchy’s inevitable “war of all against all” could survive. So it is no wonder that the morality of those societies that did survive such a world would teach them to see as righteous whatever survival required in that unavoidable struggle for power.

That problem of “intersocietal anarchy” arose with civilization and continues still. The same logic plays out in our time: witness Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

If any such assault occurred within a society, lawful order would stop it. But among “sovereign” nations, there exists no higher authority to stop such violence.

Yet the picture of the world of millennia ago, shown in the Bible, shows that the human world has made a lot of progress in the direction of enabling human affairs to be conducted so as to serve the Good — which stealing people’s land, putting thousands to the sword, and reducing survivors to human livestock most assuredly does not.

The central issue a civilization-creating species must confront is how to establish Order — a Good order — so that human affairs develop in life-serving ways rather than destructive ones.

Yet establishing such an order was at first impossible. Civilization arose in fragmented form in every region where it developed independently, with no means of enforcing any good order to prevent aggression among the emerging societies. Then, across the planet, conquest consolidated regional empires, and eventually — over the millennia — those empires too inevitably lacked protection from one another.

The issue is just that: Can Power be aligned with the Good?

And though Ukraine shows how the Good still pays a price for the world’s lack of order, it is clear that real progress has been made since the time depicted in Deuteronomy. One cannot imagine a sacred text written today portraying God as commanding His Chosen People, “You shall not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall annihilate them,” then naming all the tribes they are to displace and exterminate. (Deut. 20: 16-17]

Progress in the form of international rules, international laws, and an International Court — imperfect and incomplete, but steps toward ending the intersocietal anarchy that for millennia has condemned humanity to terrible suffering and injustice.

Anarchy empowers “the Spirit of the Gangster,” the one who is willing to treat the Other as of no concern whatever.

Anarchy empowers “the Spirit of the Gangster” — those willing to disregard the rights of others. Grab power. Grab wealth. Grab land. Against that spirit, the founding vision of the United Nations aspired to a world where the rights of peoples did not depend on the might at their command.

The issue is just that: Can Power be aligned with the Good?

Despite the progress made, the terrible things that were the way of the world three millennia ago can still happen. And with vast nuclear arsenals still hanging over our heads like a sword of Damocles, humanity cannot leave unsolved the problem of power, lest our civilization destroy itself.

Solving that problem would not be easy even if our consciousness were in the right place. But we are required to solve it despite the moral and spiritual wounds inflicted by a history in which the Spirit of the Gangster had too great a say.

It is forgivable that humankind has not advanced further since World War II—though the end of the Cold War offered an opportunity that was not fully seized.

But it is appalling that the people of a once-great nation have made “the world’s most powerful person” a man driven by the impulse to tear down every structure that restrains the strong. He throws open the gates to unjust power wherever he can reach:

• Regarding Ukraine, he aids the aggressor who shattered a European order of peace so hard-won through three global conflicts in the twentieth century.
• Regarding the climate crisis, he attacks every framework humanity has built to meet that challenge.
• He dismantles rules that govern corporate conduct.
• He breaks apart the world trading order, launching a trade war with unilateral tariffs.

All part of the same insistence that Power may do whatever it wants: violating the Constitution, breaking laws, trampling norms and traditions – as well as overturning the “rules-based international order” that the United States itself did so much to create.

The very opposite of where humankind has needed to go for ten thousand years: toward an order that prevents Power from ruling the world at the expense of the Good.