Words Without Worlds: Why "Antisemitism" Only Makes Sense If the Bible Is True

There is a curious habit in the modern West. Many people insist they have moved beyond the old stories, that God is a relic, that Scripture is an antiquated library with no bearing on contemporary debates. Fair enough. One can understand the position, even if one disagrees with it.

But then something odd happens. When cultural crises rise up like storm clouds, these same voices reach instinctively for categories that only make sense within that ancient story.

One of those categories is the word "antisemitic."

The Word Everyone Uses, The Story No One Believes

It appears constantly in our public discourse. Politicians denounce it. Activists mobilize against it. Universities craft policies to prevent it. And rightly so. The evil it names is real, devastating, and persistent.

But watch what has happened to it. Both major political parties in the West toss it around like cheap candy on Halloween night. The left uses it to silence critics of certain policies. The right uses it to score points against political opponents. Neither side seems particularly interested in what the word actually means or where it comes from. They just know it works. It shuts down conversations. It delegitimizes opponents.

This should trouble us. Not because we should stop condemning antisemitism, but because when a word becomes a weapon in tribal warfare, it loses its capacity to name reality.

Here is the deeper oddity: the same culture that wields this word with such casual urgency often denies the very story that gave the word its meaning.

The term "antisemitism" depends entirely on the concept of "Semite." And the concept of "Semite" comes from Shem, one of the three sons of Noah. Shem, Ham, and Japheth are not incidental characters in some dusty genealogy. They are the origin point for the biblical understanding of human diversity, the branching of humanity after the flood into distinct peoples, languages, and cultures.

If you accept the biblical story, even in broad strokes, then "Semite" has coherence. It refers to the descendants of Shem, a real person with real children who became real nations. The term "antisemitism" thus names a particular hostility toward a particular people with a particular ancestry.

But if you reject the biblical story (if you insist that Noah is mythology, that Genesis 10 is ancient fiction, that the Table of Nations is merely Hebrew folklore) then what exactly are you referring to when you say "antisemitic"?

You are using a word without a world.

The Incoherence We Cannot Escape

I do not raise this question to be clever or contrarian. I raise it because intellectual coherence matters.

Consider the typical trajectory of a modern education in the West. A young person is taught that the early chapters of Genesis are not historical. Adam and Eve are symbols. The flood is a myth borrowed from Mesopotamian sources. The genealogies are artificial constructs.

So far, we understand the position. Many educated people hold it.

But then that same young person enters the public square and discovers that certain moral categories are treated as non-negotiable. One of those categories is antisemitism. To be antisemitic is not merely to hold a mistaken opinion; it is to commit a profound moral wrong.

Now, I happen to agree that antisemitism is a profound moral wrong. But I want to press the question: on what grounds?

If the story of Shem is fiction, then "Semite" is a fiction. If "Semite" is a fiction, then "antisemitism" is a protest against an imaginary category. You might as well speak of "anti-Kryptonian" sentiment and expect people to take it seriously.

Of course, no one actually believes this. When people condemn antisemitism, they are speaking about real people with a real history and real suffering. But the moment you grant that (the moment you acknowledge that "Semite" refers to something real) you have stepped back into the biblical story, whether you intended to or not.

This is what I mean by using words without worlds.

What We Lost When We Lost the Story

The biblical writers were not naive or primitive. They were tracing, with remarkable clarity, the interwoven fabric of human families, languages, and peoples. Genesis 10, often called the Table of Nations, is one of the most overlooked passages in Scripture. Modern readers skip over it because it seems tedious. But the ancient readers understood what was happening. This was not filler. This was the map of the world.

Shem, Ham, and Japheth become the fathers of nations. From Shem come the Semitic peoples of the ancient Near East: the Hebrews and Arameans, the Assyrians and Elamites, along with the Arabian peoples descending from Joktan. From Ham come the great civilizations of Africa and Canaan: the Egyptians and Cushites (Ethiopians), the Canaanites who would later inhabit the Promised Land, and Put (Libya). From Japheth come the peoples who spread northward and westward: the maritime nations of the Mediterranean coastlands, the Medes and Greeks (Ionians), eventually populating Asia Minor and moving into Europe.

The point of the genealogy is not to satisfy our curiosity about ancient demographics. The point is theological. Humanity is one family. We share a common origin. Our diversity is not the result of random evolutionary accidents but the unfolding of a divine plan. And because we are one family, what we do to one another matters in a way that transcends culture, politics, or self-interest.

This is the world in which "Semite" makes sense. It is not an ethnic category invented by modern linguists. It is a family designation rooted in the memory of a real ancestor who lived in a real time and had real children.

And this is why "antisemitism" carries moral weight. To hate the descendants of Shem is not merely to dislike a particular culture or to disagree with a particular ideology. It is to violate the familial bond that connects all humanity. It is to turn against your own kin.

Now, imagine we declare this story to be false. We say that Noah is a legend, that Shem never existed, and that the Table of Nations is ancient Hebrew propaganda.

What happens to the word "Semite"?

In one sense, nothing. The word continues to be used. But in another sense, everything changes. Because if Shem is not real, then "Semite" is just a label we have agreed to use for historical convenience. It has no more moral significance than "European" or "Asian" or "left-handed."

And if "Semite" is just a descriptor, then "antisemitism" is just a preference. Perhaps it is a socially harmful preference, one we should discourage for pragmatic reasons. But it is not a violation of a moral order built into the fabric of creation.

This is what I mean when I say that words lose their worlds.

The Can of Worms We Would Rather Not Open

Of course, once you start pulling on this thread, the whole garment begins to unravel.

If Shem, Ham, and Japheth were real people, then their father Noah was a real person. And if Noah was real, then the flood was real. And if the flood was real, then we are dealing with a very different kind of history than modern skepticism allows. The story does not stop there. Follow the genealogy backward and you arrive at Adam and Eve, at the garden, at the creation itself.

This is precisely why so many modern people prefer to treat Genesis as mythology. It is not that the evidence is overwhelmingly against the biblical narrative (though they will claim it is). It is that accepting any part of it as historically grounded threatens to obligate them to the whole story. And the whole story makes claims they would rather not face.

Better, they think, to treat it all as ancient literature, beautiful perhaps, meaningful in some symbolic sense, but not the kind of thing that actually happened in space and time.

But here is the problem: you cannot have it both ways. You cannot treat Noah as mythology on Monday and then condemn antisemitism with moral urgency on Tuesday. You cannot dismiss the flood as a fairy tale and then insist that "Semite" refers to a real people with a real history that demands real respect.

The moment you grant that Shem matters, you have granted that his father matters. And once Noah matters, the flood matters. And once the flood matters, you are much closer to having to reckon with Adam, with Eve, with the garden, with the God who made them.

I am not saying you must accept a young earth or a global flood that covered Mount Everest or any particular interpretation of the early chapters of Genesis. Serious believers disagree about these details, and have for centuries. What I am saying is that you cannot use the moral categories that flow from this story while simultaneously insisting the story is fiction. The categories depend on the story being true in some deep sense, even if we debate the details of how it unfolded.

This is the can of worms modern discourse desperately wants to keep closed. But every time someone uses the word "antisemitism" with genuine moral weight, they crack the lid open just a bit.

The Irony We Refuse to Acknowledge

And here is where the incoherence becomes even more pronounced.

If "antisemitism" means hostility toward the descendants of Shem, then we need to be honest about who those descendants are. The biblical genealogy is quite clear. From Shem come not only the Hebrews through Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but also the Arabs through Abraham and Ishmael, along with the Arameans, Assyrians, and other peoples of the ancient Near East.

The term "Semitic" is not synonymous with "Jewish." It encompasses a much broader family. Modern Arabic speakers are Semitic. Many Palestinians, whose ancestors have lived in that land for centuries, are descendants of Semitic peoples. The Aramaic-speaking communities that once flourished across the region were Semitic.

Yet in contemporary usage, "antisemitism" has been narrowed to mean only hostility toward Jews. This is understandable given the horrific history of persecution that Jewish people have endured, culminating in the Holocaust. The term needed to name a specific evil, and it has done so.

But here is the irony that should give us pause: if we take the biblical story seriously (and remember, you cannot use "Semite" coherently without taking it seriously), then violence against Palestinians is also violence against Semites. Hostility toward Arabs is hostility toward the descendants of Shem. The family tree does not lie.

This is not to diminish the unique horrors of anti-Jewish hatred throughout history. It is simply to point out that the word we use to describe that hatred, if we use it honestly, actually encompasses a much larger family. Shem's descendants include both the Israelis and many of the Palestinians currently in conflict. It includes both Jews and Arabs across the Middle East.

From the perspective of the biblical narrative, this is a family tearing itself apart. These are distant cousins, separated by millennia and theology and politics, but cousins nonetheless. Both can trace their lineage back through Abraham to Shem to Noah.

And if that is true, then the word "antisemitism" should trouble us in ways we rarely acknowledge. It should make us ask harder questions about how we apply moral categories in contemporary conflicts. It should make us wonder whether we have weaponized a term that was meant to protect all of Shem's children but now functions as a shield for some while ignoring violence against others.

I am not naive about the complexities here. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict involves competing claims, genuine security concerns, deep historical grievances, and theological convictions that will not be resolved by an appeal to shared ancestry. But if we are going to use the word "antisemitism" with moral seriousness, we should at least be honest about what the word means.

It means that violence against any descendant of Shem is a violation of the family bond. It means that hatred directed at Arabs is, by the biblical logic we claim to invoke, also antisemitism. It means that the moral categories we deploy so confidently in some contexts should also apply in contexts we find politically inconvenient.

This is what happens when you start taking the biblical story seriously. It refuses to be domesticated for political purposes. It insists on its own logic. And that logic is far more expansive, and far more challenging, than our tribal loyalties would prefer.

From Biological Descent to Spiritual Family

But the biblical story does not stop with biological genealogy. It goes deeper still.

The apostle Paul, writing to the early churches, made a striking claim: those who have faith in Jesus Christ are children of Abraham, regardless of their ethnic heritage. "Understand, then, that those who have faith are children of Abraham," he wrote to the Galatians. And to the Romans: "It is not the children by physical descent who are God's children, but it is the children of the promise who are regarded as Abraham's offspring."

This was revolutionary. Paul was saying that the family of Abraham (and therefore the family of Shem, and therefore the family of Noah) extends beyond bloodlines. It encompasses all who trust in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The family that began with one man's faith now includes people from every nation, every language, every culture.

And if that is true, then the implications are staggering.

"Antisemitism" in its fullest sense is not just hostility toward ethnic Jews or ethnic Arabs or any particular bloodline. It is hostility toward the human family itself. It is the rejection of the fundamental unity that God established from the beginning and reaffirmed through Abraham and ultimately fulfilled in Christ.

Jesus himself, when asked what the greatest commandment was, did not give a complicated theological answer. He said: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself."

Your neighbor. Not just your fellow tribesman. Not just those who share your politics or your ethnicity or your theology. Your neighbor. The person made in God's image. The member of the human family.

To be "anti-Semitic" in the truest, deepest sense is to be anti-human. It is to reject the image of God in another person. It is to violate the second greatest commandment. And you cannot violate the command to love your neighbor while claiming to love God. John makes this abundantly clear: "Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen."

This is where the story leads us. Not to ethnic nationalism. Not to political tribalism. Not to the careful parsing of who deserves protection and who does not.

It leads us to the most fundamental commandment of all: love your neighbor.

And your neighbor, according to the biblical story, is every single person you encounter. Because we are all part of the same family. We all bear the same image. We all trace our lineage back to the same beginning.

When you use the word "antisemitism" to condemn hatred, you are (whether you realize it or not) invoking this entire framework. You are appealing to a moral order that says human beings matter because they are family, because they bear God's image, because love is not optional but commanded.

But if you are going to invoke that framework, then you cannot pick and choose who deserves that love. You cannot condemn hatred of one group while excusing hatred of another. You cannot appeal to the second greatest commandment when it is politically convenient and ignore it when it is not.

The story will not let you.

What If the Story Is True?

And now we arrive at the question that makes everyone uncomfortable.

If the story is true, if Noah was real, if the flood happened, if Adam and Eve were actual people made in the image of an actual God, then what does that mean for you?

Not for society. Not for politics. Not for academic debates about historicity. For you.

Because here is what the story claims: you are not an accident. You are not a cosmic fluke, a random arrangement of molecules that happened to become conscious. You are part of a family that goes back to the beginning. You bear the image of the God who made you. And that means you are accountable.

Accountable for how you treat the other members of the family. Accountable for whether you honor or deface the image of God in yourself and others. Accountable to the God who preserved Noah through the flood, who called Abraham, who revealed Himself to Moses, who became flesh in Jesus Christ.

This is why the story is so fiercely resisted. It is not ultimately about intellectual difficulties or scientific questions. It is about what the story demands if it is true.

If the biblical narrative is just ancient mythology, then you can pick and choose what you like. You can keep the moral vocabulary that makes you feel good while discarding the God who gave that vocabulary its meaning. You can condemn antisemitism without worrying about your own standing before the Creator.

But if the story is true, then everything changes. The God who judged the world with a flood is the same God before whom you will stand. The moral order you appeal to when you condemn hatred is the same moral order that judges your own heart. The family unity you invoke when you speak of human dignity is the same family unity that obligates you to love your neighbor, to seek justice, to walk humbly with your God.

This is not comfortable. It was not meant to be.

The biblical story does not exist to make you feel better about yourself. It exists to tell you the truth about who you are, where you came from, and what you owe to the One who made you.

I am not writing this to condemn anyone. I am part of the kingdom of heaven, not the kingdoms of left or right, and the kingdom's message has always been one of invitation, not coercion. But the invitation requires honesty. If you are going to use words like "antisemitism," if you are going to appeal to justice and human dignity, if you are going to insist that certain things are simply wrong, then you owe it to yourself to ask where those convictions come from.

And if the answer leads you back to the biblical story, then perhaps it is time to stop treating that story as a cultural artifact and start reckoning with what it means if it is true.

Borrowed Capital and the Coming Collapse

There is a philosophical term for what I am describing: "borrowed capital." It refers to the practice of living off the moral and intellectual resources of a worldview you no longer believe.

Modern secularism wants to keep the moral insights of Christianity (human dignity, universal human rights, the intrinsic worth of every person) while rejecting the theological foundations that gave rise to those insights. It is like withdrawing from a bank account without ever making a deposit.

The critique is not always fair. There are serious secular philosophers who have worked hard to ground morality without reference to God. But even the most sophisticated secular ethics run into a problem when it comes to words like "antisemitism." Because "antisemitism" is not a generic term for prejudice. It is a specific term for a specific kind of prejudice, and that specificity comes from a story.

There are university professors who teach Genesis as mythology in the morning and condemn antisemitism in the afternoon. They are good people, often deeply committed to justice. But they have never stopped to ask where their commitment to justice comes from.

When you press them (gently, of course) they struggle to explain why antisemitism is wrong rather than merely unfashionable. They can point to the harm it causes, the suffering it produces, the social instability it creates. All true. But none of that explains why causing harm is fundamentally wrong in the first place.

The biblical story, by contrast, gives a clear answer: causing harm is wrong because human beings are made in the image of God, and to harm a person is to deface that image. To hate the Jewish people is not only harmful; it is a rejection of God's choice to work through a particular family for the blessing of all families.

Remove the story, and you are left with pragmatic calculations. And pragmatic calculations, as history shows, can justify almost anything.

The Political Theater We Cannot Afford

And this brings us back to the political theater I mentioned earlier. When politicians of the left and right weaponize the word "antisemitism" for partisan advantage, they are participating in the very incoherence I have been describing.

They do not actually care about the coherence of the term. They do not worry about whether it makes sense to speak of "Semites" in a world where Shem is dismissed as mythology. They just know that calling someone antisemitic is an effective way to win an argument.

The left will accuse the right of antisemitism for questioning certain policies or alliances. The right will accuse the left of antisemitism for criticizing certain actions or governments. Both sides act as though they have moral high ground. Neither side acknowledges that the word they are using comes from a story they have both rejected.

This is not just hypocrisy. It is intellectual bankruptcy.

And it leaves those of us who belong to the kingdom of heaven in a difficult position. We cannot simply join one side or the other, because both sides are wrong. The kingdom operates by a different logic. It does not play the game of tribal warfare. It does not use sacred words as ammunition in political battles.

Instead, the kingdom calls us to something harder: to use words truthfully, to honor the stories they come from, and to refuse the easy path of partisan loyalty when it conflicts with reality.

I do not belong to a political party. I belong to the kingdom of heaven, which operates by a different logic altogether. The kingdom does not fit neatly into our political categories, and those who try to domesticate it for partisan purposes always end up distorting it.

The Recovery We Need

So what do we do about this?

First, we need intellectual honesty. If you want to retain the moral force of words like "antisemitism," you need to ask yourself where that force comes from. And if the answer is not "from the biblical story," then you need to provide an alternative account.

Most people, in my experience, do not have such an account. They simply assume that the moral intuitions they have inherited from a biblical culture will continue to function indefinitely, even after the story that produced them has been discarded.

But that assumption is mistaken. Moral intuitions, like words, eventually collapse when they are severed from the worlds that gave them meaning.

Second, we need to recover the story. Not to argue for its historicity in every detail (though I believe it is far more historical than modern skeptics allow) but to recognize what the story claims and why those claims matter.

The biblical story says that humanity is one family, descended from common ancestors, bound together by more than geography or politics. It says that words like "Semite" and "antisemitism" are not arbitrary labels but markers of identity rooted in a shared history. It says that the moral order we take for granted is not self-sustaining but depends on a story big enough to hold it.

This does not mean we must all become fundamentalists, insisting on a wooden literalism that ignores the complexities of history and scholarship. What it means is that we must take the biblical story seriously as a story, as a narrative that shapes our imagination, informs our moral intuitions, and provides a framework for making sense of the world.

Third, we need to recognize that the story is still at work. The very fact that our culture continues to use biblical categories (justice, dignity, antisemitism) is evidence that the story has not lost its power. It is still shaping the imagination of even those who deny it.

The words keep pointing back to the story. The moral intuitions keep gesturing toward a moral order. The longing for justice keeps suggesting that justice is more than a human preference.

And all of it, from the Christian perspective, is the work of a God who will not leave us alone.

The Invitation That Still Stands

I grew up in two worlds: Catholic in the 1980s, Pentecostal in the 1990s. Both worlds, for all their differences, believed the biblical story was true. Then I stepped into a third world, the world of modern Western discourse, where the Bible is treated as cultural artifact while its moral categories are still wielded as weapons.

That contradiction became impossible to ignore.

Through my work with BabelReport, I have been engaged in a recovery project: translating the ancient story for a modern audience, showing how it still speaks to our deepest questions, demonstrating that it has not been rendered obsolete by the passage of time.

The story is worth fighting for. Not because it belongs to Christians (though Christians have been its primary custodians for two millennia) but because it belongs to all humanity. It is the story of our origins, our fractures, our hopes for reconciliation. It is the story that explains why we care about justice, why we condemn hatred, why we use words like "antisemitism" with such moral seriousness.

If you are someone who has walked away from faith but still finds yourself using words like "justice," "dignity," and "antisemitism," I invite you to consider where those words come from. Not as a gotcha, not as a trap, but as a genuine inquiry.

What world gave birth to those words? What story made them meaningful? And what would it take to recover that story, not necessarily as dogma, but as a framework for making sense of the world?

You may find, as I did, that the story has been waiting for you all along.

The story is there, waiting. It has been waiting for a long time. And it will continue to wait, patiently and persistently, until we are ready to hear it again.

Because the God who pursues does not give up easily.

And the words we cannot stop using are His way of reminding us that the story is not over.

Here is what strikes me as most remarkable in all of this: we live in a culture that wants to pick the fruit from the biblical tree while insisting that the tree itself does not exist, that its roots are fiction, that the soil it grows in is mythology. We want justice without a Judge. We want human dignity without the image of God. We want to condemn antisemitism without acknowledging that "Semite" only means something because Shem was real, because Noah was real, because the story that connects all of humanity as one family under one Creator is real.

You can do this for a while. The fruit can sit on the table for a season, looking fresh and appealing. But eventually, cut off from the tree, the fruit withers. The words lose their force. The moral categories collapse under their own weight.

And we are left holding vocabulary we can no longer define, making judgments we can no longer justify, reaching for a story we claim not to believe.

Perhaps it is time to admit that the tree is still there. That the roots go deeper than we thought. And that the fruit we cannot stop eating came from somewhere after all.