There are few words more abused in the English language than “love.” The word has been manipulated and twisted to serve every racial and ideological agenda imaginable. Normally, the modern American uses the word to refer to some kind of indulgence: to “love” me means to “let me do what I want.” But as it stands, today, it largely means sex, or the immediate feeling of pleasure.

The Old Testament, never read and never understood, has a different view of love. Far from the saccharine and indulgent connotation deriving from American vulgarity, it is an intense, powerful word that, if followed seriously, would lead to revolution.

Love in the Old Testament is denoted by the word “chesed” or hesed, where we derive the word Hasidic. It refers to a devotion towards God that is itself mediated by a Covenant. God’s love for man is another matter, but this specific idea of love, that of man for God, exists not as some serpentine myth about “devotion without content,” but the reality of God’s presence in doctrine, sealed by the covenant and its strictures. As man is a limited being, chesed is the response of man to God’s love, or his law and presence, and this response is steadfastness and zeal for the law and the doctrine.

chesed is a bond: it can be a bond that unites man to man in the covenant community: chesed is the love that binds members of the church together, not in indulgence, but in devotion to Gods law, not out of any respect for man, but because man is God’s. In Arabic, the word for hospitality is chasada, the bond of man to man, family to family within the religion and the ethic unity.

There is no love without doctrine. There is no love without law, there is no love without God. Love is that bond which is crated by the covenant, providing the individual man with many rights and duties under the law. But it needs to be restated that chesed never refers to some indulgent devotion to anyone whatever: it only refers to the covenant community. As there is no love without doctrine, there is no love without a communal agreement with that doctrine. In fact, the way that Hebrew scholar Norman Snaith sees it (cf. his Distinctive Ideas of the Old Testament), kindness is radically secondary to the zeal for the law. Kindness and other forms of that amorphous arsenal of feelings that make up bourgeois “Christian” ethics, do not exist unless the two agents at issue are members of the covenant community. There is one law within, another without. Kindness is secondary both to loyalty and steadfastness to the covenant and the strictures of that covenant. It matters not if we speak of the Old or the New covenant. There is no abstraction here: there is no “all” or “everyone,” ethics refers to the loyalty to the law and the willing ness to suffer for it. There is no loyalty if the heretic is told that his system is fine, or that heretics or atheists are confirmed in their positions of authority. Kindness exists only after loyalty and zeal for truth, outside of these kindness is just a feminine indulgence in the void. The very substance of American, middle class “values,” meaningless and fraudulent, masking their loathing for truth of for any law over their own desires.

In fact, Snaith makes a point (cf. pps 115-130) holds that the word chesed is rarely used without reference either to mishpat (justice) or emeth (truth), and in fact, all three of these words are often found in the same context, largely pointing to the same thing. Hence, love, far from the views of the average female college student, refers to the zeal for the truth of God and his covenant within a context of justice. It means nothing more than that. Truth, justice, and righteousness are in reality cognates of each other, and all of these exist in a highly contextualized universe: the law of God and its manifestation on earth, namely the church.

The entire purpose of the prophets was to reconnect chesed with the worship of the Temple and the behavior of the community. The fact is that worship–then and now–has nothing to do with chesed. Worship without chesed is faulty worship: it is the temple service where the Pharisees demand God’s blessing on their personal interest. In crucifying Christ, the Jews thought they were doing God’s work. But what they were really doing is protecting their own power against the fulfillment of the Law that they observed with their mouth, though their hearts were far from God.

In fact, the very adultery of the wife of Hosea is what provides this great saint, evangelist and prophet, a completely new take on the concept of chesed. For him as for us, the whore is the perfect icon fo the church, the community that sees worship for their own ends and purposes, to manipulate God like sone cosmic vending machine to bless their own self interest and bourgeois values. Hosea’s harshness is matched only by his heartbreak: for the harsh words of the prophets derive from their love, strictly considered, for God and his commands. Both Hosea and Amos use chesed to refer to steadfastness; the opposite of this is whoredom, which, in their times, had become a way of life. The rich bought and sold the poor, then went to the Temple to make sure that God would be placated and not punish them for their “economic realism.” Hence, the worship of Ba’al was introduced into the temple by stealth, and the prophets reacted with their characteristic denunciation, that which would be called “a lack of love,” ironically, by our ecumenists. Ba’al was the principle–made explicit by Hosea–of the whore, not merely because the Ba’alim were worshiped with temple prostitutes, but because this pseudo-religion asked nothing of its adherents but sacrifice: the purpose was to put the god’s blessing on their wealth and status. Hence, as Israel became wealthier and wealthier, as the commercial centers fo the Levant teemed with Israelites, it was only natural that the Ba’alim would be followed and imitated, and hence, caused God to raise up His prophets, then and now. It was for this reason that Jeremiah denounced the Temple priesthood as a “den of robbers” (Jer 7:2), who served the middle class merchants rather than the Law of God. In today’s twisted language, Jeremiah would be condemned for his “lack of love.”

What becomes a graphic icon of the prophets is the time of the wilderness. Amos, Hosea and their later followers speak quite a bit about Israel’s time in the wilderness. This was a good time because they were completely dependent on God, their wants were few and survival was the only real concern. Hence, the corrosive world of capitalism and mercantilism was far off, and hence, the love of God was central to their lives, despite their seemingly endless complaining. Once Israel became settled, and adopted the realism of the middle class and the mentality of the merchant society, the prophets were called to shock them back into godliness by harsh rhetoric and even killing, as in the case of Elijah.

In Amos’ position, the rule of the Ba’alim was so overpowering that even the plagues sent by God to the Israelites to reignite their chesed were unavailing. No amount of torture could bring these corrupted people to their senses. The Temple was there for their interests and their purposes, God was our instrument, as they so pompously said to the prophets. Only invasion and dispersal brought a fraction of the remnant back to their senses. By the time of Isaiah (a court aristocrat himself) only a remnant can be saved, as the mass of Israel has long abandoned Yahweh. It is no surprise that the Talmud of the rabbis not only has Christ burning in Hell, but the prophet Isaiah as well.

The main message of the prophet, and the message that led to their doom and exclusion, was that there is no chesed without emeth. There is no love without truth, and, of course, no truth without doctrine, or without God. That was the last thing the middle classes in Israel wanted to hear, so puffed up by their Phoenician-style trading empire. In fact, Isaiah defines emeth and chesed not so much as a limp “piety,” but as a strong and manly adherence to the law regardless of worldly consequences. It was Isaiah that refused all foreign alliances of Israel on the grounds that such alliances would lead to the invasion of foreign gods. Israel should rely on God alone. In vain did the Old Believers say this to Emperor Peter I, who believed that “becoming European” and building a “modern state” would make Russia happy. The tsarist system, dependent on Peter’s example, ended in Marxist revolution, Israel ended in heresy, class war and dispersal into Babylon. God, not foreign policy “realism,” makes a people great. Love is fidelity to the law no matter what the external consequences. This is the mark of the remnant then and now, and is the sine qua non of our salvation.