When the Gods Make War

“In every generation they rise to destroy us,

and the Holy One, blessed be He, saves us from their hands.”

— The Passover Haggadah

The conflict currently pitting Israel against Iran and its proxies extends far beyond the military and geopolitical framework in which some persist in confining it. The semiology deployed by both parties — the names given to operations, the expressions chosen to announce or respond to them — reveals a battle that is eminently religious and metaphysical in character, in which each military act claims to inscribe itself within the order of scriptural fulfillment. Where military operation names ordinarily obey a logic of propaganda designed to impress the enemy, the rhetorical ornamentation here plays an entirely different role, standing at the very heart of the war apparatus. It constitutes its essence, helping to explain why this conflict unfolds on a register altogether different from strictly diachronic, historical time.

At least four expressions have concentrated this logic since the fighting resumed its intensity: Al-Aasf Al-Ma'koul, the name given by Hezbollah on Wednesday to its missile operations; Al-Saa Saaein, the message broadcast in Arabic by the Israeli army as its reply; and, before that, Rising Lion and Roaring Lion, names of the two Israeli operations against Iran in 2025 and 2026. Each of these expressions summons a scriptural memory so precise, and so consciously chosen, that it is difficult to read them as mere military labels.

“Al-Aasf al-Ma'koul”

In designating the name Al-Aasf Al-Ma'koul to characterize its operations, Hezbollah draws from Surah 105 of the Quran — the Surah of the Elephant — which recounts the fate of Abraha, a Christian king of Yemen whose army had marched on Mecca to destroy the Kaaba. The divine punishment was total and of an almost aesthetic brutality in its radicality: the soldiers were reduced to the state of “devoured leaves”, of dry residue that the wind scatters leaving nothing behind, not even the dignity of a body to mourn. The reference is clear and direct, designed to fortify Hezbollah's public. The Islamist party plays explicitly on the register of instinctive and immediate collective memory, foregrounding a vengeful punitive character in the face of the harshness of the Israeli offensive.

What deserves noting, beyond the notoriety of the reference, is the precision of the analogy it constructs. For Abraha was no ordinary enemy. He was a Christian allied with Byzantium, who believed himself the bearer of a civilizing mission and whose army possessed elephants — a symbol of technological power for the era. His defeat illustrates in the Quran that material force, however impressive, does not prevail against divine will. The parallel with Israel — a technologically advanced state, backed by the United States in its war against Iran — is constructed to be read effortlessly, as self-evident, in the circles where this discourse circulates.

“Al-Saa Saaein”

The Israeli reply is eloquent. By broadcasting in Arabic the message Al-Saa Saaein — “double the measure” —, the Israeli army chooses a classical Arabic expression that resonates simultaneously across several registers: that of the Arabic language itself, where the expression designates the principle of proportional or doubled retaliation; and the biblical register, where the Hebrew séah — linguistic and semantic cousin of the Arabic saa — runs through Scripture as a unit of measurement for grain but also, and above all, as a metaphor for divine retribution. Two punishments for one.

This biblical root merits attention. Isaiah proclaims that Jerusalem has received double for all her sins (40:2). Jeremiah announces that God will render double to enemy nations (16:18). The Apocalypse of John reprises the same structure: “Render to her double according to her works” (18:6). And behind all these texts looms the Talmudic principle of middah keneged middah — «measure for measure» — a foundation of Jewish juridical and theological thought, according to which justice functions by returning exactly what was inflicted, or doubling it. In responding in Arabic to its adversaries within this shared scriptural register, the Israeli army is in effect saying: we know your texts, we know their equivalents in ours, and it is in this common depth that we answer you.

Metaphysical and eschatological war in all its splendor, compounded by an archetypal mimetic violence that corresponds perfectly to the model defined by René Girard.

The maneuver does not seek to escape the framework proposed by the adversary but to occupy it from within and reverse its logic — which is, as experts would agree, in a war of signs, the most effective form of counter-attack.

“Rising Lion”, “Roaring Lion”

The name given to the operation against Iran's nuclear program on June 13, 2025 — Rising Lion, the Lion that Rises — already found its direct scriptural origin in the oracle of Balaam, in the book of Numbers (24:8-9).

The scene constitutes in itself a narrative device of remarkable coherence: Balaam was a foreign seer summoned by Balak, king of Moab, to curse Israel. Three times he attempted it, three times his mouth, despite himself and against his will, pronounced a blessing. It is in this third forced blessing that the verse is found: “He couches, he lies down like a lion, like a lioness; who will rouse him?”

This narrative device accomplishes something theologically singular: it has the invincibility of Israel attested by the very mouth of the enemy who wished to curse it. Far from being proclaimed by those who possess it, power imposes itself on those who hoped to deny it. Better still, through them.

To name a military operation after this verse is, therefore, to summon this precise archetype: we were lying down, we are rising, and it is for our enemies themselves to acknowledge that none can prevent us.

It was Benjamin Netanyahu who declared that he personally chose the name of the operation in reference to this prophecy. The fact that the head of government publicly assumes reading his action within the register of biblical fulfillment speaks volumes about the prophetic reach he wishes to give to the war — no doubt to legitimize it religiously — but also about the moment Israel is traversing and about the way its leaders conceive, or at least present, their relationship to history.

One must add a layer of reading that has been little highlighted: the lion before a rising sun was the emblem of imperial Iran, the one on Persian flags before 1979. In naming its operation thus, Israel kills two birds with one stone. It addresses its own citizens with a biblical reference — and simultaneously sends Iranians a message that invokes their own national memory, specifically that of the royal Persia erased by the Islamic Republic. It says, implicitly, that the lion rises not against Iran but against the mullahs' regime, and that something of ancient Persia perhaps stands on this side of the border.

Semiotic warfare here reaches its paroxysm. Staggering.

The textual inclusion with Jacob's blessing to his son Judah in Genesis (49:9) — “Judah is a lion's cub [...] he crouches, he lies down like a lion; who will rouse him?” — creates a prophetic continuity embracing the entire Torah: the lion of Judah is the royal lineage, it is Jerusalem whose coat of arms still bears the passant lion, it is in the Christian tradition the «Lion of the tribe of Judah» of the Apocalypse (5:5), the one who rises after having seemed vanquished. This symbolism activates the notion of a power held in reserve that chooses its moment — the crouching lion is not a weak lion, it is a lion that waits, ready to spring upon its prey in due time.

It is hardly surprising, in this context, that the new Israeli offensive should be titled “Roaring Lion”. Roaring Lion — in Hebrew Sha'agat Ha'Ari — is thus the second of its kind within a deliberate sequence, a narrative progression drawn directly from biblical leonine symbolism. Balaam's crouching lion rises, then roars before striking. The roar, in the prophets, is not a metaphor for anger: it is the harbinger of the divine act itself. Amos 3:8: “The lion has roared; who will not fear?” Joel 4:16: “The Lord will roar from Zion.” Netanyahu has constructed a sequence in two scriptural acts. The common thread? The punitive, vindicative expedition. And millennialism.

Purim and the Deliverance of the Jewish People

The temporal dimension of these events also deserves particular attention. The exchanges of missiles and messages unfold in the days immediately following Purim, celebrated this year on March 2 and 3, 2026. The coincidence alone would merit pause, concentrating as it does within a few days the entire paradox of the Persian-Israeli relationship.

Purim commemorates the deliverance of the Jewish people from an extermination project devised by Haman, minister of the Persian king Ahasuerus — a project aimed at “destroying, killing and annihilating all Jews, young and old, women and children, in a single day”, in the very terms of the Book of Esther. The story takes place in Shushan, present-day Susa, in Iran. The festival thus refers not to some vague Oriental reminiscence, but to nothing less than a threat of annihilation emanating from Persia itself, foiled by a woman's cunning and turned against its instigator. Haman is hanged on the gallows he had prepared for Mordecai. The narrative structure is that of the perfect reversal — and it is precisely for this reason that Purim is called the Festival of Lots: Haman had drawn lots to choose the date of the massacre, and it is that very lot which turned against him.

That hostilities resume with renewed intensity in the week following this festival — whose narrative has staged, for twenty-five centuries, Jewish survival in the face of a Persian threat — may not be the fruit of deliberate calculation. But in a conflict where both parties have demonstrated such refined mastery of religious semiology, the hypothesis of chance is the least convincing. And even if it were chance, those reading these events from within the concerned traditions will not fail to interpret it as a sign — which, in the realm of eschatological wars, amounts to exactly the same thing.

What the calendar adds to the picture is a depth that ordinary geopolitical analyses struggle to grasp: that the confrontation surpasses the conflict between two states or two ideologies and pits against each other two wounded memories, whose dates of commemoration overlap with a tragic precision. The Persia that was the empire of Haman is today the empire of Khamenei — and Purim, which celebrated an ancient victory over an ancient enemy, finds itself celebrating, in this new context, something that is not yet resolved.

The Shadow of Armageddon

What sets this conflict apart from ordinary wars — and this may be its most troubling characteristic for anyone still hoping for a political resolution — is that its principal protagonists do not reason in terms of tactical victory or negotiable balance of power, but in terms of historical finality and eschatological fulfillment. Khamenei's theocracy is architectured around the doctrine of the Mahdi, the hidden twelfth imam whose return will bring history to an end. According to anthropological readings of this tradition, this return is conditioned by a preceding great chaos, so that the destruction of Israel goes beyond a mere political objective, insofar as it is presented as a theological condition for eschatological fulfillment, an investment in an end of times whose promoters hope to accelerate the advent.

In national-religious Judaism, and even more so in the currents of American evangelism that constitute a decisive support base for Israel, current events are often read through the prism of Ezekiel 38-39 — the prophecy of Gog and Magog, a coalition of nations from the North and East that rises against Israel gathered in its land, and whose defeat manifests divine glory before all nations.

What makes this collision of two eschatologies so perilous is what Hannah Arendt would no doubt have recognized as the fundamental temptation of the political thinker turned prophet: to exit the domain of human action — irreversible certainly, but unpredictable and plural, always open to the unexpected — and enter that of necessity, where everything is already written and the actor's role is simply to conform. A war experienced as the fulfillment of a written destiny knows neither limit nor compromise, because stopping before the prophetic term would be to betray the prophecy itself. This is no doubt, in another language and with other references, what Pascal glimpsed in his time: the man who believes he acts in the name of God is capable of the extremities that the merely selfish man would never reach, because the selfish man, at least, still has something to lose.

The Middle East now faces two eschatologies acting as two forces launched toward each other with the intent of total annihilation. The mastery of sacred texts has not been placed at the service of peace, which is also present in those same texts, but at the service of war. The same Numbers that contain the lion's oracle also contain prescriptions on mercy. The same Quran that evokes the devoured straw is traversed by verses on reconciliation. The choice of texts is therefore also a choice about what one wishes those texts to be — and that choice belongs entirely to the men who make it.

The oracle of Balaam is perhaps, in this perspective, the most accurate image of the situation. Balaam had come to curse and he blessed — not out of virtue, but because something in the reality before him resisted the malediction he was commanded to pronounce. But the oracle also contains a question that no one ever asks seriously enough: “Who will rouse the lion?” — a rhetorical question in the text, meaning that none can, but which in the reality of the current conflict designates precisely what the belligerents are doing, each in their own way: provoking the adversary's lion, compelling it to rise, and finding themselves then in the position of those who have set in motion a movement they no longer control.

Which is not without evoking another religious symbol, Armageddon, the end of times, common to both traditions at war, each seeing in it the sign of a return — whether of the Demiurge, whether of the Mahdi. Unfortunately for those who watch, powerless and beneath a deluge of fire, this epic struggle outside of time between two millenarian deliriums.

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