“I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth” (Psalm 121:1-2). Thus recited the attendees of Ravid Chaim ben-Tzeela’s eighth-day naming ceremony. Born amid bloodshed in the hills of Samaria, little Ravid Chaim (whose name means “jewel of life”) will certainly need the help that only comes from the Lord, Yahweh.

Since the time of Abraham, Jewish boys have been circumcised on the eighth day (Genesis 17:12) and, traditionally, named at the same time (Luke 1:59-63). But young Ravid Chaim’s ceremony was unusual. For one thing, he could not be circumcised “due to medical complications,” the Jewish News Syndicate described discreetly. Doctors performed an emergency C-section to deliver the boy in serious condition, although his condition is now stabilized. “Apparently, he was 50 minutes without oxygen,” CBN Middle East Bureau Chief Chris Mitchell remarked on “Washington Watch.”

Ravid Chaim’s naming ceremony was also unusually somber due to the absence of his mother, Tzeela Gez, after whom he was named. “A 30-year-old mother of three,” as the Jerusalem Post described her, Mrs. Gez could not be present at her son’s naming ceremony because she is dead. Her husband Hananel was driving her to the hospital to give birth, when a radical Islamist terrorist shot through a security fence, mortally wounding her and injuring her husband.

“It’s hard to think of a more tragic ending to her life,” Mitchell reflected. “What could have been a celebration, another joy in their family — and she was tragically murdered.”

The attack occurred on Route 446 near Peduel junction in Samaria. This location is approximately eight miles east of the ancient city of Aphek and 14 miles west of Shiloh, placing it in the likely vicinity of the biblical Ebenezer (1 Samuel 4:1, 5:1, 7:12). The Peduel settlement is also the site of Israel’s Lookout, an observation post with a view of the entire coastal plain, which Samaria Governor Yossi Dagan was planning in February to rename “Trump’s Lookout.”

Dagan’s government quickly established a protest mourning tent at the site of this terror attack, thus “sending a message that they’re not leaving — if anything, they’re going to plant their roots even deeper into this biblical heartland,” said Mitchell. “The prophets said of old — Isaiah and Jeremiah — that the people of Israel would return one day, and after 2,000 years, after the dispersion, after 70 A.D., the Jewish people are coming back.”

In particular, Mitchell explained, Israeli settlers in Judea and Samaria believe they are fulfilling prophecies about Israel’s return from exile. The name “Peduel” means “redeemed of God,” evoking Isaiah’s prophecy, “And the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with singing” (Isaiah 35:12, 51:11).

“Bible-believing Christians can stand with them by using the right terminology, of referring to this as Judea and Samaria,” agreed Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, “and not the West Bank, as the international community does, which really only seeks to incite and inflame the division in those areas.”

On Thursday, Israel positively identified Gez’s killer as Na’el Samara. When soldiers confronted him on Saturday in the nearby town of Bruqin, Samara ran toward them, wearing a bag on his back and shouting “Allahu Akbar.” The soldiers shot him dead on the spot and discovered an M-16 rifle in his bag, which Israel believes is the weapon used to kill Gez.

While no terror group has taken credit for Gez’s killing, Hamas spokesman Abu Obeida praised Samara as “heroic.” Let this barbaric act stand as Hamas’s definition of heroism: shooting an unarmed, pregnant woman through her car window.

For his part, Hananel Gez uttered his own heartfelt lament at the tent afterward erected at the crime scene. “My precious Tzeela, I love you so much. It hurts that you’re not here with me,” he cried. “We are here so your murder won’t be in vain. … We want to ensure that no one ever suffers like we, the Gez and Aviav families, are suffering now.”

“This is just one of many terror attacks that happen … regularly there in Judea and Samaria — over 6,000 incidents in the last year or so, anywhere from throwing rocks to a shooting attack like this,” Mitchell related. “The residents of Judea and Samaria — this is the biblical heartland of Israel … yet the world condemns them as settlers, usurpers, colonists. They’re just returning to their biblical heartland, their homeland for more than 3,000 years.”

The violence perpetrated against Israeli settlers has less to do with their location than with their ethnicity. Just over a week after Gez’s death, a pro-Palestine activist shot and killed two Israeli diplomats as they left an event at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C.

The violent hatred towards the Jews — or anyone identified as God’s people — extends all the way back to the curse, when the Lord God pronounced eternal enmity between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent (Genesis 3:15). Throughout Scripture, characters identified as the seed (or “offspring”) of the serpent murder or try to murder the seed of the woman. Thus, Cain murdered Abel (Genesis 4:8), Pharaoh threw Israelite infants into the Nile River (Exodus 1:22), and Herod slaughtered the boys of Bethlehem (Matthew 2:16-18).

Yet Scripture identifies the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent not by their parentage, but by their behavior, which is ultimately determined by the will of God (Romans 9:6-13). Moses illustrates this through a series of sibling rivalries: Cain and Abel (Genesis 4:8), Isaac and Ishmael (Genesis 21:9-10), and Jacob and Esau (Genesis 26:34-35). Characters who believe God’s word and receive his blessings are the seed of the woman, while characters who reject God’s word and receive his curses are the seed of the serpent.

In the Hebrew worldview, calling someone the “son of” another identified that person’s character. Thus, the Jews of Jesus’s day confidently asserted, “Abraham is our father,” identifying themselves with Abraham (John 8:39). Jesus then answered, “If you were Abraham's children, you would be doing the works Abraham did, but now you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. This is not what Abraham did. You are doing the works your father did. … You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires” (John 8:39-41, 44).

Even in Revelation, we find a woman and serpent in conflict, as John symbolically describes, “the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she bore her child he might devour it” (Revelation 12:4). Foiled in his plot to kill the child (Revelation 12:5), the dragon then tries and fails to destroy the woman (Revelation 12:13-16), before going off in fury “to make war on the rest of her offspring” (Revelation 12:17). The child is clearly Jesus (Revelation 12:5), the dragon is clearly Satan (Revelation 12:9), and the woman’s other offspring are clearly Christians, “those who keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus” (Revelation 12:17). The point is that the devil is throwing one final tantrum against God’s people because he has already been conquered (Revelation 12:9-12).

The tragic death of Tzeela Gez strangely evokes this biblical pattern. At the point of giving birth, this woman was struck down by an evil man who indulged the murderous inclinations of his father, the devil. This is not to endow this one terror attack with all the significance of a biblical pattern that crescendoed in Christ. But it does recall the pattern, reminding Christians that the serpent’s seed still perpetrate violence against people associated with the one true God.

More than that, the terror attack demonstrated in stark contrast the difference between barbarous ideologies of violence and the Bible-informed worldview that built Western civilization — including, by extension, the modern, democratic government of Israel — on the value of human life.

“This is not just another tragedy. It’s the face of evil, a mother bringing life into the world, struck down by terror,” declared Israeli government spokesman David Mencer. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself expressed shock at the attack. “This despicable event reflects exactly the difference between us — those who cherish and bring life — and the despicable terrorists whose life’s goal is to kill us and cut off lives.”

The intermittent warfare in Judea and Samaria is not only geopolitical, but spiritual. Therefore, Christians should not only engage politically, but also through prayer.

We serve the God who achieves good outcomes through the evil intentions of men (Genesis 50:20). Let us therefore pray for the Jewish settlers in Judea and Samaria, for those like Hananel Gez and Ravid Chaim ben-Tzeela who suffer violence at the hands of their enemies. Let us pray that their constant danger would not harden their souls in hatred — lest they become the seed of the serpent — but rather that it would drive them to the Lord, the source of their help.

Let us pray that God would pour out on these Jews “a spirit of grace and pleas for mercy,” as he foretold through Zechariah, so that, “when they look on me, on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him” (Zechariah 12:10). That is, let us pray that these Jewish settlers would repent of their sins and believe in Jesus (John 19:37).