The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls: The ... - josephprestonkirk

216 THE BIBLICAL AND QUMRANIC CONCEPT OF WAR
Joshua, and Judges, relating to a premonarchic era. This agenda also
includes a study of Israel’s construction of Yahweh as a warrior god.
The second approach is theological, and this may in turn be divided
into descriptive and prescriptive programs, the former aiming to define the
theology of warfare expressed in the Hebrew Bible, the latter dealing with
the problem of integrating that theology into a systematic Christian theology
of war. The experiences of the twentieth century have cast a shadow
over the Hebrew Bible’s celebration of war, and a number of studies have
been devoted to confronting this problem, though perhaps not as many as
a responsible theological discipline might be expected to generate.
Let us first deal with the historical agenda. It appears to have been
Friedrich Schwally who coined the term “holy war” to describe an institution
that expressed, in his view, the cultic nature of much of ancient
Israel’s warfare. 5 The investigation of a second agenda, Yahweh’s character
as a warrior god, was initiated rather later, by Henning
Fredriksson. 6 Both lines of study have been vigorously pursued in the
last forty years, prompted by the influential monograph of Gerhard von
Rad. 7 Von Rad’s study is a convenient starting point for our survey.
Von Rad attempted an account of the institution of holy war as it
evolved through Israel’s and Judah’s history. In his view, holy war originated
as an amphictyonic institution, as an activity of a sacral tribal
league: it was defensive, not aggressive, and fought by a militia, not by a
professional standing army. The major features of this institution were
the designation of a charismatic leader bearing the divine “spirit,” the
sounding of the trumpet, the call to the warriors not to fear, the assurance
of Yahweh’s presence, the sacred ban (h[erem) on booty, annihilation
of the enemy, and the final dispersal of the warriors to their tribes. As
several scholars had previously noted, the Hebrew Bible presents warfare
as intrinsically bound up with Israelite religion, and von Rad located it at
the center of the covenant and the social structure of the nation. For him,
as for Wellhausen, the armed camp was Israel’s first “holy of holies.”
However, von Rad departed from his predecessors in recognizing this
“institution” as somewhat idealized. As elsewhere in the Old Testament,
von Rad found here not unmediated historical data, but the written form
of “traditions” that enshrined “Israel’s faith.” Thus, in his view, while the
premonarchic tribal league had conducted its communal warfare as a
5. Friedrich Schwally, Der heilige Krieg im alten Israel (Leipzig: Dieterich, 1901).
6. Henning Fredriksson, Yahwe als Krieger: Studien zum alttestamentlichen Gottesbild (Lund:
Gleerup, 1945).
7. Gerhard von Rad, Der heilige Krieg im alten Israel (1951; 3d ed., Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1958).