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

218 THE BIBLICAL AND QUMRANIC CONCEPT OF WAR
served as a paradigm event in shaping biblical accounts of divine warfare,
and in all such cases Yahweh alone undertook the fighting. But it is not
clear whether Lind regards himself as offering a literary or a historical
analysis; nor whether Israel and Judah should be imagined as having
fought any wars with a religious ideology attached. It may indeed be true
that there exists within the Hebrew Bible a prominent theological strand in
which the Deity alone fights. But such a strand is only one of several.
A more valuable contribution to the discussion has been made by Sa-
Moon Kang. 10 He not only provides a thorough survey of the ancient
Near Eastern background, but also discusses two important distinctions:
one is between “holy war” and “Yahweh war,” an issue already pressed
in an earlier study by Gwilym Jones. 11 In respect of holy war in the history
of Israel and Judah, he modifies von Rad’s account: there was no
institution of a “Yahweh war” until the monarchy, when it began to be
introduced as a dimension of battle. The exodus and conquest narratives
have been subsequently shaped under the influence of that idea. Despite
these more recent studies, von Rad’s articulation of an essentially
Deuteronomic concept of holy war remains essentially convincing and,
as we have seen, was influential on Hasmonean propaganda and, of
course, on the authors of the Qumran War Scroll. What is unclear is the
relationship of this literary concept to historical practice, and the historical
context for the creation of the Deuteronomic idea.
The “Divine Warrior”
Research on the idea of Yahweh as a warrior god begins with
Fredriksson’s taxonomy of the martial images of Yahweh under several
headings, such as leader of a human and a heavenly army and as individual
warrior with various kinds of weapons. He also carefully listed the
vocabulary associated with these images. 12 Frank Cross, however, took a
further step with his thesis, and like so many of his other theses, it was
pursued by subsequent Harvard-trained scholars. 13 Cross identifies the
theme of Yahweh’s martial character in what he regarded as the earliest
10. Sa-Moon Kang, Divine War in the Old Testament and in the Ancient Near East (BZAW
177; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1989).
11. Gwilym Jones, “‘Holy War’ or ‘Yahweh War’?” VT 25 (1975): 642–58.
12. Fredriksson, Yahwe als Krieger.
13. Frank M. Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1973), 91–111, “The Divine Warrior”; and 112–44, “The Song of
the Sea and Canaanite Myth.”