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

220 THE BIBLICAL AND QUMRANIC CONCEPT OF WAR
independence, focus on divine activity. In this process, ancient mythical
motifs are resurrected. Hanson and others have tended to stress that
divine initiative is strongly emphasized. But it is important to recognize
that human conflict is not as a rule excluded, even if it may sometimes
extend only as far as collecting booty, as in Ezek 38:21–22; 39:9:
I will summon the sword against Gog in all my mountains, says the Lord
Yahweh; the swords of all will be against their comrades. With pestilence
and bloodshed I will enter into judgment with him, and I will pour down
torrential rains and hailstones, fire and sulfur, upon him and his troops and
the many peoples that are with him.…
Then those who live in the towns of Israel will go out and make fires of
the weapons and burn them—bucklers and shields, bows and arrows, handspikes
and spears—and they will make fires of them for seven years.
In Daniel 12 the heavenly prince Michael apparently defeats the “king of
the north,” and no human intervention is envisaged. By contrast, 1 Enoch
90:19, reflecting the early victories of the Maccabean militia, envisages
human warfare: “I saw, and behold, a great sword was given to the sheep
[the righteous], and the sheep proceeded against the beasts of the field
[the wicked] in order to kill them.” Such texts demonstrate that the theology
of divinely led human warfare was sustained throughout the
Second Temple period, just as the evidence of 1 Maccabees shows that
the institution of holy war was also recalled. Because the Harvard school
accepts an early dating for the mythological poetry describing Yahweh as
warrior, it represents the motif in apocalyptic texts as a revival. However,
the idea that mythological ideas gave way to historical ideas in a simplistic
sequence is improbable. It may be more reasonable to suggest, rather
than an artificial revival of myth, a much greater continuity of mythical
ideas about Yahweh as essentially a warrior Deity. The same is possibly
true of military activity itself: the fact that Judah did not itself fight any
national wars from the sixth century onward does not mean that its experience
of warfare disappeared since, as mentioned earlier, Jews continued
to perform military service for their imperial rulers, no doubt in the name
of their own Deity, the one who had, after all, chosen Cyrus (and his successors)
as the anointed kings of Judah. 15 Ideologies of “holy war” and
“Yahweh war” cannot necessarily be confined to an “early” period.
15. See Isa 45:1, which indeed also reflects the ideology of Yahweh as a military ruler
of the world, with Cyrus his lieutenant. It is not really remarkable that among the
deities criticized in the Hebrew Bible, Mazda is never mentioned; Persian kings are
never treated with disdain, nor are there any oracles against Persia in the considerable
number of oracles against foreign nations in the prophetic literature. It is remarkable
that scholarship has so infrequently sought to understand and explain this.