War in the Hebrew Bible: A Study in the Ethics of Violence.

• Author: Carroll, Robert P.

The Bible is a book shot through with narratives and discourses about war and is often dominated by images and metaphors drawn from the vocabularies of battles and other military stratagems. The deity YHWH is represented as "a man of war" and also as the one who "makes wars cease to the end of the earth." Summonses to war and calls to peace frequently occur throughout the Bible and the modern reader is often non-plussed as to how to read the book today in terms of its advocacies of war and peace, Apart from Roy Hobbs's A Time for War: A Study of Warfare in the Old Testament (Wilmington, Del.: Michael Glazier, 1989), it is difficult to think of a book which adequately deals with the subject of war in the Bible. So it is good to be able to welcome Susan Niditch's new book on the complex and complicated topic of war in the Bible.

Niditch (of the Religion Department at Amherst College) explores seven ideologies of war which she finds in the Hebrew Bible and traces their trajectories in and beyond the Bible. The book is short for such a complex subject, but Niditch provides an illuminating and stimulating reading of the biblical text. The seven ideologies of war discussed may be summed up as follows: (1) the sacred ban (herem) is an act whereby the enemy is devoted by means of slaughter to YHWH, because it is his portion or sacrifice; (2) the sacred ban as part of YHWH's justice in rooting out the evil and impurity brought about by the enemy which damages the pure relationship between YHWH and Israel; (3) the priestly ideology of war in Num. 31; (4) the bardic tradition of war (that is, war as part of a literary pattern of the Bible); (5) war as part of the ideology of tricksterism in the Bible whereby victory is gained through trickery (as in the stories of Samson or the subjugation...