a brief history of war in the hebrew bible and the jewish interpretive tradition

8/14/2019 A Brief History of War in the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish Interpretive Tradition

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ighting WordsReligion Violence, and the

Interpretation of Sacred Texts

Edited y

ohn Renard

Q3

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Fight in g words: reli gion. vio le n ce . and the interpretati on of sacr ed texts

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A Brief i st o r y of War in theHebrew Bible and the Jewish

Interpreti ve TraditionReuven Firestone

The Hebre w Bible is a collection of diverse kinds of literature, reflecting many wideranging aspects of human culture and society, and spanning up to a thousand year sof human exp erie nce .l W ithin this anthology one can find numerous stories depicting violence, battles, and all-out wars between indi vid uals, families, tribes, andnational communities. Some legal material also treats rules of behavior in war. Theseall reflect the so cial and politi ca l reality of the ancient N ear East, where war and violent acts were co nsidered to be normal, effective, and acceptable tool s within thepolitical repertoire available to family, tribal, and national leaderships. Israel

emerged as a community in the anc ient Ne ar East during a period when empireshad Iveakened and when the commu nities and peoples living in what is to day s Israel,Palestine, Lebanon , and Jordan comp ete d rather equally in the early Iron Age of thelate thi r teenth and l wel fth cent uries B.C. E. (Iron 1 . 3 War was not only necessary forsurvival; it was also permissible under certa in conditions for co m mu nity benefit.

The world views r eprese nt ed by the Hebrevv Bible all assume the overarchingguidance, or at least scrutiny, of a great monotheistic creator God. This is both theGod ofIsrael (Ge nesis 33 :20; Ex od u s 32 :27; and so on) and the God of the universe(Genesis 14:22 ; Psalms 115:15; and so on) who watches ov er and ofte n gUides orrequires certain behaviors in relations between humdn individuals and groups.The Hebre w Bible conveys the general message that, while war is not somethingto be glor ifie d and while peac e is the long-term goal for both Israel and the worldas a whole, war does ha \ e its place, may in fact be a divine obligation, and canbring benefit to the communit y of IsraeL Violence and wars between sectors ofthe larger Isra elite community and between Israel and other nations are oftenCOuched in terms of God s command, or at le ast God s sanction.

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3 HEUVEN FIHl ' :STONE

Despite the setbacks that Israel experienced through its violent conflicts withother communities, even including the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple at thehand of the Babylonian Empire in 586 B.C. E ., war and violence remained importantand respected instruments in the Israelite political arsenal during the biblicalpe r iod (roughly 1 0 0 0 - 3 0 0 B .C.E.) . Israel profited from war as well as suffered fromwar. War was simply a basic, normal, and often necessary part of the landscape ofthe ancient world, and Isr ael lived within it Even in visions of the End of Days,when the wolf shalI lay with the lamb, God shalI strike down the land with therod of his mouth and slay the wicked with the breath of his lips (Isaiah 11:1-9) -

It eventualIy became apparent, how ever, that what many had considered to bedivinely authorized fighting against Israel's enemies was no longer of real benefit By the lat e Second Temple Period (roughly 200 B . C . E . - 7 0 C.E.), the enemiesof Israel were no longer loc a l tribal communities or far-away empires, but Greekand Roman Empires that not only conquered and extorted resources, but remainedand colonized and simply could not be eliminated or removed from the Land ofIsrael. Rising up against t he Romans proved to be so catastrophic that an exegeticalprogram emerged among the survivors that redefined the meaning and applicability of divinely authorized war. Through interpretation, the rabbis of the Mishnaand Talmud virtually eliminated the option of divinely sanctioned war from applicability in contemporary history. War had become too dangerous, too self

5destructiv e This exegetical program remained in place for nearly two millennia

until , after the reestablishment of a Jewish polity in the twentieth century, a newexegetical layer, for some Jews, revived the notion of di vin e ly authorized war.

THE BIBLICAL CONTEXT

According to the epigraphic evidence, the association of gods with fighting andwar appears to have been a fundamental part of life among most if not all peoplesin the ancient Near East. Not only does the Hebrew Bible refer to most wars asdivinely authorized, but so do many extrabiblical texts ranging from the regionof ancient Canaan to Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Egypt , and points in between. TheMoabite Stone, for example, refers to battles of the Moabite King Mesha against

the Israelites in th e mid to late ninth century B.C.E. Written in the name of the

king, it associates the early weakness of Moab with the anger of the Moabite godKemosh against his land. King Mesha became victorious against Israel only afterKemosh commanded him to fight: And Kemosh said to me, 'Go, tak e Ne bo fromIsr aelI' So I w ent by night and fought against it from the break of dawn untilnoon, taking it and slaying all, seven thousand men, boys, women, girls and maidservants, for I had devoted them to destruction for [the god] Ashtar-Kemosh. AndI took from there the [ . . . J of Yahweh, dragging them before Kemosh . . . . Kemoshdrov e [the king ofIsraelJ out from before me. 6 Community identity in the ancient

WAR I N T lE H EBREW BIBLE

Near East was based on kinship , and large kinship groups such as tribes or tribalconfederations considered themselves to have special relationships with tribaldeiti es. Just as Kemosh was the tribal deity of th e M oabite people, i'.Iilkom wasthe tribal god of the Ammonites, Dag on the god of the Philistin es , Ash toret thegoddess of the Phoenicians, and so forth.7 When communities went to battleagainst their enemies, they hoped that their gods would support the m .

Some depictions of war couch authority for fighting in terms of divine sanctionor e ven command, as noted from t he M oabite text cited here. Sometimes the deityentered directly into the fray itself. The God of Israel, for example, defeated thearmies of the great and powerful Eg y pt wi thout any of the Israelites actually engaging in the battle (Exodus 14). And in the primary biblical text detailing th erules of military engagement, the priest is instructed to address the assembledtroopS before battle and assure them that it is the Lord your God who marcheswith you to do battle for you against your enemy, to bring you victory (Deuteronomy 20:4).

W ar was a common and oft-used instrument in the political tool kit of theancien t N ear East. All communities engaged in fighting when it would benefit thecommunity materially or in defense of the community when attacked. Duringthe periods d epicted in the Bible, suc h as those of the patriarchs and the judgesand the early kings, Israel played out its political life on a basicall y even political andmilitary playing field where you win some and you lose some. And becaus e theGod ofIsrael along with the gods of other tribal communities was such a ubiquitouspart oflife, fig hting and wi nning or losing wa s naturally a ssociated with the deities .\Vhen gods get involved in war, whether by personally engaging in the fray or bysanctioning or commanding aggression, we are discussing h oly war. Accordingto this definition , virtually all wars in the ancient Near East w ere holy wars.

In t is environment, when a great power such as Assyria, Babylonia, or Greec econquered smaller communities, the gods of the great powers tended to supersedeor merge with and dominate the deities of the local communities. Requiring offerings to the gods of the conquerors was a means of demanding political loyalty,and conquered peopl e may ha ve been w illing to do so for their own transcendent,as wel l as political, protection . M aking offerings to the gods of the conquerors was

therefore a wa y of hedging one's bets in a situation of stress caused by being conquered by a much more powerful political entity represented by a presumablymor': powe rful god or gods).

TRA : SITION TO MO N OTHEISM

In the earliest p eriod ofIsrael's existence, its tribal god, like the gods of other tribe sin the region, seems to have been known and referred to among the Israelites byhis personal name s Israel, ho we ver, eventually came to understand its deity not

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merely as a limited tribal god like those of its neighbors but as the one and on lygreat creator-God who was ma ster over the entire world and the heavens aroundit. With the transition from a polythei stic or henotheistic worldview to one of truemonotheism, it evidently seemed absurd or impossibl e for weak and vulnerablehumans to address an all-powerful God through a personal name ,9 so the personalname dropped out of use and God was referred to as the God" ( 'elohim) andofte n referenced simply as "our great Lord" (adonai)lO

t appears to be around this point in the evolving theological and cosmologicalperspectiv es of Israel that the old n otio n of a limited tr ibal god fighting on beh a lf

of the tr ib e was transformed into t he all-powerful God of the universe protectinghis "chosen" community.1I That is , the emotional particularity of imminence inthe tr ibal deity remained even after th e intellectual transition to universal transcendence of the great creator-God. Despite Go d 's universal nature, God thereforecontinued to have a spe cial rel atio nship with "Hi s people Israel " (Judges 11:23; IKings 8:49; a nd so on)12 Although the "God of I srae l" (Exodus 5:1, 24:10; Numbers16:9; and so on)13 became the one and only "God of all,"14 he retained a speCialrelationship with Israel that was unique and eternal and often defined in terms of"chosenness," even after the Israelites considered their God to be the God of allcreation. IS'

Fr om the perspective of the I sraelites themselves, this may not have appearedpr ob lem atic or contradictory, since they understood all of humanity to worship

the false gods of the old tribal system . Whether they made offerings to Milkom orto Marduk, all communities living in their world engaged in the same genericreligion of polytheism, a worldview and form of worship that was forbidden andhated by the God of Israel who was, simultaneously, the God of the universe .Because only Isr ael worshipped the one true God, it was th u s logical to presumeth at the one tr ue , universal God would pri v ileg e the one particular. human collective that recognized hi m .

A s the once-tribal th eology of Isr ae l evolved into a universal theology, it n at urally retained its ancient cultural assumptions about God's spec ial relationshipwith the people of Israel a nd God's special love for the only tribal community thatrecog nized the truth of monotheism and, therefore, of God. t was thus naturalfor the community to presume that God would continue to fight Isra el's battles.

After all, Israel was the only human collective that recognized God, even ifit wouldbackslide on a number of occasions and fail to fully realize God's will.

Because God p owered the entire world and nothing within it was beyond divinereach, when Israel was at tack ed or even defeated by foreign warriors it was assu medthat this, too, was God's design. Rather th an a s tatement of weakness of the GodofIsrael (who was simultaneously the universal God) at the hand of a more powerful foreign god, a defeat for Israel had to be understood as a s ign of God's angeragainst his chosen people (Leviticu s 26, Deuteronomy 28). Milita ry defeat was thus

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understood as di vin e punishment wro ught b y or at leas t acquiesced to by the one

areat God of the world."

In the second year of King Pekah son of Remaliah of Israel , Jotham son of KingUziiah ofJudah became king. He was twenl :,-five years old when he becam e king ,and he reigned sixteen years in Jerusalem . .. ~ did what was pleasing to th e Lord,just as his father Uzziah had done. How eve r, th e cu lt places were not removed; thepeople continued to sacrifice and make offerings at the cult places In those days,lhe Lord began to incite King Rezin of Aram and Pekah son of Remaliah against

Judah. (2 Kings 15:32 - 37)

Wb e n the N orthern Kin gd o m of Israel (also called Samaria and oft en referredto in the Bible also as Ep hraim ) was destroyed by the As syrians in 723 B.C.E.,prophets such as Isaiah and Hos ea were depicted as having prophesied its doom

as a resu It of it s collect ive sins.Israel is a ravaged vine and its fruit is lik e it. When his fruit was plentiful he mad ealtars aplenty; when his land was bountiful cu lt pillars abounded .. .. The inhabitantsofSatnar ia fea r for the cal f of the house of delusion; ind eed its peop le a nd priestlings,whose joy it once was, mourn over it for the glory that is departed from it. It tooshall be brought to Assyria as tribute to a patron king; Ephr ai m sha ll be chagrined,Israel sha ll be dismayed because of his plans. (Hosea 10:1 _6 16

The Southern Kingdom oOudah was destroyed by th e Babylonian E mpire a century and a half later, and this defeat was also considered to have been the work of

God."'edekiah was twenty-one years o ld when he became king , and he reigned elevenyears in Jerusalem. He did what was displeasing to the Lord his God. . he st iffenedhis neck and hardened his heart so as not to turn to the Lord God of Israel. All th eofficers of the priests and th e peo ple committed many trespasses , fo llowing a ll theabominabl e practices of th e nations The Lord God ofthe ir father s had sent wordto them through His mes sengers daily without fail, for He had pity on His peopleand His dwelling-place [Jerusalem]. But they mocked the messengers of God anddisdain ed His words and taunted Hi s prophclS un ti l the wrath of the Lord againstHis people grew beyond remedy . He therefore brought the king of the Cha ld eansupon them. ., They burned the House of God and tore down th e wall ofJe ru salem,burned down all its mansions, and cons igned all its preciOUS objects to de struction.Those who surv ived th e sword he [the Ch aldea n king ] exiled to Babylon , and they

20became his and his son's se rvant s. (2 Chron icles 36:11 - )

But some seventy years after the Babylonian destruction and subsequent exile,soon after the Persians destroyed the Babylonians and took over their holdings,God was depicted as causing the Persian king not only to bring the jew s back totheir homeland in jud ea, but to rebuild the jerusalem Temple: "The Lord rou se dthe spi rit of King Cyrus of Persia to issue a proclamation th roughout his realm by

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word of mouth and in writing, as follows: 'Thus said King C yrus of Persia: TheLord God of He aven has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and ha s chargedme with building im a House in Jerusalem, which is in Judah. An yo ne of youof all His people, the Lord his God be with him and let him go up 2 Chronicles36:22 -23).

JE'vVISH HOLY WAR IN HISTORY

According to the perspective expressed repeatedl y in the Hebrew Bible , the community of Israel succeeded in it s wars when it obeyed G od, while it failed in warwhen it was collectively disobedient. This assumptive observation may have developed as a means to retain the notion of God's special concern for Isra el simultaneously with the notion of God s universal role as the one great God of theworld. The formula in which obedience to God resulted in victory while disobedience caused Israel's defeat was one of a number of teleologic a l assumptionsembedded in the biblical view of history. Because of this powerful teleology inconjunction with the lack of corroborative sources for most historical descriptionin the Bible, it remains unclear whether many of the wars depicted there even occurred. In any event, the equation of obedience victory disobedience failurebecame an article of faith among many Jews during the Second Temple Period(536 B.C.E -70 C.E.) and beyond.

After the rebUilding of the Jerusalem Temple, we know little about Israelitehistory from the Bible itself, an d few extrabiblical sources provide much additionalinformation. As a client of the larger Persian Empire from the sixth to the fourthcenturies B.C.E., the Jewish province ofJudea (called Jehud by the Persians) certainly engaged in military activities, but we have Virtually no information aboutthem. Alexander conquered the Middle East in 330S B.C.E., but the unified empireof Alexander soon split into fluid and feuding Hellenistic dynasties whose majorcenters were in Ptolemaic Egypt and in Seleucid Syria. The next major war of Israelafter the Babylonian destruction was the Hasmonean Revolt against the SeleucidGreeks in the second century B.C.E., a historical event that was recorded and discussed in Jewish works that were not included in the canon of the He brew Bible l 7It was followed some time later by two T a j o rJewish revolts against the Romans

referenced by Josephus and Rabbinic literature, one in the first century C.E., andthe second some seventy years later. In all three, the leadership among the fighters(or their publicists, at the very least) believed that they we re engaged in hol y warsil) which their piety and obedience to God's will would bring eventua l victory. TheHasmonean Revolt resulted in Jewish victory, even against what seems to havebeen overwhelming odds. The following two wars, however, met with overwhelming defeat and catastrophic destruction.

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T HE HA SM O N E AN R EV OLT AG A I N ST T HE SELEUCIDS

The Hasmonean Revo lt occurred under the rule of the Seleucid king AntiochusIV r. 168-61 B.C.E.) and was le d by a priestly family called the Hasm one ans, alsoknown as the M accabees, w hose na m e was applied to four independent wr itingscalled the Books of the M accabees. The fi rst two of these w ritings treat the Hasmonean Revolt, while the third and fourth treat other issues. First Mac cabees isan an ony mous work wr itte n originally in Hebrew but preserved on ly in Gr ee k lS

It not es repeated ly how God favo red the ze alotry of the Jewish military uprising

agai nst th e p agan Hellenistic Syrians (the Seleucids), and suggests throughout thatGod assu red the success of the war because of the piety and heroic forti tu de of theHasmonean family. Despite many setbacks, including the deaths of the sons ofth e patriarchal M attathias wh o began the revolt, the piety , bravery, and perseverance of the fighters earned them ultimate collective success. Their leaders regularlyprayed to God for help before going into battle, e quating their fighting w ith thebattles of the biblical heroes 1 Maccabees 3A6-53; 4:8-11 , 30-34; 7:40-42). Oneunmistakably intended correspondence is the I Maccabees 3:55-56 parallel with therules of war outlined in Deuteronomy 20, referring specifically to the defermentsthat could be t aken to remove oneself from fighting. The work unmistakably ex-presses the conviction that divine favor would assure ultimate militar y success.

First M accabees rarely incl ude s outright di v ine miracles in the sense of direct

supernatural intervention,1 9 nor does it claim that its contemporary history was afu lfil lm ent o f pr ophesy. On the other hand, it describes events in a way that wouldsuggest the l ikeliho od of divine intervention, such as the agonizing death of theHelleni zing J ew ish priest Alcimus after he had begun demolition of part of the

Temple (9:54-56). The hero Judah is depicted as relying entirely on God s deliverance in his battles against ove rwhelming odds, exclaiming, for example, It is easyfor many to be delivered into the hands of few. Heaven sees no difference in gaining V c to r y through many or th r ough a few , because victory in war does not liein the weight of numbers , but rather strength comes from Heaven 1 Maccabeesp8-19) . First Maccabees expresses the conviction that divine favor assured theultimate milita r y success of the Hasmoneans , and the Hasmonean House didindeed prevail in what appears to have been an un balanced war that logic would

suggest should have ended in failure for the Judean fi ghters. The victory was celebrated with a ceremony to rededicate the n ewly purified Jer usalem Temple thathad b een d efi led by the pagans 1 M accabees 4A7-60 . A commemorative ceremonywas instituted thereafter as an annual religious celebration called Hanuk h meaning dedication.

Second Maccabees is an entirely different work, written by a Jew originally inGreek an d j n the style of Greek historians. Unlike the sober prose with occasional


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reports are notoriously unreliable, but it is lik ely that tens or perhaps even hundredsof thousands ofJews were killed in the fighting or died from starvation and illnessin the chaos that followed.

Outraged by Jewish defiance , the Romans obliterated the most notable historicmarkers by which Jews identified their land . Judea was renamed Syria-Palestina(meaning the Palestine of Syria), thus dropping Jew ish national identity fromofficial reference to the land. Jerusalem was depopulated of Jews, and its sacredshrine , which had already been destroyed in the Great Revolt of 66-70 C.E., Wasreplaced with a temple to Jupiter. The city was turned into a pagan Roman colonyand the ancient name by which the city had been known was replaced by Aelia Capitolina, after the Lmperor Titus Aelius Hadrianus. Jewish practices such as circumcision, Torah study, and even prayer were eVidently banned for a short period.

Most Jewish survivors in Judea were forced to emigrate because of a combination of Roman military and political restrictions and economic destitution. Byanact of the Roman Senate, it was decreed "that it is forbidden to all circumcisedpersons to enter and to stay within the territory of Aelia Capitolina; any personcontravening this prohibition shall be put to death."30 Many Jews moved to Persiaor Gali lee, and Jewish Judea never completely recovered until the modern period.The revolt is remembered in Jewish SOurces both in references to its military leader,Bar Kokhba, and to the location of his last stand in the City of Beitar. The ultimatefailure of the revolt and its disastrous results were of such importance to the evolving Rabbinic self-concept that it was listed in the Mishna along with four othergreat disasters that befell the Jews on the ninth day of the Jewish month of Av, thequintessential day of calamity and mourning for the Jewish peopleY

The Bar Kokhba Revolt was the last great Jewish military action until the adventof modern Zionism in the twentieth century.32 It was commanded by a militaryleader with the backing if not coleadership of Rabbi Akiba, arguably the mostimportant religious leader of his generation 33 The very name Bar Kokhba, meaning "son of the star," hints at the messianic associations with the revolt. Accordingto the Palestinian Talmud (Ta'anit 4:5)34 and Midrash Lamentations Rabba (2:4), 35Rabbi Akiba referred to Bar Kokhba as the Kin g M essiah (malka meshicha) andsupported his view with an interpretation of Numbers 24:17 that is understood bythe rabbis to be an unambiguous messianic statement 36

Rabbi Shim'on b. Yohai 37 taught: Akiba my teacher would expou nd N umbers 24:17):A star will step forth out o cob 38 as follows: Koz iba will step forth from Jacob.Rabbi Akiba, when he saw Bar Koziba , would say: "ihis is the King Messiah.''' R.Yochan a n b. Torta

39sa id to him: "Akiba, weeds will gr ow out of your cheeks and

th e son of David will still not have cornel"40

The star (kokhav) rising out of the Jacob was none other than Bar Kokhba, according to Rabbi Akiba , and the name Bar Kokhba in Aramaic means exactly that:

WAR 11'1 TIL E l-IE l lR E W l l l l l I .E

son of the st a r star man." M oreov er, the Edom referred to in the continuationof the N umbers passage is a code throughout Rabbinic Iiterature for Rome 41 According to Ak iba's understanding, then, Bar Kokhba was destined by divine authority to lead the Jewish people in a successful revolt to retake possession of theRoman holdings in the Land of Israel, if not to destroy the evil empire of Romeitself. Akiba 's view is countered in this source by that of Rabbi Yohanan ben Torta ,an otherwise insignificant contemporary, who does not take Bar Kokhba to be am essianic figu re.'ll Bar Kokhba is twice referred to in the passage as "Bar Koziba."In fact, neither Bar Kokhba nor Bar Koziba was the general's real name.

We know that his actual name was Shim'on Bar Kosva or Bar Kosiva. Twopuns seem to have evolved in relation to the name, dep ending on how he wasv i e \ e d Bar Kokhba ("son of the star" or "star man") among those who attributedmessi.anic status to him (in relation to Numbers 24: I7J,43 and Bar Koziba ("sonof lies" or "man oflies," meaning "liar") among those who opposed him and,later, those who su ffe red from the failure of the revolt. In traditional Jewishliterature , his name is written Bar Koziba, reflecting the ob v ious conclusionrea ched by the rabbis that he was a false messiah who brought great destructionto his people 44

The Bar Kokhba Rebellion marks a watershed in both the history of Israel andthe history of Jewish thought. After its horrendous failure, the Jewish activistswho engaged in guerrilla activities henceforth would be described in Rabbinic

literature as criminals (iistim, biryonim) rather than freedom fighters (qana'im)45From this day forward , Rabbinic Jewish wisdom would teach consistently that itis not physical acts of war that prot ect Israel from its enemies, but rather spiritualconcent ra tion in righteousness and prayer. The militant messianic uprisings andmilitary confrontat ions that occurred from the Ma ccabees to Bar Kokhba weresuperseded by a far more quietistic messianism represented by Rabbi Yohanan barNappacha of Tiberias and his school of thought 46 Consequently, the Rabbinicsources that emerged after the failed revolt teach that it was the pious sage and notthe great warrior who was the true hero of Israel, and that his heirs among therabbis rather than the might y w arriors would henceforth lead the people of Israeland bring them eventually to redemption.

T HE ABOLITIO.\ ' OF A BIBLICAL INSTITUTIO N

1be rabbis succeeded in their suppression of militancy by emphasizing two symbolic paradigms that counter the expectation of divinely authorized military success. One defined divinely authori: .ed warring Choly war") in a way that made itVirtually impossible to apply. The other constructed a delicate relationship betweenexi le and redemption in whic h the Jews had virtuall y no option other than to accepttheir di vinely ordained fate to live under the politi.cal hegemony of Gentiles.

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In the first construct, found at the end of the eighth chapter of Mishna Sotah,the rabbis distill the dense, complex, and varied expressions of holy war in theBible into two sentences, and in those two sentences they distill them into twotypes: discretionar y war milchemet rshut) a n d commanded war or war ofmitzvah milchemet mitzvah). This construct established extremely narrow pa-rameters for discussion of war in Rabbinic Judaism. However one reads the twoTalmuds ' slight expansion of the Mishna, the dangerous wild card of divinelyauthorized war ( war of mitzvah ) could no longer be initiated by Israel becauseinitiat ed holy war, by definition in the Talmud , is limited to the divinely com-manded wars of conquest led by Joshua 47 Henceforth, the only possible kind ofJewish holy war is defensive, but even that option is articulated only in the Pales-tinian Talmud and is absent from th e Babylonian Talmud, the latter being theauthoritative work upon which Jewish law is constructed 48 W hat had proven tobe the terrifying wild card of holy war was thus effectively removed from the a c tiverepertoire of Rabbinic J udaism. 49

The second construct that emerged from the Rabbinic repertoire is the ThreeVows , through which the rabbis discouraged mass movements that might insti-gate a violent backlash by the Gentile powers under which the Jews lived. Thesevows refer to a phrase occurri ng three times in the Song of Songs, I ma k e yous wear, 0 daughters of Jerusalem, by the ga z elles and by the hinds of the field, do notwake or rouse love until it is wished 5 0

By general consensus, the rabbis understand this verse to mean that God ismaking the daughters of Jerusalem, a metaphor for Israel, swear not to wake orrouse love-understood as attempting to bring the messiah-until it is wished,meaning until God decides the time is right. God will bring the messiah whenGod wills. Att empting to bring the messiah by human means through rebellion,war, or revolution rather than through waiting patiently for God to bring themessiah himself is sometimes called forcing God's hand. This came to be con-sidered an act of disobedience that would only bring further di vine wrath andadditional disasters for the Jewish people.

Combined, the two positions were understood in classical Rabbinic thought toconvey the divine command that Israel not ascend to the Land of Israel en masseto attempt to reestablish Jewish rule there through arms nor rebel against theirinferior position under the rule of Gentiles 51 In response, God will not allow theGentiles to persecute the Jews overly much yoter midday). Wh en G od deter-mines the ti me is right for the messiah, God will bring the messiah himself. In themeantime, Jews must continue to live in a state of exile, but they need not be en-tirely passive. They can hasten the coming of the messiah by means of obedienceto the divine will through proper religious observance and acts of human compas-sion. f Jews did not agree to these terms, then the y would be subject to divinely

W i\ { IN 1'1112 H E B R E W BIBLE 41

sanctioned violence at the hand of the Gentiles, permit ti n g their flesh [to beconsumed] like [that of] gazelles or hinds of the field.

The biblical con s truct of Israel's wars succeed ing when they obeyed God butfailing wh en the y ref used to heed the divine will (obedience su ccess disobedi-ence failure) was thus retained in Rabbinic Judaism, but with one major in-novation. That innovatio n was, in essence , a le sson derived from histor y. After thedestruction of the Second Tem p le and the failure of the Bar Kokhba Rebellion,Jewish leaders we re no long er t o b e considered qualified to determine when thetime is ripe for war. W ar is st ill theoreticall y possible, but practically impossible.

That is to say, a Jewish defa ult position would judge Jews incapable of kn o wi ngwhe th er or not they were spiritually fit enough to engage the enemy successfully.TIle rabbis ruled, therefore , c' en if somewhat indire ctly, that wars initiated byJews, for all intenL:; and pu,poses, were no longer an option. Th e only authoritycapable of deciding when the time is ripe for war or mass m ovement is God, andthe t im e is repre sented by the coming of the messiah. Hu m a n initiative in this

direction was an att empt at forcing God's hand to bring the messiah, whichwould result in possibl y catastrophic divine punishment. Active messianic move-ments were thus conde m ned, and when they occaSionally appeared such as u nd erthe leadersh p ofSabbatai Z evi,5 their catastrophic outcomes encouraged Rabbinicleadership to work hard to prevent their formation. This Rabbinic reformulationof the b iblical position on war and violence held sway for nearly tvl'O mill en n ia,

lw t like many aspects of Jewish life and perspective, these were altered under thepowerful pressure of modernity.

MODER N ITY CH AN GE S T H E RULES

AN 0 MOD I FIES PRIOR ASSUMPTIO N S

The complex forces of modern ity and the equally complex Jewish responses to53

them are subjects of mu ch scbolarship that cannot be distilled adequately here.We direct our attention rather abruptly to three related subjects that hav e pro-foundly affected Jewish attitudes toward war and violence.1nese are the develop-ment of the Jewish nation a l movement known as Zionism resulting in the estab-lishment of a Jewish political state, tbe overwhelming horror of the Holocaust,

and the great growth of messianic thinking among many Jews since the 1960s.European Jewish identity was profoundly affected by modernity as Jews began

to be integrated into the larger societies in which (or alongside of which) they badlived for centuries. One nagging aspect of identity constantly pulling at modernJews w as the problem of how to integrate their identity as Jews into the patte rnsof identity that were articulated by modern Europeans. W e have observed abovethat religious identity among biblical monotheists, like their polytheist neighbors

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in the ancient Near East, was profoundly affected by their tribal identity. Religion inthe ancient Ne ar East was a tribal affair, and tribal communities were loyal to theirtribal deities. Throughout the ages , Israel never moved entirely away from theirkinship consciousness. Although Jews are as ethnically and racially diverse asChristians or Muslims, they always identified as a religious people (or nation, Orpolity, or society). But as a universal religious identity , being Jewish was neverlimited to a single tribe, race, nation, or kinship unit, and non-Jews have joinedthe Jewish people through conversion for thousands of years. Quite contrary toEuropean Christian identity, therefore, Jewish identi ty was both a religious markerand a marker of peoplehood or nation. 5

In the West, ews were eventually integrated into sOciety at large in the nineteenth century by discarding or reduci ng the national aspect of their identityand joining the French, British, and Dutch nations as believers in the Jewishfaith. In Eastern Europe, their emancipation w s much slower and by the turn ofthe twentieth century was hardly a reality. When ews attempted to join the national movements working toward political independence from Czarist Russia orthe Austro-Hungarian Empire , they were rejected as foreign nationals by virtueof their Jewish identity. It was inconceivable to the nationalists that they could beboth Jews and Poles, Jews and Ukrainians, and so forth. Profoundly influencedby their rejection from modern national movements at the same time that nationalid entity was becoming a profound force for determining modern identity , someJews took the p th of disc a rd ing or reducing the relig iou s asp ec t oftheir identityand joining with other Jews to work toward their own independent political future .That national movement eventualIy became Zionism 55

Zionism w s founded by secularists, Jews who had rej ec ted their religiousidentity and considered themselves a Jewish nation . Most religious Jews rejectedZionism and refused to join or support the movement because it w s considereda dangerous attempt to rebel against the divine command that Israel not ascendto the Land of Israel en masse nor rebel against their inferior pOSition under the

56rule of Gentiles . The few relig ious Jews who Supported Zionism attempted todissociate the movement from any sense of messianism and argued that immigration to Palestine was not a mass movement and not associated with expectationsof a final divine redemption 7 Nevertheless, a small but significant community ofReligious Z ionists has participated in the movem ent to establish a JeWish homelandsince the inception of modern Jewish nationalism. Among them we re some whobelieved that establish ing a Jewish homeland in Palestine had transcendent meaning , particularly those who were influenced by the first Ashkenazi Chief Ra bbiunder the British Mandate, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook 5 8

To the secul ar Jews who led and largely populated the Zionism Movement , theissues of divinely authorized war and the Three Vows were meaningless. SecularJews worked to bring large numbers of Jewish im migrants to Palestine under the

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THE M I R A C U L O U S "SIX-D A Y WAR"

. A N D T H E REVIVAL OF JEWISH MESSIA N ISM

On May 12, 196 7, the eve of Independence Day , just one day before the beginningof the crisis leading up to the Six-Day War , the only son of Rabbi Abraham IsaacKook, Rabbi Tzvi Yehudah Kook, delivered a sermon in which he bewailed thepartition of the biblical Land of Israel during the 1948 War, as a result of whichJews were unable to visit the holy cities of Hebron and Nablus: "Yes, where is Our

Hebron - are we forgetting this? Where is our Nablus, and our Jericho? W h erehave they been forgotten? And all the far side of the Jordan - it is ours, every clodof earth, every square inch, every district of the land and plot ofland that belongsto th e Land ofIsrael-are we allowed to give up even one millimeter of them 7 "63Rabbi Tzvi Yehudah Kook was the head of the most important Religious Zionistyeshiva in Israel and the larger Jewish world Three weeks after the sermon, hisstudents would consider his words truly, not merely metaphorically , prophetic.

Part of the reason for their prophetic assessment of his message lies in the astonishing events of the following weeks, which led up to the outbreak of war onJune 5 Israel found itself surrounded by millions of Arabs who were being exhortedto destroy it. Egypt's President amal Abdul N asser had received and absorbedmassive Soviet military armament during the previous decade . With the blessing

of the USSR, he expeUed the United Nations' Expeditionary Force (U N EF) thathad been established in the Sinai Peninsula after the 1956 War, concentrated overa hundred thousand troops in the Sinai Peninsula, and closed the Straits ofTiranto Israeli shipping. He persuaded Syria and Jordan to join the preparations forwar, and even Iraq, Morocco, Tunisia , and Saudi Arabia offered at least token useof their armies and communications.64

It appeared to the Israeli public that the United N ations cared little about themilitary bUildup and the possible invasion, and Europe seemed to express littleinterest in the pressure building up in the region. The year 1967 was only twentytwo years after World War II. More than one quarter of the Israeli population atthat time had survived the horrors of the Holocaust as refugees or had lost closerelatives to the systematic Nazi genocide. There was palpable fear that another

holocaust was in the making. As part of the war preparations in Tel Aviv, massgraves were dug in the main football stadium. s

Na sser gave speech after speech exhorting his people and soldiers to be readyfor the onslaught . The Jews would be destroyed. Tel Aviv would be emptied of itsinhabitants. The Zionist entity would exist no more. vVhether Nasser had the actualintention to invade or was simply attempting to gain politically through an act ofmilitary bravado, he gave every impression to Israel that he was serious. And Israeltook him seriously. The Israeli chief of staff, Yitzha k Rabin, broke down temporar

W.'\l' IN THE H E B REW BTI lLE

ily over the stress , and th e entire Jewish world held its bre ath, with terrible fearand dread over the futur e of Israel. 66

But in one day the war was essentiaJiy over. Israel managed to destroy the airforces of aU the neighboring A rab nations within hours. W ith Israeli control ofthe skies, the war was won. t ended formally six days later. To the Jews of Israeland the world, who were terrified at what seemed to them to be an impendingmassacre, the quick and relatively painless victory was miraculous. To ma n y inthe Religious Z ionist wo rld, it was not merely a metaphor but was indeed a divinemiracle. O n e must keep in mind the fresh and overwhelm ingly powerful memoryof the Holocaust among Israelis and Jews everywhere. It was natural to considerthe astonishingly sw ift and ne ar ly painless victory to be a sign of the approachingmessianic redemption, a signpost along the path to a final divine deliverance afterso much suffering. Even staunchly secular Jews found themselves drawn towardtheir religiOUSroots 67

In addition to the presumed miracle of Jewish survival against all odds wasthe miracle of Jewish conquest of the most sacred sites of the Bible. The warbrought virtually all the important biblical sites under Jewish ruie, which wasthe first time in two millennia that Jews were in political control of the ancienthomeland. This was noted im mediately and clearly, and many Religious Z ionistsconsidered this to be powerful evidence in support of the diVinely authorizedredemptive nature o f ' .ionism and the Jewish state 68 Zionism and Israel wereinstruments of God through which he was now and finally bringing about themessianic redemption.

'The 1967 War marks a larger historical watershed indicating a change in conception of the Israel-Arab/Palestinian conflict. W hat had been articulated previousl y as a national con tlict between Israelis and th e Arabs of Palestine began tobe articulated by partisans of both sides in incr ea Singly religious and apocalypticterms. After th e messianic suggestion associated with the conquest of most of thebiblical Land of Israel in the 1967 War, many Orthodox religiOUS scholars, and particularly Religious Zionist activists and thinkers, became deeply invested in legitimating the right of Israel to control those territories and in the legitimacy ofJewishmilitancy in general. The causes of this are complex , but it is clear that many Orthodox thinkers began, only after 1967 , to discover and cite a range of premodernthin .kers and argu m en ts that support the messianic nature of the State ofIsrael. 69

The chief rabbi of the Israel Defense Forces and later the chief Ashkenazi rabbi ofIsrael, Shelomo Goren d. 1995), provided a series of reasons for the cancellationof the force of the Three Vows .J

'The "miraculous" nature of the 1967 War enabled Religious Zionists to articulatepublicly the messianic nature of Zionism. t was the 1973 VVar, however , that servedto inVigorate The Settler M ovement and encourage an increaSingly militant andmilitary approach to political control of the territories captured by Israel during

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the 1967 War. Those territories, which had quickly come to be considered a biblica lpatrimony, were nearly lost in the 1973 War. This was a terrifying sign to someReligiously Orthodox Jews that the Israeli government was willing to negotiateaway biblical holy sites captu r ed in 1967, which they viewed as a move against God.Based on the traditional Jewish view that Isr ael (or th e Jewish people) succeededin war when it obeyed God while it failed i n wa r when it was collectively disobedient, the near disaster of th e 1973 War was viewed as a sign of God warning thatJews must do everything humanly possible to settle and control the area throughfor ce if necessary, and that the imperative to do so trumped both international

law and even the laws of the State of Israel.It was the aftermath of the 1973 War that stimulated the activi st movement of

settlers called Gush Emunim , which eventual ly gave way to what is called simplyThe Settler Movement. 7 1 The old biblical notion of conquest was invigorated

through a religious n a tionalist narrative that emerged to expla in the extrao rdinarysu ccess of the 1967 War and almost cal amitous near- failure of the 1973 War. By themid-1980s, particularly among the more activist groups within The Settler Movement , conquest had ta ken on an aggreSSive a nd militant tone , to such an extentthat it had become transformed into a biblical sense of divinely ordained , aggressive , unlimited military conquest of the Land of Israel. Indeed , and ironically , thevery a ct of conqu est itself had be com e one sign of the coming divine redemption .

As w ith most an y topic of dis cussion within the greater Jewi sh community,

there is no overall consensus about when wa r should or must be waged and whatconstitutes its limits . Religious leaders and scholars continue to take a variety ofpositions on the issues of settlem ent, force, and violence, a nd some movementssuch as Oz Ve-shalom / Netivot Shalom and Meim ad have formed from within theOrthodox Jewish communit y of Israel to counter the growing militant aggres-siveness of Religious Zioni sm l2 Thus, while the Orthodox communit y is not allof one mind on the issues , for the large m ajority of traditional Jew s today theimpediments to d iv in ely authorized war that were so successfully established bythe Rabbinic sages of the Talmud have been removed to allow Jewish holy warto reenter history. The langu age and the idea of milit a ry conquest h as increaSinglyinfiltrated the langu age of thinkers and teachers that make up The Settler Movement and its supporters and, subsequently, Z ionist discourse in gener a l. Stuart

Coh en notes how the Israel De fense Forces incorporates Jewish religious terminol-ogy, symbols , and collective myths into its training and troop educ a tion in orderto create a unified fighting force out of th e divergent populations of religious andsecular Jews of widely different backgrounds , which ha s a Significant impact onthe citizens of the state a s a whole , given the profound impact of the IDF on thepersonal lives of Isr ael's citizenry n Key Religious Zionist thinkers have writtenmajor works claiming any war fought by the Jews of Israel to be di v inely sanctionedor holy war (mil ch mot h sh em , wars of God )74

The increase d in vestment in l in kin g Is rael' s m odern wars to d ivinely sanc tione dor eve n commanded war parallels the inten si ication of belief that divine redemp-tion is imminent, an d t he signs of the approaching Re demption b ecame increa singly ob vi ous and more frequent. By the 1980s, but from 1967 if not ea rlier a mongs 111 obser vers , it had become possible to observe the hist orical signposts of Re-

edemption in seemingly odd ways.

It is simply th at a se ries of hi storic events ha ve brought th e j e' i sh p eo ple in to a p os ilion in whi ch It is imp oss ible not to fee l th at we are on th e road th at mu st lead toredempti on. Wc have onl y to think of som e of th e events of th e post-war era, fol

lowing th e apo calyptic t err o rs o f Na zi Eur ope, to see how pregnant th ey are w ithsignifica nce. Had the n ecess ity fo r fre e jewish immi gration int o Pales tin e after 1945nut met with th e impla cable hostilit y o f th e Ar abs, th ere might n ot have bee n aJewish State in our lim e. Had r e ~ e n tTruman' s sugg es ti on in 1946 to admit on ehund red th ousa nd displace d p ersons Lo Palestine been accept ed by Brita in and th eA rab s, th ere would h ave bee n n o U :'l Reso luti on. Had th e Arabs not r es isted thatUN Reso luti on of 1947 th e new Israel would ha ve remain ed a tiny, trunc ated ,insignifi ca nt p ocket-state. Had Hu sse in in 1967 not thr own in hi s lo t with the Arabanti-Israel co nfederacy (in d efian ce ofI srael's plea), jud ea and Samari a and j eru salem might still have remained outside jewi sh care a nd influe nce . Is it any wonderthat b elie\';ng Jew ; see in all thi s proce ss the workin g of the H a nd of God' Hi stor yis bearing d own on us . . . Inex orabl y, if we have eyes to see and a h ea rt to und erstand, w e a re led to acknowled ge th at, afte r twO h ousa nd yea rs of wand ering in th e

by-ways of exile, we ha c em erged on th e high road of hi story whi ch, however longil may yet be, mu st lead us eventually to Redempti on. It is in thi s sense that we describ e o ur ow n era as Re shit Z em ichat G eula te l u [th e begin njng of th e fl owerin g

uf our R edempti on] 7 5

The perception of di vi ne signs and notion of di v inely sanctioned or even commanded war became generalized by the 1980s to the extent that for ma n y it couldfit Vi rtually an y definition of the conflict b e tween Israel and th e P alestinians andneighbo r ing countrie s . Th is repr esents a revival of holy war, pa rticularly amongan influential and activist community of O r thodo x Jews. Of course not all Jews(or all Orthodox Jews ) agree with the conclusions a nd pronouncements of ze alousrabbis and acti v ists. But v irtuall y all traditionally minded Jews and most Jewsliving in Isra el, whether religiously observant or not , ha ve become famili a r withthe discourse of h oly war in Jewi sh terms . rhe revival of the old hol y war paradigmwas llol a consciou s program or politi cal goal , but rather the product of an attemptto make s ense of sa cred text and tradition in light of cont emporary events. t wasthe result of a r eligiOUS and human respon se to a reality that wa s c onfusing andfright ening, and also a response to social and political forces both 10caUy andint ernat ion a lly that were beyond th e abilit y of the political leadership of the state

to manage .

a brief history of war in the hebrew bible and the jewish interpretive tradition

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