Both then and for centuries to come, the supreme expression of a nation’s life was war. War is what makes peoples; it was in this capacity that the solidarity of the Israelite tribes originally expressed itself, and as a national activity, it was also a sacred one.Footnote 1
In brilliantly formulated books and essays that exposed a broad readership to the historical study of the Bible and ancient Israel, the German scholar Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) established an influential yet highly problematic historical paradigm, according to which Israel evolved into a people or nation as it competed with its neighbors on the battlefield. The nation would go on to establish monarchies and kingdoms that safeguarded its interests. Eventually, however, the armies of the world’s first empires conquered these kingdoms, and when they did, they also destroyed Israel’s national identity. What sprouted up in the nation’s place was an unpolitical, religious sect called Judaism, and this supersession of the nation of Israel with the religion of Judaism has shaped the basic contours and larger purpose of the Hebrew Bible.
In this book, I take on Wellhausen’s paradigm and demonstrate that it proves to be woefully inadequate as a way of understanding not only ancient Israel’s history but also the political theology unfurled in the biblical narrative.Footnote 2 What propels the formation of this narrative is the conviction that a people is greater than the states that govern it, and that a nation can survive, and even thrive, under conditions of foreign rule.
Defeat and the Birth of a New Religious Identity
Throughout his writings, Wellhausen made war the engine of change in Israel’s history. War brought an end to this people, but long before it had also given birth to them: “The war camp was the cradle of the nation, and also its earliest sanctuary. There was Israel and there was Yhwh.”Footnote 3 As soul and body, the two belonged together – “Yhwh the god of Israel, and Israel the people of Yhwh”Footnote 4 – setting the conditions for all that was to follow. A god came into existence (“before Israel, there was no Yhwh”), and rival tribes and clans united under his aegis to wage battle against common enemies.Footnote 5 National life and religious life were inseparable, and war was the supreme expression of both. In response to military threats posed by its neighbors, the nation eventually formed kingdoms that endured for centuries, and a national consciousness endured as long as these kingdoms could continue to fight under the banner of their national deity.Footnote 6
Wellhausen was confident that the natural symbiosis between the nation and its warring god would have persisted for much longer had it not been for the rise of imperial powers, beginning with the Assyrians:
They destroyed peoples as if they were nests, and as one gathers eggs, they collected the treasures of the world. No flapping of the wings, no opening of the beak or chirping helped. [See Isa. 10:14.] They crushed the national individualities of antiquity, they tore down the fences in which these nations nourished their customs and beliefs. They commenced the work that was carried on by the Babylonians, Persians, and Greeks, and completed by the Romans. They introduced into the history of nations a new concept – that of the world empire or, more generally, the world. Confronted with this concept, the nations lost their spiritual center. The raw fact they suddenly faced would ultimately destroy their illusions … .Footnote 7
The campaigns conducted by these empires devastated all that ancient peoples held to be true, forcing them to invent new identities. In the case of ancient Israel, the new identity was a nonpolitical one:
Through its destruction at the hands of the Assyrians and Babylonians, the nation became essentially a community held together by the cult. The precondition for this religious community was foreign control, which forced Jews from the political sphere into the spiritual.Footnote 8
Israel went into exile as “a nation or people” but returned as “an unpolitical and artificial construct,” built on a “Mosaic theocracy” that shapes both the final form of the Pentateuch and Judaism as a religion. Stated succinctly, “the Jewish church emerged as the Jewish state perished.”Footnote 9
According to Wellhausen, those who (unknowingly) laid the foundation for this inferior and synthetic form of collective life were perspicacious prophetic figures, such as Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. Standing on the margins of their societies, they realized that the petty states of the southern Levant wouldn’t be able to repel the onslaught of the imperial powers that loomed on the horizon. To save their people, they did something that’s counterintuitive: instead of offering divine comfort, they proclaimed a radical rupture of the primordial bond between Yhwh and his people Israel. Displeased with the nation’s behavior, Yhwh was no longer leading it into battle; now he was going to war against it, wielding foreign armies as the rod of his anger.
By interpreting military defeat as divine punishment, the prophets asserted that the relationship between Yhwh and his people was conditional, bound by the contractual terms of a “covenant.” If it hadn’t been for this covenant and the innovative political theology that emanates from it, Israel wouldn’t have survived.
Thus far, Wellhausen’s work presents few problems; indeed, his analysis of the sources is exemplary, just as the synthesis of his findings is often breathtaking. But he went further. According to his reconstruction, the prophets’ audacious assertion had an unanticipated yet enduring impact, producing over time a religious community that, in contrast to the wild and free nation that preceded it, is characterized by a tedious performance of cultic rites and a slavish allegiance to lifeless laws.
Wellhausen’s categorical distinction between the political nation of ancient Israel, on the one hand, and the religious community of Judaism that usurped the nation, on the other, has deep roots in European intellectual history.Footnote 10 Yet thanks to the elegance and intellectual force of his writings, it reverberates in the thought of scholars far and wide. Thus, one of the most widely used textbooks in North American colleges and seminaries for the past sixty years, John Bright’s A History of Israel, describes the new form of corporate life that emerged in the postexilic period as a “religious community marked by adherence to tradition and law,” which replaced the “national-cultic one” that had flourished before the Babylonian conquest.Footnote 11
Nation and State
The present study offers a rejoinder to Wellhausen, and it does so by demonstrating that the generations of scribes who composed and collected the writings we know today as the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament were profoundly political in their orientation. Their aim was not, as Wellhausen contended, to transform Israel from a people into a religious sect after the fall of the state. To the contrary, these scribes sought to construct a robust and resilient national identity capable of withstanding military defeat and the encroachment of colonizing powers.Footnote 12 Rather than Wellhausen’s polarity of nation and religious community, what we witness in the formation of the biblical corpus is the groundbreaking discovery of a distinction that we take for granted today – namely, between nation and state.Footnote 13
The political theologies of “Yhwh’s people” that we find in the Hebrew Bible may have paved the way for the birth of religions – in the forms of the Christian church, Islam, and some (in particular, modern) variations of Judaism.Footnote 14 However, the formation of the Hebrew Bible itself must be studied as an experiment in nation-making if it is to be properly understood. This experiment is arguably one of the earliest and most elaborate of its kind, and throughout history defeated and colonized populations have often imagined themselves as peoples and nations by looking to the biblical model of Israel.Footnote 15
The anonymous scribes who curated the biblical corpus bracketed an era of the monarchy, presenting it as a turning point in their people’s history. In the framework of an extensive prose narrative, they sought to demonstrate how Israel, by virtue of a covenant with its god, became a people long before it established a kingdom. Although their narrative runs counter to what we know today about Israel’s political evolution, they wanted their readers to understand that, with the help of their narrative and the divine laws embedded in it, a vanquished and exiled population can unite and flourish as a nation even when imperial domination prohibited the reestablishment of the sovereign state and political independence that their narrative ascribes to the legendary reign of King David.Footnote 16
As a project of peoplehood and nation-making, the formation of the biblical corpus is unprecedented. Nowhere else in the ancient world do we witness a people’s effort – and such an elaborate and collaborative effort at that – first to document and depict its own defeat and then to use this history as a means of envisioning a new political order, one that recognizes the nation as an entity distinct from the state that governs it. The scribes who engaged in this effort were convinced that their communities would survive colonization by imperial powers when all of their members could claim a piece of the pie, when they had not only a spiritual vision but also a material incentive to take an active part in the collective life of a nation. As they reimagined Israel’s corporate identity, these scribes asked themselves what it meant to be a people. Their responses to this foundational question – formulated in the widest array of genres: law, narrative, songs, laments, prophecies, wisdom, and love poetry – charted new territory in political theory as much as in theology. To be sure, the authors of our texts were political thinkers.Footnote 17
The biblical project was set in motion when Judean scribes, working at the court in Jerusalem, asserted that two rival states – the Northern kingdom of Israel and the Southern kingdom of Judah – had their origins in an earlier “United Monarchy.” This was above all an affirmation of political unity. Demonstrating that Yhwh had chosen David and his descendants to rule the nation, their account beckoned the population of the Northern kingdom to turn, or return, to Davidic rule. Yet even if it was statist in its agenda, this older work, with its affirmation of a political unity, inspired others, especially members of the defeated Northern kingdom, to think in terms of a nation that transcends the borders of its kingdoms. Diminishing the role of the throne, these circles composed counternarratives that tell the story of a large family that evolved into a diverse nation and existed for centuries before the establishment of the monarchy.
Over time, and especially after the fall of the Southern kingdom some 130 years after the fall of its Northern counterpart, the larger national perspective in these counternarratives took hold in wider circles. As it did, these counternarratives were joined to the older account of Israel’s monarchies, which was in turn thoroughly reworked from the perspective of the former. The new, expanded national narrative grew to its present proportions as it was supplemented with law codes and didactic stories that address all aspects of what it means to be a people, and what a people needs to prosper.
Without the special relationship between two (defeated) kingdoms, there would be no Bible. North and South had long been divided, and they had repeatedly come to blows in long civil wars. What first ignited the biblical project was a vision that the populations of these two rival kingdoms could be one people. Many comparable cases of nation-making can be documented throughout history (e.g., Germany and Italy during the nineteenth centuries), and visions of a national unity that transcends political borders have often inspired similar projects of peoplehood.
The Bible’s genesis presupposes not only the division between North and South but also the rise of the world’s first empires. By demonstrating the limits of native sovereignty, the programs of destruction and deportation pursued by Assyria and Babylonia provoked the defeated (first in the North and then some 130 years later in the South) to reevaluate what they took for granted and to devise new strategies of collective survival. Instead of abandoning world affairs and political engagement, the biblical scribes worked to consolidate their communities and mobilize them as members of a nation.Footnote 18
From the Priestly Source to Ezra-Nehemiah
To understand how Wellhausen could deny the national-political character of Israel’s postdefeat identities, one must appreciate his analytical approach.Footnote 19 As a German source critic, he reconstructed social and historical developments in Israel and Judah by identifying the hands of multiple authors in the biblical text and assigning their work to stages in Israel’s social evolution. Thus, he argued that what we now call the “Priestly source” is not earlier but rather later than all other materials in the Pentateuch. As such, this source and the laws it contains represent the final stage in Israel’s putative transformation from a national-political to a religious-cultic community: “The Priestly codex is characterized by a complete indifference with respect to all matters of the state and the nation. As a theocracy, its function is the cult; it has nothing to do with government, because this role is left essentially to foreign powers.”Footnote 20
What remains unaccounted for in this approach is the way in which the Priestly source has been integrated into a larger literary work that is undeniably national and political in character. Perhaps this source was once independent, but today we know about its existence thanks to a feat of modern scholarship that restored its basic contours by carefully dissecting it from other parts of the Pentateuch, which, in its transmitted forms, is the blueprint for a nation, not a religious community.
This Pentateuch portrays the birth of a people, their liberation from tyranny, and their voyage to a new homeland; it also contains multiple law codes that bear on all aspects of their corporate life as a nation. As a work that evolved over centuries, it has a pronounced polyphonic and multilayered quality, like most biblical texts. As we will see throughout this study, the new consistently supplements rather than supplants the old. If Israel had gradually shed its national character and evolved into a religious community, as Wellhausen claimed, one would have to explain why the biblical scribes worked in this supplementary manner. Why didn’t later generations do more to erase and diminish Israel’s “national past,” instead of preserving and embellishing it in sundry and significant ways?
Wellhausen connects the Priestly source to late prophetic writings and the book of Ezra-Nehemiah, yet it’s difficult to see how these texts lend weight to his historical paradigm. Prophetic writings, both early and late, reflect an acute interest in not only domestic politics but also world affairs. It would be surprising if such were not the case; after all, these writings originated among a small people who were caught in the interstices of world empires and whose homeland lay on the Levantine land bridge, where the armies of these empires repeatedly confronted each other.
As for Ezra-Nehemiah, this book portrays Judean exiles returning from Babylon and struggling to rebuild their national life under conditions of foreign domination. They now live not only according to their own native laws but also in keeping with those imposed upon them by their imperial overlords. The returnees realize that any attempt to reestablish the monarchy would provoke the ire of these overlords, and hence their leaders focus their efforts on public institutions and communal activities conceded to them by the empire. Admittedly, many of these institutions and activities may be classified as cultic or religious, but religion and politics are hardly antithetical.
Moreover, while the temple and priests figure prominently in Ezra-Nehemiah, its lengthiest section relates to the construction of Jerusalem’s ramparts. The building project is repeatedly interrupted by assaults from neighboring peoples, and the workers must take up arms to protect themselves until the wall is finished. When exhorting them to carry on, Nehemiah, the non-priestly governor who leads them, uses rhetoric that reminds us of battle speeches from America’s Revolutionary War: “Have no fear of them. Remember the Lord, the mighty and awesome one, and fight for your kin, your sons, your daughters, your wives, and your homes” (Neh. 4:14 [HB 4:8]). The only way to maintain Wellhausen’s paradigm is to ignore texts like these along with the social context in which they were written and read.
War Commemoration
Wellhausen was correct to assign a leading role to war in the formation of Israel’s national identity, yet the way in which he did so is untenable. Yes, war was a major factor in the consolidation of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, as it was for any ancient state. And yes, the military campaigns conducted by imperial armies eventually destroyed the state in the form of these two kingdoms. However, if these campaigns simultaneously destroyed the nation, as Wellhausen contended, one would be hard pressed to explain the pervasive presence of war in biblical texts, both early and late. The Hebrew Bible is suffused with stories of war not because the kingdoms of ancient Israel and Judah were unusually bellicose; the reason is rather that its authors were engaged in a concerted effort to construct a new national identity for Israel, and nations commonly define and redefine themselves by appeal to memories of wars and battles fought in their pasts.
As the most extreme form of cultural trauma, war has an incomparable impact on collective life. Yet when it comes to the formation of national identities, the actual experience of military conflict is less determinative than the shared memories of that experience. War monuments and war memorials in all forms (including works of historiography and national hymns) serve as spaces in which political communities negotiate belonging and status by commemorating the wartime sacrifice and service of its members.
Competing with hegemonic memories are “counter-memories” created by marginalized members of the community who, by reminding the nation of their record of sacrifice, lay claim to respect and rights in society.Footnote 21 Thus, as a monument that “both commemorates and attests to the lack of previous commemoration,” a thirteen-foot bronze statue of a Black soldier was set up in Baltimore in 1972, and in his outstretched arm he solemnly holds a long list of wars fought by African Americans in US history, for which astonishingly few monuments or memorials had ever been built.Footnote 22 Memory battles make and mold a nation’s identity, and when dissent and disputation cease, a national consciousness withers and wanes.Footnote 23
The politics of war commemoration is one of the most promising candidates for interdisciplinary research in the humanities.Footnote 24 Yet due to modernist prejudices, on the one hand, and disciplinary narrowness, on the other, past scholarship has unfortunately failed to appreciate the important ancient precursors to this modern mode of political discourse. My research redresses this situation by demonstrating the extent to which the Hebrew Bible represents a work of war commemoration.
Among the many survival strategies adopted by Jewish communities living under foreign rule, war commemoration has long occupied a central place. Thus, a wide array of Jewish sources from Greco-Roman times commemorate the military valor of Jewish soldiers and the crucial contributions they made to the Ptolemies’ conquest and control of Egypt. The memories created by Jewish authors served the interests of their communities in securing not only imperial privileges but also protection in an often hostile environment. The same use of war commemoration can be witnessed among Jewish populations in many other times and places, from China to the Ottoman Empire. With the emergence of the modern nation-state, war commemoration assumed a new urgency. Allegiance to the crown was now replaced by membership in the nation, and as they affirmed their belonging and struggled for acceptance in the face of growing hatred and xenophobic assaults, Jewish communities fashioned many monuments (both literary and physical) to their disproportionate wartime service and sacrifice.
While in both the empires of antiquity and the nation-states of modernity war commemoration has played a key role in Jewish survival, my work has demonstrated something quite remarkable: It wasn’t only after Jews had already become a people that war commemoration began to play this role in Jewish history; no, war commemoration constituted the very process by which Israel became Israel. The scribes who produced the biblical writings demarcated the boundaries of the nation (belonging) and negotiated the rank of its members (status) by constructing memories of great wars and battles, and by identifying who contributed to these war efforts or who shirked their obligations.
Therefore, it’s not war itself, as Wellhausen claimed, but war commemoration that has served as an engine for Israel’s ethnogenesis as a people and the Bible’s evolution as a corpus of literature, and we can trace a direct line of continuity from modern Jewish cultures to the emergence of Israel’s national identity in biblical writings via this political activity.Footnote 25
Purpose and Plan of the Present Book
In prior studies, I defined the genre of war commemoration in biblical literature and compared it to memorials from past to present. Those studies treat the way in which scribes addressed concerns in their societies by evoking memories of David and the wars he had fought centuries before. In the present volume, I turn my attention from the dynamics of statehood to the politics of peoplehood. In a fourfold exposition, I show how scribes constructed Israel’s national identity by commemorating battles and wars fought in the formative years of its history as a people.
Part I treats the earliest encounters between Israel and its future neighbors as depicted in the books of Numbers and Deuteronomy. As a newly formed nation of refugees making their way to the Promised Land, Israel has to cross the borders of various peoples. In each instance, it sends petitions for permission to pass peaceably through their lands. Despite the Israelites’ efforts to avoid conflict, the petitioned peoples consistently prove to be inhospitable, coming out against them to wage war.
The texts are complex and have a number of agendas, including a concern to establish rightful claims to surrounding territories. What they all have in common, though, is an essential component of war commemoration: they appeal to memories of military conflicts in the past to address political problems in the present. One of the most illustrative cases is that of the Edomites, and we examine a wide range of biblical texts whose authors either malign the memory of this southern neighbor by documenting their misconduct in wartime or respond to these aspersions by constructing counter-memories of past reconciliation.
The biblical scribes used war commemoration to negotiate relations not only between the nation and neighboring peoples but also among the members of the nation itself, and in Part II we consider one of the most contentious issues of internal relations in biblical texts: the status of the Transjordan. If the Jordan River marks the nation’s eastern border as assumed, or argued, by most biblical texts, then how should one view the communities across the Jordan that claim affiliation with the nation? How did they come to live there? And is the territory they occupy on a par with the Promised Land?
We explore the responses to this question found in what I call the “Narrative of the Transjordanian Tribes,” which begins in the book of Numbers and reemerges at key points in the books of Deuteronomy and Joshua. The authors of this narrative are not univocal in their defense of the Transjordanian communities, but they agree on several points: 1) that the members of these communities (although perhaps not their territories) belong to the nation; 2) that they demonstrated their solidarity by crossing the Jordan and fighting in the nation’s vanguard; and 3) that they performed this service and sacrifice for their Israelite kin without taking possession of any of the territories conquered in Canaan. While early iterations of this account underscore the fraternal character of these wartime contributions, later additions, penned by Priestly scribes, present the participation of these tribes as fidelity to Yhwh’s command. In the tension between these competing rationales we begin to sense the profound political-theological dimensions of biblical war commemoration.
Part III plumbs these dimensions by considering how a paradigmatic case of war commemoration – the story of Rahab the harlot saving Israelite spies in return for being saved from the destruction of her city – offered early Christian and Jewish communities a symbolic framework for addressing their own issues, ranging from soteriological disputes to conditions for conversion. In exploring the formation of Rahab’s story, we will witness how ancient scribes seized on a suggestive detail in an older narrative and fashioned from it what I call a “parable of peoplehood.”
With fear and courage as its central themes, Rahab’s story is woven into the seams of a major division of the biblical canon, offering not only an archetype of an outsider who honorably enters the national fold but also a basis for evaluating the behavior of native members of the nation. Among these native members were the Gibeonites, and we will see how the biblical scribes used war commemoration to identify this prominent population as outsiders who infiltrated Israel’s ranks through a dishonorable act of duplicity.
We turn, finally, in Part IV, to the most monumental example of biblical war commemoration, the Song of Deborah from the book of Judges. Extraordinarily complex and exquisitely structured, the song celebrates simultaneously a military victory over Israel’s foes and a collective identity that unites its members. This identity is a thoroughly national one, distinguished by the civic virtue of volunteerism. The battle lines are drawn between “the kings of Canaan” with their professional armies, on the one side, and “the people of Yhwh” led by “a mother in Israel,” on the other. In cataloguing the names of those who volunteered to fight along with those who dodged their wartime duties, the song negotiates both belonging and status among the members of a nonmonarchic political community.
Our study of the song maps the formation of this literary monument and its place in the wider biblical narrative. It also explores the important part played by women in war commemoration, paying special attention to the figure of Jael, a Kenite woman who defies her husband’s political alliances and performs a heroic deed on behalf of her people.
As the work of generations of scribes, the texts we will be studying evolved over time. I engage in the compositional reconstruction of some texts, but my aim is to do so in an easy-to-follow and engaging manner, always with an eye to the larger intellectual payoff. The medium of communication is an important aspect of war commemoration, ranging from stone to song. The biblical scribes worked with stylus and scroll to create what I call a “movable monument,” and the fabric and texture of what they produced is an important part of their nation-making project. As we will see, the study of war commemoration offers us a historically concrete, comparative context for understanding the diachronic growth of biblical texts.Footnote 26
This work has its origins in a course on political theology taught at Candler School of Theology and Emory University. In turning it into a book, I’ve kept my students in mind – both those who have worked directly with me at Emory and the more than 50,000 individuals who, from Dhaka, Bangladesh to Atlanta, Georgia, have learned “virtually” with me in my ongoing Coursera course. I am grateful to underwriting from the Mellon Foundation that made it possible to offer the book gratis in an open-access format on the Cambridge University Press platform.
In this book, as in the classroom, I guide readers through wide swaths of biblical texts, illustrating the kinds of questions and concerns that inform my own approach as a professor of biblical studies. Each chapter corresponds to a week of classroom instruction, growing successively more complex. I introduce the reader to methods of diachronic analysis, as well as diverse materials that bring a wider perspective to the ancient biblical accounts. Even though I am not always successful, I try not to get bogged down with technical matters or be distracted for too long by “inside baseball” with colleagues in the field. I have kept the notes to a minimum (especially in Parts I and II), providing what I deem to be essential reading, even if it is occasionally in other languages.
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