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

193 Pages·1995·8.64 MB·English

by  Susan Niditch

WAR IN THE HEBREW BIBLE
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WAR
IN THE
HEBREW BIBLE
A Study in the Ethics of Violence
SUSAN NIDITCH
New York Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York Toronto
Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo
Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town
Melbourne Aukland Madrid
and associated companies in
Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 1993 by Susan Niditch
First published in 1993 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1995.
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Niditch, Susan
War in the Hebrew Bible: a study in the ethics of violence
Susan Niditch.
p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-19-507638-9; ISBN 0-19-509840-4 (pbk)
1. War—Biblical teaching
2. Bible. O.T.—Criticism,interpretation, etc.
I. Title
BSI19.W2N53 1993 221.8'355—dc20 92-5787
6 8 7 5
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For Robert, my dear husband,
on the occasion of our
eighteenth wedding anniversary
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book was written with the generous and much appreciated
support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and Am-
herst College. I thank the many colleagues who read portions of the
manuscript or drafts of the whole, providing encouragement and
useful insights or who offered valuable bibliographic and methodo-
logical suggestions. These include Lawrence A. Babb, Claudia V.
Camp, Carole R. Fontaine, JoAnn Hackett, Theodore Hiebert,
David Little, Peter Machinist, John P. Reeder, Philip Stern, Gene
M. Tucker, David W. Wills, Robert R. Wilson, William F. Zimmer-
man, and the members of the Colloquium for Biblical Research
who met in Rochester, New York in August 1989. Diane Beck
graciously prepared the manuscript. I received additional assistance
from my students Katherine Davis and Catherine Lhamon.
An earlier draft of chapter 3 and small pieces of the introduction
have been published in a volume of Semeia, War, Woman, and
Metaphor, edited by Claudia V. Camp and Carole Fontaine. I
thank Scholars Press for permission to incorporate this material
into my book.
Finally I thank my children Rebecca and Elizabeth for their love
and their infectious energy, and my husband Robert Doran for all
his help with this particular project, but also for being the most
supportive and loving friend a wife could have.
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CONTENTS
Abbreviations, xi
Introduction, 3
1. The Ban as God's Portion, 28
2. The Ban as God's Justice, 56
3. The Priestly Ideology of War in Numbers 31, 78
4. The Bardic Tradition of War, 90
5. The Ideology of Tricksterism, 106
6. The Ideology of Expediency and
Biblical Critique, 123
7. Toward an Ideology of Nonparticipation, 134
Conclusions, 150
References, 157
Additional Readings, 171
Index of Biblical Citations, 173
General Index, 178