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Home , Babylonian captivity

War and Peace in Biblical and Post-Biblical

R.G. FUKS-MANSFELD*

The attentive reader of the may well be struck by the complete reversal in scope and contents of the works which originated before and after the Babylonian captivity (586-536 BCE). Before the conquest of the by Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylonia, and the ensuing destruction of and its temple, war was one of the main topics in biblical narrative. During the time of and the penetration of the twelve tribes of in the promised land, the God of Israel was the supreme warlord who led his people to victory. The tabernacle as sign of God's leadership and as token of the covenant with Israel, was present in each major battle. Sometimes the Lord even reversed the laws of nature to influence the outcome of the battle, like when had to complete his battle with the Amorites. Then He made the sun stand still in and the moon in the vale of Aijalon (Joshua 10,12- 13).1 In the times of the and Israel, when iron tools, weapons and chariots came into use as well as professional soldiers which had to be paid for their services, warfare demanded evergrowing military and strategic skills. War was no longer a personal matter of each Israelite male whose valour had been a direct tribute to his God. Now the skills of the kings and their generals pre- vailed and not every war they waged against their neighbours was "a war of the Lord". Many kings of Judah and Israel did what was wrong in the eyes of the Lord, mostly by worshiping the gods of , and they were punished by losing the battles against their adversaries. From the ninth century BCE onwards a new type of war was waged within the boundaries of Judah and Israel. The prophets, visionary men of God, fought against the worship of the Canaanite gods. They brought new, ethical elements into the service of the God of Israel. So it could happen that Ahab, king of Israel, and his Phoenician wife Jezebel (I Kings 16, 29-22, 40) became the

* Juda Palache Instituut, Amsterdam University I This and other biblical quotations are rendered according to the New English Trans- lation (Oxford 1970).

5 prototypes of the bad rulers in the Old Testemant who persecuted the prophets and their adherents and oppressed the common people. Whereas the same Ahab was an esteemed ruler and patron of the arts in the eyes of his neighbours. Parts of his "house of ivory" against which the prophet Amos fulminated (Amos 3,15) have been excavated on the site of ancient ? The conquest of the kingdom of Israel and the destruction of its capital Samaria by the Assyrians in 722 BCE, was considered to be the ultimate puni- shment for the sins of the kings and the ten tribes of Israel by the prophets and their adherents. Though the greater part of these ten tribes remained on their ancestral soil, they developed a different kind of Judaism, mainly based on the Pentateuch. They were the forebears of the who did not accept the postexilic laws of and Nehemiah. The Samaritans finally drifted so far away from Jewish historical consciousness that in late antiquity a new mythical view on the fate of the ten tribes was developed which came to be closely linked with the then prevailing ideas about the forthcoming end of days. The still existing Jewish sect of the Samaritans was not acknowledged to belong to Judaism.3 The time of the Babylonian captivity was a real watershed in the history of the Judeans. When part of the Judean exiles returned to Judea with the permis- sion of the new ruler of Babylonia, the Persian king Cyrus II (559-530), a complete change took place in ludean politics, society and religion. Zerubavel, grandson of the exiled king of Judah, , was the leader of the returning captives, but he did not succeed in restoring the monarchy. After a long period of political and religious upheaval, the temple of Jerusalem was rebuilt and the reign of the high priests and the Council of the Elders () installed. A new generation of religious teachers who were not prophets, explained hence- forward the laws of the Lord to the people. They paved the way for a new understanding of the ludeans' place in the world. The disappearance of the Davidian monarchy, the rapidly growing number of Judeans living outside Ju- dea, in , Egypt and in several Phoenician settlements in the Mediterra- nean area, gave rise to a completely new concept of Jewish religion and the Jewish state. The writing of the prophet who had witnessed the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple, are the first to bear testimony of this development.

2 R.D. Barnett, Illustrations of Old Testament History (London, British Museum 1968) p. 42.

3 There is still no communis opinio on the Samaritan question. For an evaluation of recent views see Irving M. Zeitlin, Ancient Judaism. from Max Weber to the Present (Cambridge 1984) p. 272-275. A new historical view is expounted by Allen K. Godby, The lost Tribes, a Myth. Suggestions towards rewriting Hebrew History (New York 1971) p. 8-117.

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