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

ISBN-13: 9780195098402 / Angielski / Miękka / 1995 / 192 str.

Susan Niditch

Opis

Texts about war pervade the Hebrew Bible, raising challenging questions in religious and political ethics. The war passages that readers find most disquieting are those in which God demands the total annihilation of the enemy without regard to gender, age, or military status. The ideology of the "ban," however, is only one among a range of attitudes towards war preserved in the ancient Israelite literary tradition. Applying insights from anthropology, comparative literature, and feminist studies, Niditch considers a wide spectrum of war ideologies in the Hebrew Bible, seeking in each case to discover why and how these views might have made sense to biblical writers, who themselves can be seen to wrestle with the ethics of violence. The study of war thus also illuminates the social and cultural history of Israel, as war texts are found to map the world views of biblical writers from various periods and settings. Reviewing ways in which modern scholars have interpreted this controversial material, Niditch sheds further light on the normative assumptions that shape our understanding of ancient Israel. More widely, this work explores how human beings attempt to justify killing and violence while concentrating on the tones, textures, meanings, and messages of a particular corpus in the Hebrew Scriptures.

Recenzje

This is a short but dense book which creatively explores many of the differing traditions of war in te Bible...this is in my opinion probably the most sophisticated book on war in the Bible which I have had the pleasure of reading. It certainly should take its place alongside T.R. Hobbs's A Time for War: A Study of War in the Old Testament (Wilmington, Delaware, 1989) as one of the two indispensable books on the subject in biblical studies...Niditch has written amost interesting book, full of excellent insights into the text and containing much stimulating and provocative discussion of difficult texts. Journal of Theological Studies Vol 46 no 1