A final issue to be explored here is the way in which Israelite writers describe the passage from war, a way out of what David Little (1995) has called “the pathology of violence.” How might conquered peoples be integrated into the society of the conquerors? How might warriors who have experienced the sensations of battle with its death, bloodshed, and mayhem make the passage back to the workaday world of peace? If war is participation in sacral activity, which in some cases it is in Israelite conception, how does one return successfully to the realm of the mundane?
First on dealing with captives. As noted above, one option is to return survivors on the other side to their own people. Such behavior generously undertaken can make reconciliation possible. Another, terrifying, option seen in the Hebrew Bible and mentioned earlier is to kill all captives imagining one’s own group as responding to divine orders to place the “idolatrous Other” under the ban or as fulfilling a promise, a war vow. Defeated humans will be “devoted to destruction” as a kind of offering to the deity in thanks for his allowing one’s own side to be victorious in battle. Anthropologists of an “ecological materialist” bent might suggest that both of these options, to let them go or to kill them, betoken a society which is unable to absorb more members even as slaves or second class citizens. The availability of protein resources prevents, or the amount of labor necessary in that society precludes, the desirability of adding to the conquerors’ population. Perhaps such a pragmatic approach gives some hint as to the date or provenance of these varying Israelite war views. But there is a third option that does involve the absorption of the enemy or some of the enemy, and here we find recognition of the need for transition, rite of passage, transformation of identity that follows battle. Deuteronomy 21 describes the treatment of women taken as spoils of war. It is an extremely troubling passage, written from a male and Israelite victors’ point of view. As in the rape of Dinah (Genesis 34), women have no voice. The passage is interesting nevertheless in what it says about its writers’ sense of the group and of the conquered Other. Here the enemy is neither personally hated nor expressly described as deserving of mistreatment because of wrongs done by their people who have been defeated with the help of God. The women captives are the unfortunate victims of circumstance. The Israelite writer suggests that they must in some way be integrated into the world of the victors.
The text from Deuteronomy sets the scene. “If you go to war against your enemies (’oyeb term discussed earlier) and Yahweh gives them into your hand, and you take captives of his (group) ...” The war is thus not one in which the total ban has been imposed, and implicit is the assumption that the people will go warring from time to time, which is an interesting and disturbing feature of the writer’s worldview in and of itself. In any event, should an Israelite see a beautiful woman from among them (notice that all is addressed to the males) and wish to take her as his wife, he may do so, and the woman may be brought into his household, but she is to be ritually purified and transformed: she is to shave her head, pare her nails, and remove her captive’s garments (21:12, 13). She is to remain in his house for a full month’s days, literally “crying,” that is mourning over her father and her mother. After that time the man can “go into her” (that is, consummate the marriage) and become husband to her, and she for him a wife (21:13). The writer adds that if the woman displeases her husband, he must set her free. He cannot sell her as a slave woman since he has had his way with her. The Hebrew uses the term 'anUh/'innHh, which literally means “oppress,” “humiliate” and is sometimes used for rape (Gen 34:2: Dinah; Judges 19:24; 20:5: the Levite’s concubine; 2 Sam 13:12, 14: the rape of David’s daughter Tamar; Deut 22:24, 29). This root is also used to describe what the Egyptians do to the Israelites in slavery (Ex 1:11) and how Sarah treats Hagar (Gen 16:6).
On the one hand Deuteronomy 21 evokes modern comparisons with “ethnic cleansing” whereby rape is one vicious weapon used to subdue, humiliate, and dehumanize the enemy. The least we can say is that women are regarded as chattel and are subjected to forcible abduction as spoils of war. One might counter that such was the way of war in the ancient world, thinking of parallels in classical Greek tradition, but this acknowledgement does not let the tradition off the ethical hook. Similarly, one might aver that in ancient Israelite society, all women marginals were subject to brutish methods of “neatening up” the social structure defined in terms of male lineages: rape victims who could be married off to their rapists; young widows to be married off to their brothers-in-law; adulteresses to be stoned. This passage takes its place along the others and is on one level a priestly passage about absorbing the spoils of war, making unclean booty clean and usable.
On the other hand, it is possible to see in Deuteronomy 21 an acknowledgement, albeit patronizing of women and prejudiced against the Other, that the enemy is a human being. Given the realities of war in the ancient world that were taken for granted, the woman is imagined as undergoing a passage that allows her integration into the people of Israel. Having her head shaved must have been a humiliating experience. Her body, her fertility, like that of the matriarchs’ slave women is treated as a commodity to be plucked and utilized. For the framers of this material as for the conquered, the body is a powerful symbol, a template that signifies status and change of status. By shedding old hair, old nails, and old clothing, the woman is transformed, made anew. Again, she would not want to be remade by her enemies, nor would she probably experience reconciliation. For the victors whose voice dominates the passage, her transformation marks an end to military hostilities, a possibility for some degree of reconciliation, although of course the terms are dictated by the winners. The humanity of those she left behind is acknowledged. Their loss is to be mourned by their child. It is not certain, by the way, whether she cries because they died in the war or because she has been permanently separated from them and her former way of life. The association with the parents as guardians left behind implies the youth of the woman. Finally, she is not treated as a slave that can be sold for money. Sex with the Israelite has made her a part of the group; she has been branded in a sense - again the paternalistic and androcentric bent of the material is clear. At the same time, however, the use of the verb‘innah implies an admission that all is not proper in this method of obtaining a wife, further enforcing the sense that the israelite writer on some level recognizes the humanity of his enemies. The end of war and the transfer of conquered peoples requires a process of passage and transformation.
Another descriptive text that concerns itself with such transition and transfer is the priestly account in Numbers 31 of a military encounter with the Midianites. Within a thread of the biblical founding myth, alluded to in Num 31:16 (cf. Num 25:6-18; 23:28: Josh 13:21-22), the Midianites, their women in particular, have tempted the Israelites into the worship of Baal Peor. This temptation is given as justification for a war of vengeance. The victorious israelites take women and children as spoils, but Moses, whose point of view dominates the scene, insists that male children and adult women who have known a man (sexually) be slaughtered. Only the young virgin girls are blank slates who can be integrated into the group. As I have argued elsewhere and is perhaps implicit in Deuteronomy 21 where the captive women weep for their mother and father (but not for husband or children left behind), the young women are as yet unmarked by the contagious Other - they have not become “one flesh” with them - and unlike young boys who will grow into the “Other” can be transformed by possession into members of Israel, fresh gardens into which Israelite seed may be sown. Again, we are dealing with an alien worldview in which women are objects, men determine identity. Women are presented here and in Deuteronomy 21 as receptacles; ethnicity is rooted in paternity.
Significantly, both the warriors who have killed or touched a corpse and the captives who are to be integrated into the community must undergo a process of purification, as must any inanimate spoil that is to be brought into the camp. Implicit in this particular priestly passage is the notion that death defiles (cf. Num 5:1-4; 19, and compare rules applying to priests alone in Lev 21:1, 2, 11; also 11:39 on the defiling characteristics of animal carcasses). For this reason, virtually all war defiles some of the combatants. To emerge from the uncleanness, time must be passed outside the encampment (Num 31:19); seven days as in other purification rituals, with purification on the third and seventh days. Material booty is to be cleansed with fire if it can survive fire, or with water if not. Clothes are to be washed on the seventh day and then they are permitted to enter the encampment.
The passage is interesting in various ways. First is the reason given for the attack on Midian, an implication that the events of collective memory have long-lasting influence and staying power. In the case of Midian and Numbers 31, at least according to the biblical chronology, we are still dealing with the pre-conquest period, but other misdeeds of the various populations encountered after the emergence from Egypt, e. g. not allowing Israel to pass through their land in spite of peaceful requests to do so, will generations later be cited as cause for war (see, e. g. 1 Sam 15:2-3 regarding Saul’s war with the Amalekites). Stories of past hostilities are recognized to have lots of staying power within the tradition itself. In our own time, we have observed the ways in which ancient tales of hostility serve as justification for war in the present, for example, when the Serbs in former Yugoslavia justified their attacks on Muslims in the 1990s by the aggression of their enemies in 1389. These stories of past indignities take on a life of their own; they assume importance as fixtures of a foundation myth thoroughly interwoven with a group’s sense of its own identity. This process too is surely part of the “pathology of violence.”
Numbers 31 is also interesting from the perspective of gender, the body, and identity; sexual contact transforms and demarcates, altering ethnic status and branding identity. The priestly source of this tale is acutely aware of the way in which the body serves as a cultural code. While the world is filled with the uncontrollables of chaos, especially in the form of death, one can impose some degree of order on the body, having it serve as symbol of renewal and transformation. One can mark upon the body the emergence from unclean to clean and thereby the passage from death to everyday life, from crisis to the quotidian. Death defiles, and war is intimately associated with the chaos of death, but through rituals of purification one may emerge from the status of the unclean, death-stained warrior. In a similar vein, the Chronicler suggests that David was not allowed by God to build the temple because he had been a warrior, his hands stained with blood. His peacetime son “Shlomo” will build the sacred space.
In contemporary war situations we have learned about the danger of returning the warrior to his old life too quickly after combat, and before allowing him or her some sort of passage. We deal in terms of human psychology and state of mind, and as has sometimes been the case, we fear that the fury of war might spill over to the peace-time setting with wife and children, resulting in violence, aggression, and even death (see, for an impressive analogy in early Greece, Shay 1994). Perhaps the ancient writers of Numbers 31, albeit in their own priestly terms of “purity and danger,” as Mary Douglas (1966) calls it, recognized a similar need to demarcate clearly between war status and peace status, to give the warrior some means by which he could effect the return to his former life. He requires transformation in order to rejoin the community much as the foreign wife needs to be transformed from an Israelite perspective to become a part of the people.
Our analysis moves the study of israelite war in some interesting directions. The emotions and experiences of war are acknowledged by several biblical voices who not only implicitly explore the boundary shared by personal and political enmity but also critique the violent excesses resulting from the furious emotions of war. Biblical writers do examine possibilities for reconciliation between enemies after war and ritually mark not only the entrance into battle but also the emergence from war. And thus in a wide range of biblical texts pertaining to war we not only see the need ideologically to justify the killing, but also a desire to find a way back to the sentiments and the state of peace.
World History
