In passages such as Exod. 15; Ps. 24: 1-10, 89: 8-18; Hab. 3; Zech. 9; and throughout Isa. 40-55, Yhwh is the divine warrior. His victorious battles create or recreate the world as in Marduk’s defeat of Tiamat and the forces of chaos in the Mesopotamian tale of creation. Frequently, world-creation intertwines with the establishment of Zion, one of the centers of Israel’s symbolic universe, and the divine warrior’s victory is on behalf of Israel, his beleaguered people. He rescues them and establishes them as a very part of the cosmogonic process. The ‘‘victory-enthronement’’ pattern that describes the plot of these narratives is rooted in and formulaically expresses the essence of war: challenge by enemies; preparation of weapons for the hero; march to battle; victory; victory shout; march out of battle/procession; celebration (banquet); house-building. The motifs of victory-enthronement, not all of which need appear in any one account and all of which metonymically evoke the larger pattern, also describe military aspects of the narratives about human heroes, set as they are in actual patterns of war. In the pattern of battle and in their function as foundation myths, tales of human heroes and the divine hero are thus comparable. The emotions of war are manifested in each variety of epic-like material, as are the warrior’s boasts, his special weapons, and his obvious power. The camaraderie between warriors, the bardic code, the mediation by women (except perhaps for the case of Jephthah’s daughter, who is given to the male deity in exchange for victory) are more within the purview of the human hero’s tale, but much of the content expected of epic does seems to provide Israelite authors with a means of imaging the explosive machismo of the deity as well as the aspirations of human beings.
World History
