by Aharon Oppenheimer

Professor Oppenheimer will speak on Tuesday, Decmber 1, at 12 noon in Room 2022 of The Thayer Building.

One of the most important images of God in the Bible is his image as a warrior god, a hero, who precedes his people and aids them in their wars. This concept is unique in that the wars of the God of Israel do not take place in the mythological arena, and are not perceived as wars of one god with another. The wars of Israel are fixed in the arena of history, where God is seen as going out to battle to help Israel against its enemies.

In the Hellenistic and Roman periods, the Jews of Palestine revolted a number of times against foreign rulers. These wars were different from the wars of other peoples or the Greeks and Roman themselves, for the polytheistic nature of these latter meant that their wars were not wars of religion. In contrast, the revolts of the Jews were holy wars, for their leading cause was religious.

Monotheism developed two novelties in the history of war. First, religion as a prime motive for war, as distinguished from a secondary motive, or a further basis or excuse. Monotheism turned religion into the central cause of the conflict. This is true not only for Judaism and later for Islam, but Christianity also took up the idea of holy war with enthusiasm. Second, extremism as expressed in martyrdom, the ‘sanctification of the name of God’ as an end in itself, or as part of a holy war, is not a necessary complement of such a war: it is possible to have a holy war without martyrdom. But the Hasmonean revolt, the First Jewish war against the Romans and the Bar Kokhba revolt were all Wars which included the phenomenon of martyrdom.

It would appear then, I will argue, that the Jews of antiquity invented both the holy war and martyrdom, as well as the possibility of combining the two.