Chapter 8

HOLY WAR AND THE GREAT WAR IN GERMAN PROTESTANT SCHOLARSHIP ON THE OLD TESTAMENT

Nathan MacDonald

Introduction

During the Great War, a number of Protestant Old Testament scholars addressed the topic of the Bible and war in lectures and publications. Reviews of the history of scholarship on Holy War in the Old Testament are in agreement that the works by German biblical scholars during the Great War contributed nothing of significance to the understanding of Holy War. In his introduction to the English translation of Gerhard von Rad’s seminal work, Holy War in Ancient Israel, Ben Ollenburger overlooks all the works from the time of the Great War with the exception of Gunkel’s ‘Israelite Heroism’ (1916). Ollenburger describes Gunkel’s work as ‘of merely anecdotal interest’ that ‘contributed little distinctive to the study of holy war’.¹ In the most recent, comprehensive analysis of Holy War, Rüdiger Schmitt deliberately bypasses the work of Gunkel, Eißfeldt and Bertholet in his account of the history of research which opens his book. Instead, Schmitt relegates them to his concluding chapter on the reception of the biblical war tradition from the Middle Ages to the Third Reich. In Schmitt’s monograph, the chapter on reception history is something of an appendix to the central chapters which offer a detailed exegesis of texts from the deuteronomistic and priestly traditions of the Old Testament.²

In this essay, I intend to show not only that this assessment of these works is mistaken but also that the designation of them as reception rather than research is problematic. I will undertake this by first describing the works on war and the Bible that were produced by German protestant scholars³ before offering some critical reflections on the literature and its assessment by contemporary scholarship.

The Holy Call of German Old Testament Scholarship

Strange though it may seem a century later, the outbreak of the Great War was almost universally welcomed by academics on all sides.

The intellectual elite of Europe embraced the war not merely as unpleasant necessity, not even as potential excitement after many dull years, but as spiritual salvation and hope of regeneration.⁴

War awoke a new moral and national seriousness, engendered a sense of community and helped shake off the dead hand of materialism that was thought to have gripped the fin de siècle. It is small wonder, then, that churchmen, theologians and biblical scholars were also numbered among the war’s enthusiastic proponents. As well as cheering its appearance and offering staunch intellectual defence for their national causes,⁵ they also recognized that the war had decisively altered the intellectual and theological priorities. Alfred Bertholet opened his work on the Old Testament and war piety with the claim that ‘the tremendous time that we are experiencing requires of the academic establishment partially altered assignments’. Theologians had a ‘holy call’ to address their academic work to the needs of the time and the biblical theologian a special vocation to bring holy life from the depths of the biblical sources.⁶ Scholars who, on their own admission, had passed over biblical texts about war, violence and vengeance with discomfort, suddenly discovered that those texts had a vital word to say to a nation engaged in war. They were cheered by the new moral seriousness and the discovery of a willing audience who believed they had something worth hearing.

Otto Eißfeldt, War and the Bible (1915)

The first to publish a book-length treatment of the Bible and war was the young Otto Eißfeldt (1887–1973), then an unestablished lecturer in Berlin and pastor at the Jerusalems- und Neuen Kirche in the Friedrichstadt district of Berlin. Eißfeldt was relatively unknown having just published his second doctorate in the year before the war’s outbreak.⁷ He had studied in Göttingen and Berlin, enjoying instruction from both the leading literary critics like Wellhausen and Smend, and members of the history of religions school like Gunkel, Bousset and Gressmann. The influence of Gunkel, who Eißfeldt was later to join at the University of Halle, is apparent in Eißfeldt’s second doctorate on the mashal. In the second part, Eißfeldt adopts Gunkel’s approach by discussing mashal as a literary genre.⁸

Eißfeldt’s War and the Bible originated as a public lecture delivered at the University of Berlin in the winter semester of 1914/1915.⁹ The published version is devoted to the memory of Eißfeldt’s brother Hans, a volunteer in the infantry reserve who was killed in the successful assault on Diksmuide on 10 November 1914. In War and the Bible, Eißfeldt sets out a historical approach to war in the Christian Scriptures insisting that there is considerable diversity in understandings of war, but beneath these different perspectives there lies a single principle. Eißfeldt sets his insistence on historical particularity in contrast with attempts to speak about war and religion more generally: there is no single religious perspective on war.¹⁰ In the context of the war, a focus on the Bible requires no justification.

At a stroke . . . the Bible has again gained significance for our nation. It is not only that the word of the Bible reaches larger crowds in services than before. Even in the privacy of the home, many a mother, many a wife, has picked up the Bible again and sunk into its words, even though they had scarcely given it a thought before.¹¹

For Eißfeldt, the Bible’s capacity to speak to the war generation stemmed from its ability to clarify the experience of war, kindle courage, engender patience and provide strength.

For what the men of the Bible experienced and underwent is in many respects entirely similar to what we are now experiencing. And because they experienced it with a more godlike soul, they can guide us how to saturate our experience with the same pious feeling.¹²

It is not just that the biblical texts speak to those enduring similar circumstances, it is also only by sharing the same experience that the biblical reader can truly understand. As Goethe puts it, ‘Whoever wishes to understand the poet, into the poet’s land he must go.’¹³ For Eißfeldt then, it is experience and pious feeling that provides the essential connection between the Bible and its readers.

Eißfeldt’s work falls into two uneven parts: sixty-seven pages are devoted to the Old Testament and only eleven to the New Testament. The historical approach to the material is more fully developed in the discussion of the Old Testament. Eißfeldt divides his account into three historical periods: ca. 1400–750, 750–586 and 586–141 BCE. For each period, he sets out an account of Israel’s history with particular attention to wars and battles before discussing the Israelites’ ideas about warfare.¹⁴ For the New Testament period, there is no history to recount and Eißfeldt moves directly to the New Testament’s contribution to thinking about warfare.

The early period demands the lion’s share of Eißfeldt’s book. This is the time of the exodus, the conquest, the judges, the united monarchy and the first 150 years of the divided kingdoms. Examined with a critical eye, there is very little in the Hexateuch that can confidently be ascribed to the early period, though this does not prevent Eißfeldt from holding that the basic outline of the biblical story is correct in its essentials. The most ancient traditions are the poetic fragments embedded in the narrative, such as Miriam’s song (Exod 15:21) or the mocking of Sihon (Num 21:27–30). The texts from Amarna provide some insight into this early period; the early Israelites were nomads who penetrated into Canaan in the Late Bronze Age, leading to armed confrontation with the sedentary inhabitants.

It is only with the battles of the judges and Israel’s first kings that the biblical text offers us a secure footing. There are a couple of interesting features of Eißfeldt’s retelling of the biblical text. First, he utilizes the non-biblical metaphor of the nation as a maturing male to structure his history. In its early history Israel was a ‘warlike nation . . . a young and strong people’.¹⁵ During this period, Israel exhibits the qualities of a youthful male fighter.

The martial virtues, of which all young and vigorous nations are proud, were also Israel’s renown: desire for freedom and male honour, bravery and daring, love of home and self-sacrifice, craftiness and cunning.¹⁶

This early period is characterized by wars of aggression under Joshua and David. In contrast, Israel and Judah, in the last centuries of their existence, undertake only defensive wars.

There a fresh, youthful nation who conquered its land with a strong arm and then guarded it with stout defence; here an aging, dying nation which has one region after another wrested from it.¹⁷

Secondly, Eißfeldt creates a different roster of heroes and villains. The nation’s decline begins with Solomon who lacked a martial spirit and ambition. He allowed the Transjordanian states to regain their independence and did nothing to stop Damascus and Assyria emerging.¹⁸ In contrast, Saul and ‘valiant Ahab’ emerge as improbable heroes: ‘So this king [Ahab] died as a hero, just like Saul, fighting against a power which he had previously fought with some success.’¹⁹

The decisive shift in Israel’s conception of war occurs because of the prophets, and the influence of Wellhausen’s account of Israel’s religious history upon Eißfeldt is evident. At the beginning, Israel’s relationship to its God was conceived as a natural one, and the national and religious impulses were inseparable. As a result, the wars at the time were holy wars characterized by a naïve patriotism. The prophets transformed the relationship into an ethical one. The early Israelites did not waver in their belief that God fought on their side. Any military setbacks were due to minor infractions, such as Achan’s sin, and were only temporary. The prophets insist, however, that God is just, and the only wars in which God can be enjoined are just ones. These developments in Israelite religion give rise to a tension between national-particularistic ideals and universalistic ones.

After the end of the Hebrew kingdoms, with the exception of the Maccabean period, Israel was neither a protagonist in any conflicts nor did it introduce any fundamentally new thinking about war. Instead, different attempts were made to resolve the tension that the prophets had introduced into Israelite religion. On the one hand, the firm belief in God’s justice made it imperative that true religion was not lost and was transmitted to the entire world. Such ideas find expression in Deutero-Isaiah and many of the psalms of lament and trust.²⁰ On the other hand, there were others who pursued a chauvinism, despite their lack of political power. This is evident in books like Esther and Judith. At this point, Eißfeldt reaches for anti-Semitic tropes and speaks of ‘Jewish fantasy’ and the ‘patriotic chauvinism of the Jews’.²¹ He introduces a contrast between the conscious and artificial chauvinism of this later period with the naïve and natural nationalism of early Israel.

Although Eißfeldt detects some elements of ‘Jewish chauvinism’ in the book of Revelation,²² in every other respect the New Testament is ‘another world’.²³ Christianity fully embraces a universalistic worldview, and this has consequences for the Christian understanding of war. Like many other interpreters, Eißfeldt has to confront the difficulty that Jesus’s teaching about enemies appears to support a complete abnegation of national wars.²⁴ Not so, insists Eißfeldt. Jesus’s teaching addresses individuals and says little about traditional human relationships, such as with family or nation. When we examine Paul too, we must be conscious of his missionary context and the eschatological character of his beliefs. For him, marriage and nations are temporary. Nevertheless, we can see in the case of marriage that it has for Paul a relative value in the present, and the same logic could be extended to the nation.

In order to offer a more full-throated defence of national war as a Christian duty, Eißfeldt directs his readers’ attention to early Christian beliefs that they were in conflict with evil and demonic powers. It is on the basis of resisting evil that Eißfeldt believes he can find a foothold in Christian piety: ‘The war against a power that has become a hotbed of immortality and ungodliness does not contradict the nature of New Testament piety, but is demanded by it’.²⁵ With this established, Eißfeldt can uncover the principle that lies behind the diversity of the biblical perspectives on war.

A war conduct only to satisfy national claims or obtain material advantage is unequivocally opposed to biblical religion. On the other hand, a war that breaks out against iniquity and injustice for the preservation of moral goods can be assessed as God’s war. Here you have in mind, as the object of hope and the goal of aspiration, a time of eternal peace in the world of nations and men. When the moral evil has been eradicated from the world, then war has completed its task of educating and refining the human race, then the time of peace has come.²⁶

Eißfeldt strives for an objective tone befitting a historian. He alludes to his contemporary context only in the introduction and briefly in his discussion of the psalms.²⁷ Nevertheless, Eißfeldt presumably assesses the Central Powers to be fighting a just war against nations that have become ‘a hotbed of immorality and ungodliness’. We might also observe how strongly his assessment of early Israel aligns with the self-presentation of the German Reich as a young and virile nation full of a warranted national pride. Eißfeldt’s book comforts the soldier and his family that responding to the call to arms is not only permissible for a Christian, but it is also a holy duty and an act of religious and national piety.

Hermann Gunkel, Israelite Heroism and War Piety in the Old Testament (1916)

From our later perspective, it is clear that Hermann Gunkel (1862–1932) was the towering figure in Old Testament scholarship in the first quarter of the twentieth century. He was a leading figure in the history of religions school and developed the form critical method. Yet, he was famously opposed by Wellhausen and struggled to obtain his first tenured professorship. It was not until 1907 at the age of forty-five that he took the chair at Gießen, where he was to teach until 1920 when he received the call to Halle. By the outbreak of the war, he had already published his seminal work on chaos and creation, his magisterial commentary on Genesis and a series of studies on the psalms.²⁸

As Gunkel’s recent biographer, Konrad Hammann, observes, Gunkel had rarely expressed public opinions on political matters, but when war broke out, he was conspicuous in his patriotic efforts.²⁹ He wrote a number of short pieces on the war and the Old Testament, composed some patriotic poems for soldiers and was involved in humanitarian work.³⁰ His most extensive contributions were two essays published initially in the pages of the International Monthly for Science, Art and Technology and then collected together and published in 1916 by the Göttingen academic press Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. The volume was dedicated to Gunkel’s son Werner who had volunteered for the Kaiser’s army in the first few days of the war.

Gunkel’s essay on ‘Israelite Heroism’ appears to be familiar with Eißfeldt’s War and the Bible and begins with a brief overview of Israel’s history from the wilderness to the Maccabees. Like Eißfeldt, Gunkel insists on the diversity of the biblical portrait and deploys the image of an ageing male to order it. In its early years, Israel was full of national pride, love of fatherland, and heroism. In the monarchy’s declining years, however, the nation grew weary and increasingly unwilling to fight.³¹ Gunkel’s particular focus is the nature of Israelite heroism and establishing a close association between the heroism of the sword and the heroism of faith. Gunkel seeks to persuade a public used to reading the Bible for stories of faith that the same stories can nurture a nation at war. Far from being a reading against the grain, it is only the nation at war that can truly understand the unity of the inner life of faith and the outer life of national war.

What does Gunkel’s reader learn about the Israelite heroic ideal? The hero faced death with inner peace, as Agag did in 1 Samuel 15 or the ‘heroic Ahab’.³² Consequently, he can also view the death of others with equanimity. The biblical authors show no squeamishness in describing death and injuries. There are numerous accounts of heroism, such as that of Jonathan or David’s mighty men. Heroes accompanied one another in bands and fought not for their own honour alone. The esteem with which heroes are held is seen not only in the sagas told about them but also in the songs celebrating their deeds. These stories include the establishing of the monarchy, for it is in the heroic bands of warriors that leaders arose who became chieftains and, eventually, the earliest kings. Anticipating that his book would not only be read by serving soldiers but also by their mothers and wives, Gunkel also insists that the heroic character suffused the people entirely, drawing particular attention to the actions of Hagar, Tamar, Rizpah and Abigail, among others.³³

Having detailed the heroic actions and virtues of the Israelites, Gunkel turns to its connection with the religious life, introducing as he does so the idea of ‘war piety’ (Kriegsfrömmigkeit). The duty of war piety is established through imitatio dei: the God of Sinai is a heroic, warrior God. His people are called to obey his commandments without question and to be completely loyal to him. Even when wars could not be prosecuted, as during the exile, Israelites could still demonstrate their heroism through commitment to God. Legends tell of the heroic exploits of Nehemiah, Mordechai, Daniel and Tobit.

Gunkel’s essay on ‘War Piety’ is structured historically. The epitome of Israel’s war piety is found in its early history. Yahwism was a national religion and, as a result, war and religion were tightly bound together. In this period, we also see Yhwh’s distinctive responsibility amongst the gods more clearly: Yhwh was the warrior deity, and war was one of the highest forms of Yhwh’s revelation. Consequently, Gunkel provides an extensive treatment of the conduct of holy war for the pre-monarchic and early monarchic period. He describes how the war was initiated through offerings, oaths, and the sounding of trumpets and the war cry, how God’s presence was assured through banners and the ark, how victory was celebrated in feasts and song and memorialized through the devotion of the spoil. The people of Israel were conscious of God’s presence and perceived him to be fighting for them through various means: the weather, the stars, the flood waters, and through plague and pestilence. They portrayed God as a mighty warrior, sometimes fighting alone on behalf of his people, sometimes leading his troops into battle.

Gunkel follows Eißfeldt in perceiving two major shifts in Israel’s understanding of war. One occurred with the end of the Hebrew kingdoms: ‘Israel’s religion now fully died out with its state’.³⁴ That this was the case is apparent in 1–2 Chronicles where the stories of the monarchy are retold without any understanding of the true war religion. Rather than the Israelites cooperating with God, the people are simply bystanders as God achieves victory. At the same time, religion became more abstract. A good example is the Greek translation of the ‘Lord of Hosts’ as ‘Lord Almighty’. Equally enduring changes occurred as a result of the ascendency of the Assyrian Empire in the middle of the eighth century BCE. In Gunkel’s assessment, the old war religion could only flourish whilst Israel faced enemies that were not too powerful. In the face of an overwhelming enemy, defeat could not be viewed as a temporary setback due to sin, easily rectified through repentance. The prophets insisted that God was against Israel because of its sin and that its defeat was inevitable, a moral necessity. If the prophets struck a fatal blow to the old war religion and its confidence in God’s decisive assistance, they also secured its survival, albeit in a transformed state. The warrior God of Israel became the warrior God of the world. Assyria too would be destroyed and the prophets proclaimed a vision of the future with healing and restoration. In this way ‘a new, higher war religion’ was born.³⁵

Rudolf Kittel, The Old Testament and Our War (1916) and Wars in Biblical Lands (1918)

When the First World War broke out, Rudolf Kittel (1853–1929) was at the pinnacle of his career. After studies at Tübingen, he had taught at Tübingen and Stuttgart before receiving the call to Breslau in 1888. A decade later, he was made professor in Leipzig where he remained until his retirement. In the last two years of the war, and in the difficult revolutionary years after the war, he was rector of the university.³⁶

Kittel’s The Old Testament and Our War brought together an essay and a lecture.³⁷ The essay, entitled ‘On War in Israel’, had been commissioned early in the war by the Lutheran Church Review for its series ‘What have our theologians to say about the war?’³⁸ The lecture, entitled ‘The Significance of the Old Testament for the War Piety of the German Nation’, was delivered to the Church and Pastoral Conference in Meissen in 1916. Kittel’s essay ‘On War in Israel’ was one of the earliest writings on war by an Old Testament scholar, written in the winter of 1914/15. Kittel writes for an audience that is on the front and at home. It lacks the historical structure that became common after Eißfeldt’s book and is organized according to three loosely-related themes: the idea of holy war; the war song of Israel; and pastoral care in war. Nevertheless, Kittel manages to move across the entirety of the Hebrew canon. The overall effect, however, is marred by the personal vignettes. At one point, Kittel regales his audience with a story of how he encouraged a student recruit who had qualms about the sawtooth bayonet. Foreign newspapers had denounced the weapon as barbarous. Kittel is incensed – the sawtooth bayonet was not an offensive weapon to be used against the enemy but issued to a few soldiers in each regiment charged with the task of clearing obstacles such as barbed wire. Nevertheless, insists Kittel, he would have no reservations in using it against the enemies who he renounces in vivid racist language.

But my young friend was in agreement with me that hard and unusual means could be used if it is necessary to protect the homeland and the highest goods from wild hordes: black, brown, yellow, who have no idea about international law or of culture, and have been let loose without hesitation by these half-breeds on our best sons – often the sons of their own teachers.³⁹

In a similar manner to the other Old Testament scholars we have examined, Kittel opens by remarking on the extraordinary surge in interest in the Old Testament once war was declared. War is scarcely mentioned in the New Testament because of the political situation of the Jews, but ancient Israel was a nation under arms. The first section discusses the idea of holy war. Kittel begins by seeking to distinguish ‘holy war’ from Islamic jihad but quickly moves to equate the two. He imagines aggressive wars outside the land of Israel gaining new converts, but perhaps the most surprising instance is his listing of war cries, in which he seamlessly blends biblical and Islamic expressions: ‘For Yahwe’, ‘The Sword of the Lord’ and ‘Yhwh is great! Yhwh is great!’⁴⁰ For ancient Israel, war was a holy undertaking that saw patriotism and piety flow together. Even in the present, war is a sacred undertaking. Those at war and those at home are equally charged with the requirement to be holy. Does the idea of holy war require that God is the God of the Germans? Kittel insists that God is pre-eminently the God of justice, and if the cause is just, God is on the German side.

In the second section, Kittel demonstrates that songs were sung on all sorts of occasions in ancient Israel but also at wartime. He collects examples from the historical books, such as Num 10, as well as examples from the psalms. Kittel was well placed to write on the psalms, having just finished his extensive commentary on the book.⁴¹ The importance of the home front is seen in the songs of Miriam, Sisera’s mother, and Jephthah’s daughter, all of whom celebrated the deeds of their menfolk. In the third section, Kittel argues that pastoral care is not a modern idea. He points to the prophets as those who provided encouragement. He singles out for particular treatment, Isaiah’s encouraging of Ahaz during the Syro-Ephramite war. This brings Kittel to the importance of faith in Isa 7:9 and the need to trust God when all has been done that can be. Trust in God is ultimately orientated to peace and Kittel concludes with this as the hope of the men who at war and those left at home.

Kittel’s lecture in Meißen on war piety opens with a defence of the Old Testament from the attacks by Ernst Katzer, a retired minister from Löbau.⁴² Katzer saw all war as sin, and the Old Testament stands guilty of propagating war. In contrast, the New Testament offers a message of peace. In Katzer’s view, German Christianity needed to be cleansed of its ‘Semitic influences’. Kittel’s preliminary response is not to attack Katzer’s main point but to highlight examples in which piety and military patriotism are united. He cites letters from a student on the front who took comfort from the psalms and regales his audience with statistical evidence that theology students were more conspicuous in their commitment to the war effort and their heroism than their fellows. Kittel’s point seems to be that such piety belies the idea that war is sin. Before turning to the Old Testament, Kittel treats the New Testament. Jesus is concerned with the cosmic Kingdom of God and says nothing about many of the necessary social institutions that belong to this world. Warfare is not sin, though war originates in sin.

The Old Testament does, Kittel admits, sit at a lower level in its concentration on the present world. Nevertheless, he contends that the Old Testament is closer to the New than Katzer allows, as can be seen in its prizing of peace. In his lecture, Kittel makes many of the same points that he made in his essay for the Lutheran Church Review. His approach is less thematic and more historical. He begins with a Mosaic period characterized by defensive and aggressive wars. Both Germany and Israel faced the threat of nations intent on destroying them. War was a holy service for them, just as defence of home and culture is a holy service for Germany. Consequently, Israel’s war poetry is suitable material for German soldiers. To the objection that such actions contradict the fifth commandment, Kittel complains that ‘you shall not kill’ should have been rendered ‘you shall not murder’.

The prophets herald a decisive shift to a higher level. Even Israel’s national wars can come under the searching critique of the prophets with their ethical monotheism. Both Israel and the nations are condemned. There is nothing comparable elsewhere in antiquity. Even here, the highest point of Old Testament war piety has not been reached; for this, Kittel turns to Jeremiah and Isaiah. Kittel returns to the same themes that concluded his essay ‘On War in Israel’: the importance of faith and the goal of peace. There is, Kittel insists, nothing for a Christian to be embarrassed about. Indeed, it is only to be wished that the lofty principles of the prophets were put into practice.

It is apparent that Kittel’s audience in Meissen was not entirely convinced, and Kittel appends a response to the question of why attention should be given to the Old Testament, if it does indeed represent a lower religious level. Shouldn’t the Old Testament be abandoned to the Jews and it be admitted that we have two different religions? Kittel argues that the New has grown out of the Old, as can be seen by the frequent references to it by Jesus and the apostles. In its high points – its monotheism and universalism – the Old Testament almost approaches the message of Jesus.

Kittel’s illustrated talk, ‘Wars in Biblical Lands’, was first delivered in November 1917 to a literary society in Dresden but subsequently repeated in the Lichtbildhörsaal at the University of Leipzig. The following spring, it was published in Gotha.⁴³ The extension of war into Palestine made the subject particularly resonant and timely. Clearly, the publishers felt the book had a significant audience. Despite the advanced state of the war and the many shortages, the book is a beautiful volume with good-quality paper and thirty-eight illustrations in red and black ink.

Wars in Biblical Lands covers war in Israel and the surrounding nations and draws on the Bible, Near Eastern texts and archaeology. Kittel opens with a brief history of warfare in Israel from the invasion of Thutmosis III to the Hasmoneans. Israel’s story is full of warfare and heroism; the only peaceful period was Solomon’s reign. The central part of the book is an account of how warfare was conducted in the time of the Bible. Kittel begins with the idea of ‘holy war’, covering the same ground as his essay ‘On War in Israel’. Entirely new are his chapters on the mechanics of war, and it is here that Kittel draws on the rich illustrated material available. He discusses infantry and chariots, siege warfare and battlefields and the treatment of prisoners. The discussion of prisoners allows Kittel to turn to ethical matters. Prophetic voices protest not only against ill-treatment of Israelites, but even Assyria’s actions against Israel’s enemies. As a result, we find in the prophetic literature ‘the first traces of human rights’.⁴⁴ Kittel insists that there is much to learn from the prophets. After a discussion of the extra-biblical evidence for specific biblical wars, Kittel concludes his volume, as he had his other works, with the theme of peace. The prophets understood God to be the God of the entire world and of justice. Ultimately, there can be no place for war. Some of the tensions that the war had revealed in German society come to the surface in Kittel’s final reflections, and he envisages a new, just Germany just as the Bible tells of a new Israel.

From an academic perspective, Wars in Biblical Lands is the most satisfying of Kittel’s contributions to understanding war in the Bible. It is a comprehensive account of war with well-chosen examples from the Bible and the Near East. It remains focussed on its topic and largely avoids troubling personal anecdotes. The one exception is a story he tells of how he had proposed to a senior officer many years ago that he might share his insights about biblical warfare with junior officers. The officer dismissively pointed out that the German army had more relevant and recent experience. ‘How right that was then, but how differently we would regard this matter today’.⁴⁵ The small, rhetorical victory for the armchair general is vain and naïve but also points to Kittel’s desire to provide an academic contribution to the war effort.

Alfred Bertholet, Religion and War (1915), From Holy Sources: A Booklet on War and Victory (1916) and The Old Testament and War Piety (1917)

At the beginning of the war, Alfred Bertholet (1868–1951) had just replaced Rudolf Smend in Göttingen, having previously held posts in Basel and Tübingen. There was scarcely a scholar more prolific than Bertholet, and although in his mid-forties, he had already produced numerous biblical commentaries, completed Stade’s biblical theology and written extensively on religious history. As we have seen, Bertholet believed that the war introduced a new set of obligations, and he would not be backward in contributing to the war effort. Bertholet’s academic work was not narrowly focused on Old Testament studies, and he was interested in religion more broadly, most especially Buddhism. His war output reflected this broad canvas.⁴⁶

Bertholet’s first publication was on the subject of Religion and War, a lecture he had delivered to the female student members of the Göttingen branch of the Wartburgbund in May 1915. Religion and War was published the same year by J. C. B. Mohr, in the same popular series that Eißfeldt had published his War and the Bible.⁴⁷ In the lecture, Bertholet took issue with Eißfeldt’s insistence that there was no such thing as a general approach to religion and war. Bertholet argued that it was possible to recover the primitive religious understanding of war. Humanity’s early history was full of violence, and war was a constant feature in the struggle to survive. Drawing on religious beliefs and practices from across the world, but especially the Old Testament, Bertholet sketches out the relationship between war and religion. Even within the more advanced religions, primitive elements are deeply rooted, often sitting somewhat uncomfortably alongside more sophisticated notions of universalism and ethics. It is striking that Bertholet treats the issue mostly as an academic problem, rarely touching upon the issues thrown up by Germany’s current situation.

Bertholet’s second contribution, From Holy Sources: A Booklet on War and Victory, was a more direct contribution to the war effort.⁴⁸ In it, Bertholet collected numerous texts from the Old Testament: seventy from the prophets, forty-one from the psalms and one each from Lamentations and the Song of Moses. Bertholet’s choice and ordering of the texts creates a narrative arc. He begins with the coming judgement, scenes of the terror of war and the mocking of the enemies. The texts that follow feature appeals to God, trust in him and concerns that he might not be present. God promises to be with those who return to him, provide them with strength and fight on their side. Victory is achieved and the enemy is destroyed. In this way, God shows his power over the nations. Finally, God returns in victory to be met by the celebrations of the righteous who now enjoy peace and prosperity. The text selections end with the iconic Psalm 46.

Bertholet’s The Old Testament and War Piety was initially delivered in November 1916 as part of a series of lectures in the Prussian upper house organized by the central committee for the inner mission of the evangelical church. The animating issue for Bertholet is the suitability of the Bible for the German nation during the time of war and its ability to speak to their spiritual needs. While the Old Testament does have passages that suggest a passivity, where God’s salvation is merely observed, there are many texts that are not so alien to the reality of warfare. Bertholet insists on the importance of recognizing the Bible’s diversity.

Having struck a note we have already heard in Eißfeldt, Bertholet plots a similar historical course in the first half of his lecture. He begins with Israel’s origins as a nomadic people and the idea of blood vengeance. Like Eißfeldt, he highlights poetic fragments in Israel’s history that portray warfare. As the nation’s history progresses, Bertholet discerns a weakening desire for war and employs the familiar imagery of the aging male: ‘It is as though the strong, youthful nation had grown old; it was like the beginning of a long dying’.⁴⁹ This imagery is substantiated by appeal to Isaiah and Hosea’s description of the ill body politic. Sapped of any desire for war, the people were eventually defeated and exiled. The return from exile saw the old language of holy war being taken up in service of the cult.

Consequently, the once military instincts were understood in transposed form spiritually. It is an interesting observation that can be made on the basis of the Hebrew that the old military vocabulary was transformed into cultic expressions. The word for military service itself becomes the expression for holy service, the militia sacra; the war cry becomes the cultic call; the trumpet call whose blast brought the nation together became an instrument of peace which the priests blew at cultic occasions.⁵⁰

The hatred of the other never died, and was imagined in books like Esther and Joel. The time of the Maccabees and finally the rebellion against the Romans saw these hopes flicker briefly into flame.

For Bertholet, the history of warfare in the Old Testament is merely the backdrop for his focus upon what can be of relevance to the contemporary situation from ancient Israel’s war piety. As evidence of the Old Testament’s newly discovered relevance, Bertholet points to the new appreciation for the word ‘enemy’. Texts like ‘you prepare a table before my enemies’, which were once so alien, now have a new relevance. War is a shared reality that connects ancient writers with modern readers, and assures a common spirituality or war piety.

In Bertholet’s assessment, the fundamental idea of the Old Testament is that God is the creator of history, and, thus, war too is divinely ordained. This basic idea underlines the Old Testament’s war piety. From this fundamental insight, Bertholet draws a number of consequences. First, God does not stand apart from war. Not only is war God’s war, but Bertholet agrees with Gunkel that war is a revelation of God himself. God is a man of war. Secondly, war has a purpose. This leads Bertholet into a lengthy reflection on the relationship between God, war and justice. War is an instrument for divine justice, but considerable caution must be given to claims about ‘the German god’. Not only are God’s chosen judged more strictly, but also God does not commit himself to one people only. In Bertholet’s view, to believe this would be a step backwards to a lower level of piety. The idea of justice in the Old Testament is corporate, and Bertholet argues that the war has brought to an end the unhappy individualism of the pre-war period. The recognition of a close relationship between God and justice requires self-reflection. God is on the side of those who are righteous. Thirdly, the Old Testament faith is orientated not to the past or to the present but to the future. In a similar way, argues Bertholet, the German soldier fights for a brighter future. He compares the soldier who perishes to ‘brave Moses’ who saw the land but did not enter it himself.

The Holy War of German Old Testament Scholarship

According to each of the scholars we have examined, there was a renewed interest in the Old Testament in churches following the outbreak of the war. Their books responded to a need felt within the churches to understand what the Old Testament taught about war. A number of the books originated in lectures outside the universities, and their authors insist that they were pressed into publishing them by enthusiastic audiences. Even if we are sceptical about some of these claims, there clearly was some appetite for these books. For their part, the teachers of the Old Testament were delighted by the new relevance their studies now possessed. In this matter at least, the Old Testament emerged from the shadow of the New.

Yet, Old Testament scholars also found themselves assailed by critics from two different directions. On the one hand, there were those who questioned whether the Bible was suitable material for inspiring Germany’s youth-in-arms. Bertholet raises the spectre of Nietzsche: ‘It is well known that biblical literature’s extolling of physical weakness made Nietzsche unsympathetic to biblical religion’. He quotes a letter which read, ‘The spirit of the Old Testament is the spirit of servitude, of anxiety; the spirit of the German race stands in contradiction to it, and above all the German spirit of our time’. The Norse myth of Edda is much more to be preferred.⁵¹ On the other hand, as Kittel discovered, there were those within the church who criticized the Old Testament for failing to be sufficiently Christian. The martial spirit of the Old Testament contradicted Jesus’s message of love and peace to all.

A striking feature of the books we have examined is the hermeneutics of shared experience. It is only with the contemporary experience of war that the Old Testament can properly be appreciated. The opening sentence of Gunkel’s essay on Israelite heroism sets this out baldly: ‘It is a fact that we only understand as much of the past of humanity as we have experienced in the present’.⁵² It finds its most extended expression in the implication that it was only the German nation that could truly understand Israel’s experience:

Such a brave, proud and politically mature nation now experienced the terrible fate: despite all of its resistance, it fell under the bondage of superior powers, which it could never escape in the long run. We understand that its character had been decisive in these centuries – and we cannot deny – not altered to its advantage. We understand the consuming hatred of the foreign oppressors, whose cruel and striking expression is found in the well-known verses:

        ‘Daughter Babylon, you devastator,

                Happy those who pay you back!

        Happy those who catch and dash

                Your children against the rocks!’

And we understand the inner plight of a once noble nation who cannot express this deepest feeling. Indeed, it is their fateful destiny to feign submissiveness to strangers and in their sanctuary to pray for their king.⁵³

As we have seen, Eißfeldt also understands appreciation of biblical texts to depend on our experiencing similar situations ourselves. For his part, Bertholet insists that there were parts of the Bible, such as the psalms which spoke about the ‘enemy’, that were simply a dead letter prior to the beginning of the war.

It is perhaps no accident that a number of the authors we have examined were associated with the history of religions school. Gunkel was a leading light, and at this point, Eichrodt belonged within that circle. The history of religions school emphasized religious experience above theology and pursued a comparative method that assumed the universality of religious expressions. It was no surprise to find points of contact between the religious spirits of the Germans and the Israelites, nor that these commonalities were the basis for appreciating ancient Israelite religion. By 1914, the emphasis on religion had spread beyond the circle of scholars that made up the history of religions school. Even a scholar like Kittel – no enthusiast for the history of religions approach – was to write on Israel’s religious experience.⁵⁴ The term ‘war piety’ (Kriegsfrömmigkeit), a term that, so far as I can see, had not been coined prior to 1915, expresses the connection between ancient and modern religious experience.

But were these attempts to respond to the public mood and forge a link between the sacred past and the needs of the present anything more than occasional writings that contributed nothing to the academic study of the Old Testament? In treating these essays as reception and not research, Rüdiger Schmitt characterizes the essays from the First World War as ‘popular academic portrayals’,⁵⁵ which represented nothing more than the reception of academic research in the wake of Julius Wellhausen. The studies of Eißfeldt and Gunkel were not written for an academic readership but for ‘a broad, educated public’; as such, they can be characterized as simply ‘theological propaganda for the war’.⁵⁶ The self-identification of Germany with biblical Israel is an abandonment of academic objectivity and justifies Schmitt’s final denunciation of the works as not truly scholarly: ‘the “academic” war theology of the First World War’.⁵⁷

It is not clear to me that the Old Testament scholars of the Great War would have recognized Schmitt’s classification of their work. He is right to observe that they were often ‘popular academic portrayals’, but this did not in any way diminish them as thoroughly academic. As is well known, the history of religions school thought it particularly important to spread their ideas beyond the narrow confines of academia and founded a number of book series, culminating in the great encyclopaedia project, Religion in Past and Present. Scholars at the beginning of the twentieth century would have not have recognized the choice that Schmitt imposes on them. While some of the essays originated as lectures to church audiences, a number were delivered in academic contexts. Eißfeldt’s War and the Bible was given as a public lecture during the 1914/1915 winter semester at Berlin University, and Kittel’s Wars in Biblical Lands was first delivered to a literary society in Dresden but subsequently repeated at the University of Leipzig. In both cases, the line between academic and popular almost disappears. The same is true if we look at the contexts for publication. A number of the books appeared with publishers with strong academic credentials, such as J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck) in Tübingen, or Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht in Göttingen. Eißfeldt’s War and the Bible and Bertholet’s Religion and War appeared in the series ‘Religious History Booklets for the German Christian Present’. With print-runs in the thousands, the series aimed at a broad audience, but it was the popularization of the most current academic scholarship. Consequently, the list of contributors to the series reads like a who’s who of early twentieth-century German theological scholarship. It was, for example, the organ that Gunkel chose for his groundbreaking work The Folktale in the Old Testament.⁵⁸ Similarly, Gunkel’s Israelite Heroism and War Piety in the Old Testament first appeared as two essays in the pages of the International Monthly for Science, Art and Technology. The journal was envisaged for an educated public with articles covering all academic fields. Nevertheless, its academic credentials were impeccable, including among its patrons Adolf Harnack and boasting contributions from the leading minds not only in Germany but also abroad.⁵⁹

The war had made a difference to academic priorities, and the Old Testament scholars whose works we have examined were certainly conscious of that as Bertholet’s comments about ‘partially altered assignments’ demonstrates. The urgent needs of the times did bring academic theology back in touch with the concerns of those in the pews, and the scholars we have examined were more than willing to put their talents at the service of the church. Indeed, in Bertholet’s view, not to do so would have been a dereliction of academic duty: ‘This holy call concerns not least theology, so long as it seeks to educate practical theologians who must offer bread and not stone to the souls entrusted to them’.⁶⁰ In other words, an academic theology which was no longer also for the public could not legitimately claim to be theology.

Bertholet’s The Old Testament and War-Piety provides further evidence that these Old Testament scholars did not regard their wartime offerings as anything less than academic contributions. In his groundbreaking History of Israelite Culture published in 1919, which demonstrated the inner connection between culture and religion, Bertholet included an extensive discussion of war and peace as part of his discussion of Israel’s political life.⁶¹ He directs the interested reader to his wartime tract for a more extensive discussion and rehearses its significant points. If there is a difference between Bertholet’s popular academic work and his academic work, it is beyond my abilities to describe it. Yet, paradoxically, Schmitt discusses Bertholet’s History of Israelite Culture as part of his history of research.

Contemporary reviewers also failed to make Schmitt’s crucial distinction between research and reception. The publication of the books by Bertholet, Eißfeldt and Kittel were all noted in the pages of the Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, and together with Gunkel’s Israelite Heroism and War Piety in the Old Testament, they were reviewed in the pages of Theologische Literaturzeitung by Hermann Schuster, who, alongside his editorial responsibilities for the journal, found time to review a significant number of war-related publications.⁶² In the pages of Theologisches Literaturblatt, Otto Procksch reviewed works by Bertholet and Kittel.⁶³ Procksch’s wartime reading was subsequently to serve him well, for he was called upon to write the article ‘War in the Old Testament’ for the second edition of Religion in Past and Present which appeared in 1929.⁶⁴ His bibliography includes Schwally and Caspari, but also Gunkel, Bertholet and Kittel. In short compass, his article synthesizes Schwally’s synchronic and anthropological approach with the more historical orientation of the wartime tracts.

Schmitt’s attenuated account of the history of scholarship has this to its credit – it reflects the canon that has been recognized since von Rad’s Der Heilige Krieg. Harvesting the footnotes of the essays by von Rad, Smend and Weippert brings up the same clutch of names: Wellhausen, Schwally, Caspari, Weber and Pedersen.⁶⁵ Schmitt’s decision not to overlook them is commendable, but his classification of them as ‘reception’ seems more than a little convenient. That impression is not dispelled when we find Schmitt treating the work of the anti-Semitic Johannes Hempel in the same way.

It is an interesting question to ask why works composed during the Great War were passed over in silence by German scholarship after the Second World War.⁶⁶ It may tell us more about the shadow the Second World War cast than how the works were perceived during the First World War or in the years afterwards. I think it unlikely that Gerhard von Rad was unaware of the works by Bertholet, Eißfeldt, Gunkel and Kittel, though explaining his omission of them in Der Heilige Krieg can be no more than an exercise in speculation. Of course, anyone who has worked with von Rad to any degree will have been frustrated by his notoriously sparse references to other literature. Nevertheless, there are a number of ways in which we might discern the influence of those writing during the First World War. First, although Schwally is credited with being the first to write on holy war, his approach was comparative and anthropological. Von Rad analyses holy war in a historical framework, and it is Eißfeldt who first addresses the subject in this way. Secondly, many of the elements of holy war – the trumpets, war cry, consecration, sacrifices and so forth – were already mapped out by those writing in the First World War. Von Rad’s decisive contribution was to locate holy war in institutional practices and, thus, provide a concrete context for its historical transmission. At this point, von Rad was deeply influenced by Max Weber’s account of warfare as has long been recognized. Weber contributed to von Rad the idea of ‘holy war’ as a type, an abstraction only partially realized in the biblical instantiations, and the idea that it was with the establishment of the monarchy that the institution of ‘holy war’ had fundamentally changed with prophecy preserving the original ideals of the confederacy and its celebration of Yhwh as a warrior.⁶⁷ Why did von Rad fail to mention them? Perhaps it was the liberal and nationalistic instincts of these works that was inimical to von Rad, especially in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. In other words, the obscurity that befell the works of Bertholet, Eißfeldt, Gunkel and Kittel may have had everything to do with the events of the Second World War and rather less to do with Schmitt’s concern to maintain scholarly objectivity.⁶⁸

Schmitt is, of course, quite right to be worried about the scholarly objectivity of the work of Old Testament scholarship during the Great War. Not because it suddenly lost its objectivity in the midst of the great upheavals of the age, but because of the brilliant light it casts upon the critical enterprise as it had been carried out. If we ought to admit them to the rolls of the history of research, we should have to admit how difficult it is to maintain the clear distinctions between research and reception, and that will be a very messy thing indeed. But if any Old Testament subject demands the dismantling of this artificial boundary, it is surely the idea of ‘holy war’. Its novelty is witnessed to by the fact, widely acknowledged, that the subject only became a matter of scholarly investigation with Friedrich Schwally’s Semitische Kriegsaltertümer published in 1901.⁶⁹ Schwally clearly envisaged a series of volumes, though he only ever published the first on Der heilige Krieg im alten Israel. As the conception of the abortive project suggests, Schwally’s approach was comparative. In the manner of other armchair anthropologists of the period, Schwally’s interest was in discovering primitive mentality, and he traced evidence of earlier beliefs in the conservative practices of ancient Israel. With the help of numerous ethnological examples drawn from across the globe, Schwally discerned beliefs in daimonic powers, fetishism, magical practices and taboo. It is unsurprising, then, that his principal interlocutors included Spencer, Tylor, Frazer and Smith. Already, of course, Smith had argued: ‘In the Old Testament, war and warriors are often spoken of as consecrated – a phrase which seems to be connected, not merely with the use of sacred ceremonies at the opening of a campaign, but with the idea that war is a holy function, and the camp a holy place’.⁷⁰ The ground was well prepared, even if Schwally’s precise description of the phenomenon as ‘holy war’, a term not found in the Bible, was not used by Smith.

Given Schwally’s subsequent career as an Orientalist, we might well think that his notion of holy war had been influenced by jihad, as indeed Ollenburger did.⁷¹ In truth, the Arabs and Islam feature very rarely in Schwally’s ethnographical examples, and there is, I believe, no mention of jihad.⁷² If Islamic jihad was not an especially important influence on Schwally, what was? Harold Washington rightly notes that amid his ethnological comparisons, Schwally draws a number of parallels between Israelite holy war and German mythology. The heavenly hosts are like Wotan’s army or the Valkyries, the Israelites’ military banners are like Wotan’s spear and the Nazirites are like the Berserkers. As Washington observes, ‘this reconstruction of “holy war” looks more like a Teutonic institution than a Hebrew one’.⁷³ We may coordinate this apposite observation with recent scholarship on the idea of ‘holy war’ in modern Germany. This has emphasized the importance of the German nationalist poets of the final years of Napoleon,⁷⁴ even if Friedrich Graf has shown that the expression did not originate with them.⁷⁵ Poets like Theodor Körner, Ludwig Uhland, Max von Schenkendorf and Ernst Moritz Arndt wielded biblical language to forge a new national identity and fight the French tyrant.⁷⁶ To quote but one example from Körner:

It is no war that royalty saw

‘Tis a crusade, a holy war.⁷⁷

Throughout the nineteenth century, the poets of the German wars of liberation enjoyed considerable popularity, circulating in numerous anthologies and becoming part of the school curriculum. After 1871, they became the poets of the ‘birth of the German nation’.⁷⁸ Just prior to the outbreak of the First World War, the events of the wars of liberation and its poetry were brought vividly to mind through the centenary celebrations in 1913.⁷⁹

When we recognize the influence of the poets of the wars of liberation, the carefully erected boundaries between research and reception dissolve entirely. Biblical language inspired the poets, whose poetry then provided some of the categories by which the biblical material was understood. If the poets of the wars of liberation leapt enthusiastically upon the biblical text for the religious validation it provided for forging a German national identity, biblical scholars a century later were only too willing to return the compliment. If for many Germans the historical and religious validity of the Bible had been so thoroughly undermined by a century of biblical criticism, the Great War offered biblical scholars the opportunity to rediscover a role for the Bible as a national history. The effect was transformative for every part of the Hebrew canon.

This is the case even with the most cautious of the writers we have examined, Otto Eißfeldt. The Old Testament story is a story of heroes that begins in youthful vitality but ends in chauvinism and hatred of the other. In contrast, the New Testament is concerned with the individual and stands apart from nationalism. Nevertheless, as Eißfeldt reaches his conclusion, he raises a speculative question: Could a national war be permissible in the thinking of the Old Testament? Yes, he replies, since Christians fight against evil, and, thus, a just war is permissible. But a war fought merely in support of national claims or material advantage cannot be justified.

Eißfeldt’s caution about national wars is belied by the fact that in his hands the Bible is transformed into the characteristic genre of the nineteenth century: a national history. As Stefan Berger observes, ‘battles, wars and civil wars were particular concerns of national historians’, and Eißfeldt is no different.⁸⁰ Israel’s national history is full of warrior heroes – and also villains. Bertholet and Kittel also rehearse this national story, perhaps with some dependence on Eißfeldt, though in shorter compass. The influential model of Gibbon applies here, just as well as it does to so many nineteenth-century national histories.⁸¹ In the story of rise and decline, the body politic is presented as a man. Israel in its youth is full of warlike vigour, but as he ages, the desire for peace and ease takes hold. In Kittel’s hands, the parallels to Germany’s experience are especially easy to trace. In his Wars in Biblical Lands, Kittel describes Israel thriving in the time when other powers were weak, but as the surrounding empires grew, Israel found itself under threat and having to defend its native land. Its ability to do so was hamstrung by the division of the kingdom into two and the shattering of the original covenant (Bund). Israel’s history is a mirror image of Germany’s, but in reverse. Gunkel makes the parallels explicit: ‘The particularism, which has resulted in so much decay in our own fatherland in earlier centuries and which we now hope has been overcome, became fatal for Israel’.⁸²

The genius of Eißfeldt’s contribution to the interpretation of holy war was to remove it from the realm of evolutionary anthropology and the idea of primitive vestiges, and locate it firmly in the history of the Israelite nation that critical scholarship had developed. It is most certainly an advance in the understanding of holy war and subsequent scholarship continued in a historical mode. As we have seen, it even influenced Schwally’s presentation, and here, too, we may perhaps detect the influence of Eißfeldt’s work. At the very least, his War and the Bible does not merit being shunted out of the history of research. The reasons to do so are because it exposes the extent to which the nineteenth-century critical project was indebted to the nationalism that blossomed at the same time. Written with a decade of the Franco-Prussian War, Wellhausen’s oft-cited observation that ‘the war camp, the cradle of the nation, was also the oldest sanctuary’ is ample evidence of the tendency to see biblical history through contemporary events.⁸³

It was not just the biblical narratives that were transformed into a nineteenth-century national epic; Israelite poetry was also commandeered for the same end. The idea that the earliest traces of the military tradition are to be found among Israel’s bards are fully incorporated into Eißfeldt’s historical overview, though the initial steps had already been taken by Caspari a few years earlier.⁸⁴ The potential for poetry to inform the understanding of holy war was pursued most thoroughly by Rudolf Kittel. Kittel was part of a new wave of scholarship at the beginning of the twentieth century that began to abandon the assumption that the entire Psalter was to be dated to the post-exilic period and instead placed some of the psalms in the time of the monarchy. This was the case with psalms that mentioned the king and his warfare: ‘Especially the royal psalms and individual war songs, as also many prophetically-inspired songs, are best explained by placing them in the pre-exilic period’.⁸⁵ The king of the psalms was understood as a real monarch with real enemies, rather than being interpreted messianically and his enemies pietistically. In Kittel’s hand, the national reading of the psalms replaced earlier forms of Christian and spiritualized readings. If Kittel concedes something to the religious reading of these psalms, it does not deny their fundamentally nationalistic nature.

The famous song of Deborah, sung in honour of Israel’s victory over the Canaanites, is, indeed, at first a political-national song. But in ancient Israel nothing, least of all fighting and victory, is pure national. Every national event and experience is also a religious experience. Consequently, national singing is necessarily at the same time religious singing.⁸⁶

It is remarkable that Kittel has relegated the religious significance of the psalms to a secondary place.

The prophets proved rather more difficult to accommodate to this nationalist framework, since the prophets had been celebrated by critical scholarship as pioneers towards a more ethical conception of religion and a belief in a universal God. For Eißfeldt, as we have seen, the rise of the prophets is one of the two pivotal moments in the history of ancient Israel’s understanding of war. For Eißfeldt, this marks an important step on the way from simply national wars fought purely for self-interest to the concept of just war. The omission of the Great War’s essays from Schmitt’s roster of scholarship obscures a rather interesting divergence from von Rad’s assessment of prophecy. For von Rad, the fundamental shift occurred not with Amos and Hosea but much earlier with the beginnings of the monarchy. This fundamentally changed the covenantal pact between the Israelites and moved Israel towards professional military units and offensive wars. The prophets remain true to the older idea of sacral war and promoted it and its covenantal implications. This was, of course, part of a wider assessment of the prophets in the middle part of the twentieth century that saw them less as religious geniuses and insisted on their allegiance to the tradition.

Conclusion

In this essay, I have sought to argue that the 1914–1918 tracts on war in the Old Testament were a serious and problematic contribution to understanding the relationship between war, the nation and religion in the Old Testament. In their assessment of the Bible’s poetry and Israelite prophecy, it is clear that the tracts and their authors were children of their time. They cannot, however, be placed within a narrative of scholarship’s progress and gradual refinement, for they point to biblical scholarship’s deep entanglement with contemporary politics and culture. They do not merit being excised from the history of research as has occurred since von Rad’s influential study and continues even in the most recent work of Rüdiger Schmitt. Instead, they should be studied as chastening examples of the myth of historical-critical scholarship’s political and religious neutrality.

1.Ben C. Ollenburger, ‘Introduction: Gerhard von Rad’s Theory of Holy War’, in Holy War in Ancient Israel, by Gerhard von Rad, trans. and ed. Marva J. Dawn (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 1–33 (9, 10).

2.Rüdiger Schmitt, Der ‘Heilige Krieg’ im Pentateuch und im deuteronomistischen Geschichtswerk: Studien zur Forschungs-, Rezeptions- und Religionsgeschichte von Krieg und Bann im Alten Testament, AOAT 381 (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2011).

3.These were by no means the only book-length publications on the subject of war in the Old Testament. The Greifswald systematician, and later sociologist, Karl Dunkmann wrote a book on Bibel und der Krieg (Biblische Zeit- und Streitfragen X/1; Berlin-Lichterfelde: Edwin Runge, 1915). Theodor Kappstein wrote on Krieg in der Bibel: Ein Friedensbuch in eiserner Zeit (Perthes: Gotha, 1915). Karl Klingemann, the general superintendent of the Rhine province of the Old Prussian Church Union, published Das Heldentum in der Bibel (Bonn: Alexander Schmidt Verlag, 1915). Jewish perspectives were offered by the Bamberg rabbi Adolf Eckstein in his Das Völkerkrieg und das Alte Testament (Nuremberg: Freidrich Korn, 1915), and the Essen rabbi Salomon Samuel published five of his lectures as Bibel und Heldentum: Fünf Kriegsvorlesungen gehalten in den Akademischen Kursen zu Essen im Wintersemester 1914/15 (Berlin: Louis Lamm, 1915). Alfons Schulz provided a Roman Catholic voice with his Die sittliche Wertung des Krieges (Münster: Aschendorff, 1915).

4.Roland N. Stromberg, Redemption by War: The Intellectuals and 1914 (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1982), 1–2.

5.Theologians were prominently represented in the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three and in the subsequent Erklärung der Hochschullehrer des Deutschen Reiches. The Erklärung was authored by the Berlin systematic theologian, Reinhold Seeberg, and was signed by almost every teacher in the German universities, including Eißfeldt, Gunkel, Kittel and Bertholet.

6.Alfred Bertholet, Altes Testament und Kriegsfrömmigkeit: Ein Vortrag (Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1917), 3.

7.Otto Eißfeldt, Der Maschal im Alten Testament, BZAW 24 (Gießen: Alfred Töpelmann, 1913).

8.For further details about Eißfeldt’s career, including his upbringing and subsequent career, see his autobiographical ‘Sechs Jahrzehnte alttestamentlicher Wissenschaft’, in Volume du Congrès International pour l’étude de l’Ancient Testament, Genève 1966, ed. P. A. H. de Boer, VTSup 15 (Leiden: Brill, 1967), 1–13; Rudolf Smend, ‘Otto Eißfeldt 1887–1973’, in Understanding Poets and Prophets: Essays in Honour of George Wishart Anderson, ed. A. G. Auld, JSOTSup 152 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1993), 318–35; Gerhard Wallis, ‘Otto Eißfeldt – Wesen und Werk: Gedenkrede zum ersten Todestag von Professor Eißfeldt’, in Gerhard Wallis, Mein Freund hatte einen Weinberg: Aufsätze und Vorträge zum Alten Testament, BEATAJ 23 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1994), 255–67.

9.Otto Eißfeldt, Krieg und Bibel, Religionsgeschichtliche Volksbücher für die deutsche christliche Gegenwart V/15–16 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1915).

10.Eißfeldt’s outspoken critique of examining war and religion stands in contrast to Alfred Bertholet’s volume, Religion und Krieg, which appeared later the same year in the same series: Alfred Bertholet, Religion und Krieg, Religionsgeschichtliche Volksbücher für die deutsche christliche Gegenwart V/20 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1915).

11.Eißfeldt, Krieg und Bibel, 2.

12.Eißfeldt, Krieg und Bibel, 3.

13.Eißfeldt, Krieg und Bibel, 3.

14.Eißfeldt had already the previous year produced a short primer of Israelite history until the fall of Jerusalem: Otto Eißfeldt, Israels Geschichte, Religionsgeschichtliche Volksbücher für die deutsche christliche Gegenwart (Praktische Bibelerklärung) VI/4 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1914). Eißfeldt revisits the lines he developed in that earlier volume, especially his insistence on the importance of the idea of the God of justice in Israel’s developed theology.

15.Eißfeldt, Krieg und Bibel, 24.

16.Eißfeldt, Krieg und Bibel, 24.

17.Eißfeldt, Krieg und Bibel, 44.

18.In his earlier history, Eißfeldt had already slighted Solomon as an oriental despot. Through his trading ventures, Israel was opened up to the softening luxuries of Asia (Eißfeldt, Israels Geschichte, 34–37).

19.Eißfeldt, Krieg und Bibel, 21.

20.Despite his views that poetic fragments were some of the earliest materials preserved in the narrative books of the Old Testament, Eißfeldt holds that the psalms stem from a later period, many from the time of the Maccabees. His later view that many psalms were pre-exilic reflected the changing assessment of the psalms in the first half of the twentieth century. See Otto Eissfeldt, The Old Testament: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), 446–48.

21.Eißfeldt, Krieg und Bibel, 66, 71.

22.In Eißfeldt’s reading, Revelation has a ‘Jewish spirit’ alongside elements of Christian piety. To his mind, this explains the church’s uncertainty about its canonical status (Krieg und Bibel, 70).

23.Eißfeldt, Krieg und Bibel, 72.

24.In a British context, note the interpretations of the Sermon on the Mount propounded by William Temple and the New Testament scholar B. H. Streeter: William Temple, Christianity and War, Papers for War Time 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1914); B. H. Streeter, War, This War, and the Sermon on the Mount, Papers for War Time 20 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1915).

25.Eißfeldt, Krieg und Bibel, 83.

26.Eißfeldt, Krieg und Bibel, 84.

27.‘So it is in the war that we are presently fighting, the German people have felt particularly drawn to the psalms. No other book of the Bible has influenced the religious proclamation of this time of war to the same degree as the psalms’ (Eißfeldt, Krieg und Bibel, 61).

28.Gunkel’s life and work is well documented in a series of studies. See especially Werner Klatt, Hermann Gunkel: Zu seiner Theologie der Religionsgeschichte und zur Entstehung der formgeschichtlichen Methode, FRLANT 100 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1969) and Konrad Hammann, Hermann Gunkel: Eine Bibliographie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014).

29.Hammann, Hermann Gunkel, 254.

30.For details see Klatt, Hermann Gunkel, 220–21; Hammann, Hermann Gunkel, 253–65.

31.Hermann Gunkel, Israelitisches Heldentum und Kriegsfrömmigkeit im Alten Testament (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1916), 21–22. Gunkel largely avoids the unpleasant anti-Semitism of Eißfeldt, though he does, at one point, contrast the love of freedom seen in early Israel with the servile attitude of later Judaism (Israelitisches Heldentum, 22).

32.Gunkel, Israelitisches Heldentum, 7.

33.Gunkel, Israelitisches Heldentum, 15.

34.Gunkel, Israelitisches Heldentum, 39.

35.Gunkel, Israelitisches Heldentum, 45.

36.For more detailed accounts of Kittel and his scholarship, see Rudolf Smend, ‘Rudolf Kittel (1853–1929)’, TZ 55 (1999): 326–53; Rudolf Kittel, ‘Autobiographie’, in Die Religionswissenschaft der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen, ed E. Stange (Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1925), 113–44; Johannes Hempel, ‘Rudolf Kittel’, ZDMG 84 (1930): 78–93; and Lukas Bormann’s essay, ‘Between Prophetic Critique and Raison d’état: Rudolf Kittel on German Jews during the Great War and on Old Testament Hebrews in Biblical Wars’ in this volume. As well as Bormann’s essay, Kittel’s views on war have also been discussed in Andreas Scherer, ‘Zu Rudolf Kittel: Alttestamentliche Kriegskonzepte im Spiegel der Zeitgeschichte’, in Kontexte: Biografische und forschungsgeschichtliche Schnittpunkte der alttestamentlichen Wissenschaft. Festschrift für Hans Jochen Boecker zum 80. Geburtstag, ed. Thomas Wagner (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2008), 115–30.

37.Rudolf Kittel, Das Alte Testament und unser Krieg (Leipzig: Dörffling & Franke, 1916).

38.Rudolf Kittel, ‘Was haben uns unsere Theologen zum Kriege zu sagen? XVII. Vom Kriege in Israel’, Allgemeine evangelisch-lutherische Kirchenzeitung: Organ der Allgemeinen Evangelisch-Lutherischen Konferenz 48 (1915): 74–78. The series was published as a stand-alone volume: Wilhelm Laible, Deutsche Theologen über den Krieg: Stimmen aus schwerer Zeit (Leipzig: Dörffling & Franke 1915).

39.Kittel, Das Alte Testament, 8.

40.The first two war cries are drawn from Judg 7:18 and 7:20; the third is reminiscent of the Takbir: Allahu akbar.

41.Rudolf Kittel, Die Psalmen, Kommentar zum Alten Testament 13 (Leipzig: Deichert, 1914).

42.Ernst Katzer, ‘Christliche Kriegsphilosophie’, Neues Sächisches Kirchenblatt 49 (1915): 764–70; 50 (1915): 781–86; 51 (1915): 798–808. For further detail about Katzer and his critique of the Old Testament, see Lukas Bormann’s essay in the present volume.

43.Rudolf Kittel, Kriege in biblischen Landen (Gotha: Friedrich Andreas Perthes, 1918).

44.Kittel, Kriege, 55.

45.Kittel, Kriege, 8.

46.For a more detailed account of Bertholet’s life and work, see Rudolf Smend, ‘Ein Göttinger Deuteronomiumskommentator Alfred Bertholet (1868–1951)’, in Liebe und Gebot: Studien zum Deuteronomium, ed. Reinhard G. Kratz and Hermann Spieckermann, FRLANT 190 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), 173–89.

47.Alfred Bertholet, Religion und Krieg, Religionsgeschichtliche Volksbücher für die deutsche christliche Gegenwart V/20 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1915).

48.Alfred Bertholet, Aus heiligen Quellen: Ein Büchlein von Krieg und Sieg (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1916).

49.Alfred Bertholet, Altes Testament und Kriegsfrömmigkeit: Ein Vortrag (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1917), 18–19.

50.Bertholet, Altes Testament, 21–22.

51.Bertholet, Altes Testament, 6.

52.Gunkel, Israelitisches Heldentum, 1.

53.Gunkel, Israelitisches Heldentum, 5–6.

54.Rudolf Kittel, Die Religion des Volkes Israel (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1921).

55.Schmitt, Der ‘Heilige Krieg’, 6.

56.Schmitt, Der ‘Heilige Krieg’, 198.

57.Schmitt, Der ‘Heilige Krieg’, 206.

58.Hermann Gunkel, Das Märchen im Alten Testament, Religionsgeschichtliche Volksbücher für die deutsche christliche Gegenwart II/23, 26 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1917).

59.For the origins and early history of what began as the International Weekly for Science, Art and Technology, see Trutz Rendtorff, ‘Autonomie und Rationalismus in der modernen Welt (1907): Editorischer Bericht’, in Schriften zur Religionswissenschaft und Ethik (1903–1912), ed. Trutz Rendtorff, vol. 6 of Ernst Troeltsch: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Friedrich Wilhelm Graf et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 517–23.

60.Bertholet, Altes Testament, 3.

61.Alfred Bertholet, Kulturgeschichte Israels (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1919), 185–94.

62.Hermann Schuster, review of Krieg und Bibel, by Otto Eißfeldt, TLZ 40.15 (1915): 337; Hermann Schuster, review of Israelitisches Heldentum und Kriegsfrömmigkeit, by Hermann Gunkel, TLZ 43, no. 2/3 (1918): 29; Hermann Schuster, review of Das Alte Testament und unser Krieg, by Rudolf Kittel, TLZ 43, no. 2/3 (1918): 29; Hermann Schuster, review of Altes Testament und Kriegsfrömmigkeit, by Alfred Bertholet, TLZ 43, no. 2/3 (1918): 30.

63.Otto Procksch, review of Religion und Krieg, by Alfred Bertholet, Theologisches Literaturblatt 37, no. 25 (1916): 457–58; Otto Procksch, review of Das Alte Testament und unser Krieg, by Rudolf Kittel, Theologisches Literaturblatt 37, no. 25 (1916): 457–58; Otto Procksch, review of Altes Testament und Kriegsfrömmigkeit, by Alfred Bertholet, Theologisches Literaturblatt 39, no. 5 (1918): 78.

64.Otto Procksch, ‘Krieg. I. Religionsgeschichtlich. 4. Krieg im Alten Testament’, RGG² 3 (1929): 1305–6.

65.Gerhard von Rad, Der Heilige Krieg im Alten Israel (Zürich: Zwingli-Verlag, 1951); Rudolf Smend, Jahwekrieg und Stämmebund: Erwägungen zur ältesten Geschichte Israels (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1963); Manfred Weippert, ‘“Heiliger Krieg” in Israel und Assyrian: Kritische Anmerkungen zu Gerhard von Rads Konzept des “Heiligen Krieges im alten Israel”’, ZAW 84 (1972): 460–93.

66.See also Gordon Mitchell, ‘War, Folklore and the Mystery of a Disappearing Book’, JSOT 20 (1995): 113–19.

67.Max Weber, Ancient Judaism (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1952).

68.See also the important article by Harold C. Washington, ‘Violence and the Construction of Gender in the Hebrew Bible: A New Historicist Approach’, BibInt 5 (1997): 324–63. Washington notes: ‘In his discussion of Israelitisches Heldentum, Gordon Mitchell asks why Gunkel’s book has been virtually suppressed in the scholarly record. It is not simply because subsequent studies focused, unlike Gunkel’s, on the Israelite cultus as the Sitz for the sacral war traditions. Gunkel’s study has been forgotten because it is too disturbing for post-Holocaust generations to read so revered a figure in the history of the discipline praising the dispassionate narrative economy of the biblical flood story, where “an entire humanity is brought to death, without the narrator losing many words”’ (‘Violence and the Construction of Gender’, 340).

69.Friedrich Schwally, Semitische Kriegsaltertümer: I. Der heilige Krieg im alten Israel (Leipzig: Deiterich, 1901).

70.William R. Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites: First Series, The Fundamental Institutions (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1894), 455.

71.Ollenburger (‘Introduction’, 6) notes: ‘The most obvious legacy of Schwally’s book is the term “holy war” itself. The Old Testament does not use the term, although it does speak about the “wars of Yahweh” (1 Sam 18:17; 25:28; Num 21:14). Schwally took the term from the Arabic jihad, “holy war”’.

72.Schwally did later address the subject of holy war in Islam as part of the controversy around Snouck Hurgronje’s outraged response to Germany’s enthusiastic encouragement of the Ottoman Empire’s declaration of ‘holy war’. Hurgronje’s work was first published in his native Dutch, but the intervention of so noted an Orientalist soon found a ready public abroad with a translation into English: C. Snouck Hurgronje, The Holy War “Made in Germany” (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915). In Germany, a fierce exchange took place between Becker and Hurgronje in the pages of the International Monthly for Science, Art and Technology which has been much discussed by subsequent scholarship; see esp. Peter Heine, ‘C. Snouck Hurgronje versus C.H. Becker: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der angewandten Orientalistik’, Die Welt des Islams 23/24 (1984): 378–87. Somewhat overlooked is Schwally’s rather cautious contribution on the subject in the same journal a year later: Friedrich Schwally, ‘Die heilige Krieg des Islam in religionsgeschichtlicher und staatsrechtlicher Beleuchtung’, Internationale Monatsschrift für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik 10 (1916): 687–714. He regarded the claims made for the jihad’s significance to be inflated, overlooking the rather disunited nature of contemporary Islam. As a corrective to the hysteria, he offers a historical account. Schwally begins rather idiosyncratically with Israel, insisting on its value for reconstructing primitive ‘holy war’ and its development. He traces how ‘holy war’ altered as the tribal war god became the national deity and finally the one universal God. In the Qur’an, holy war is only declared against those who oppose Islam and was not envisaged outside the Arabian peninsula. If anything, Schwally saw Islamic jihad through biblical lenses, rather than vice versa.

73.Washington, ‘Violence and the Construction of Gender’, 336.

74.Carsten Colpe, Der Heilige Krieg: Benennung und Wirklichkeit, Begründung und Widerstreit (Bodenheim: Philo, 1996); Hans-Richard Reuter, ‘Heiliger Krieg, III. Ethisch’, RGG⁴ 3 (2000): 1564–65.

75.Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, Götter Global: Wie die Welt zum Supermarkt der Religionen wird (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2014), 216–24. Graf notes that the expression is already found in Schelling and Schleiermacher.

76.For a comprehensive account of the numerous biblical references in the poets of the wars of liberation, see Karl Scheibenberger, ‘Der Einfluß der Bible und des Kirchenleides auf die Lyrik der deutschen Befreiungskriege’ (PhD diss., Frankfurt, 1936).

77.‘Es ist kein Krieg, von dem die Kronen wissen; // Es ist ein Kreuzzug, ‘s ist ein heil’ger Krieg!’; ‘Aufruf’ (1813), in Theodor Körner, Leyer und Schwerdt: Von dem Vater des Dichters veranstaltete Ausgabe (Vienna: n.p., 1814). For other examples, see Graf, Götter Global, 216–24.

78.For the German wars of liberation in the imagination of nineteenth-century Germany, see Karen Hagemann, Revisiting Prussia’s Wars Against Napoleon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

79.For an account of the celebrations including the role of the universities, see Wolfram Siemann, ‘Krieg und Frieden in historischen Gedenkfeiern des Jahres 1913’, in Öffentliche Festkultur: Politische Feste in Deutschland von der Aufklärung bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg, ed. Dieter Düding, Peter Friedemann, and Paul Münch (Reinbeck: Rowohlt, 1988), 298–320.

80.Stefan Berger, ‘The Invention of European National Traditions in European Romanticisim’, in The Oxford History of Historical Writing: Volume 4, 1800–1945, ed. Stuart Macintyre, Juan Maiguashca, and Attila Pók (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 19–40 (30).

81.Berger, ‘Invention’, 32.

82.Gunkel, Israelitisches Heldentum, 2.

83.Julius Wellhausen, Israelitische und jüdische Geschichte, 7th ed. (Berlin: Reimer, 1914), 24.

84.Wilhelm Caspari, ‘Was stand im Buch der Kriege Jahwes?’, ZWT 54 (1912): 110–58.

85.Kittel, Das Alte Testament, 44.

86.Kittel, Das Alte Testament, 34.