Forging Swords into Plows: A Twenty-First Century Christian Perspective on War

Forging Swords into Plows:

A Twenty-first Century Christian Perspective on War

George Clifford

Published by Ethical Musings at Smashwords

ISBN: 9781301805198

Copyright 2012 George M. Clifford, III

All rights reserved.

Cover photo © iStockphoto.com

Scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Acknowledgements

Ron Numbers, Barry Talley, Mark Smith, Darrell Wesley, and Phil Cato each kindly read and commented upon drafts of part or all of this work. I appreciate their time and thoughts; any remaining errors are entirely mine. Marcia Talley graciously designed the cover, creating a better product and saving me much time, effort, and aggravation.

This book would have been impossible without the generous and unfailing support, encouragement, and love of Susan, for whom I am ever grateful.

Table of Contents

List of Figures

Introduction

Chapter 1: Holy Wars and Crusades

A. Holy wars and crusades

B. Not a Christian option

Chapter 2: Pacifism

A. Peace and rationales for Christian pacifism

B. The history of Christian pacifism

C. Assessing Christian pacifism

D. Conscientious objection

Chapter 3: Just War Theory

A. Background and development

B. Part I: Jus ad bellum

C. Part II: Jus in bello

D. Part III: Jus post bellum

E. Gulf War I: A just war theory analysis

Chapter 4: Jewish and Islamic Views of War

A. The Jewish view of war

B. A brief introduction to Islam

C. Islamic extremism, jihad, and war

Chapter 5: Gulf War II: Invasion and Occupation of Iraq

A. Historical context

B. Jus ad bellum and jus in bello

C. Jus post bellum

Chapter 6: Afghanistan

A. Historical context

B. Jus ad bellum and jus in bello

C. Jus post bellum

Conclusion

Bibliography

About the Author

List of Figures

Figure 2.1 — Stages in the History of Conscientious Objection

Figure 3.1 — Jus Ad Bellum and Jus In Bello Criteria

Figure 3.2 — Jus Post Bellum Criteria

Figure 3.3 — The Just War Theory Model

Figure 4.1 — Jewish Categories of War

INTRODUCTION

May the Lord bless his people with peace! (Psalm 29:11)

In early January 2002, I visited the horrendous, massive hole in the ground where New York City's World Trade Center had once stood as a proud symbol of American prosperity and economic power. Four months after the attack, wreckage was still widely evident; some neighboring buildings remained empty; their windows, broken by the catastrophic explosions, still unrepaired. Dust covered everything, the air smelled of destruction, and the place was eerily quiet — apart from the occasional and unsettling sounds of metal grating against metal and creaking cables as crews continued to excavate the massive mounds of rubble.

Then I walked over to St. Paul's Chapel, the small Episcopal church adjacent to the World Trade Center. Rescue workers had found sanctuary in the Chapel from their work and the crowds of gawkers, grabbed a few moments of precious rest, eaten hasty meals, and sought some sense of hope before returning to what they euphemistically called the pile. The Chapel's nave had become a living memorial. Quilts, posters, and children's crayon pictures expressed grief and gratitude for those who had died, for those who heroically sought to help others, and for those who now labored to bring closure to the grieving.

I was in New York because the Rt. Rev. George Packard, then the newly consecrated Episcopal Bishop for Federal Ministries, had invited me, along with other Episcopal priests who were senior U.S. military chaplains, to a planning conference. The location of the Bishop's office in lower Manhattan had unexpectedly thrust him and his staff into the front lines of the recovery effort, caring for workers on the pile. Several of my military chaplain colleagues at this meeting had been in the Pentagon when the terrorists attacked it on 9/11. We knew that life had changed for us as Americans and as military chaplains. What we did not, and could not, anticipate were all of the ways in which the attacks on that fateful day would change our perceptions of the world, our understandings of how twenty-first century Christians can best live out their faith, and the challenges that lay ahead in the quest for peace.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 awoke the United States to both the deep hatred that some foreigners have for the U.S. and its vulnerability to attack by foreign terrorists. Although foreign terrorists in the previous two decades had exploded a bomb in the subbasement of the World Trade Center, attempted other attacks in the U.S., and successfully attacked U.S. embassies and military personnel overseas, 9/11 was a wakeup call. That day shattered the somnolent American illusion of invulnerability created by its geography and status as the world's only superpower. For better or worse, 9/11 instantly became a defining moment in U.S. history.

Less than a month after September 11, 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush declared a Global War on Terrorism (GWOT).1 He wanted to act decisively against the nation's enemies, seeking to restore U.S. prestige and to prevent future attacks. At his direction, the United States invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq. More than a decade later, in spite of having elected a new President, the U.S. continued to occupy Afghanistan and did not repatriate all of its troops from Iraq until the end of 2011. Victory in both countries, as well as in the larger GWOT, remained frustratingly elusive.

Some Christian leaders and scholars, like ethicist Jean Bethke Elshtain, quickly joined the public conversation, endorsing President George W. Bush's actions.2 Other Christian leaders and scholars, like ethicist Stanley Hauerwas and philosopher Cornel West, took the opposite position, criticizing President Bush's actions as inconsistent with a Christian perspective.3 Who is right? Presuming some measure of peace is possible, what moral values or ethical concepts can help guide people in general and Christians in particular in the struggle to establish peace?4

After the U.S. invaded Afghanistan but before the U.S. invaded Iraq, Osama bin Laden, the infamous founder and nefarious leader of the al Qaeda terrorist network, scathingly indicted the United States in his November 24, 2002 Letter to America:

1. The United States targets Muslims for attack, e.g., in Palestine and Somalia;

2. The United States oppresses Muslims;

3. The United States is hypocritical and godless.

He followed that indictment with a call: (a) for everyone in the United States to convert to Islam; (b) for the U.S. to stop its aggression against and oppression of Muslims; (c) for the U.S. to cease all debauchery and immorality; and (d) for the U.S. to acknowledge its hypocrisy and end its support of Israel and other governments that oppress Muslims. The U.S. should, he continued, promptly exit all Muslim lands, ending its economic presence and withdrawing all military forces from those nations. The U.S. should also stop supporting corrupt leaders in Muslim lands and begin to interact with Muslims as equals.

If the United States failed to comply with his call for change, then the U.S. should, bin Laden warned, prepare to fight with the Islamic world. In his letter, he characterized the world of Islam as confident that Allah will give it victory and its people as desiring death more than people in the U.S. desire life:

If the Americans refuse to listen to our advice and the goodness, guidance and righteousness that we call them to, then be aware that you will lose this Crusade Bush began, just like the other previous Crusades in which you were humiliated by the hands of the Mujahedeen, fleeing to your home in great silence and disgrace. If the Americans do not respond, then their fate will be that of the Soviets who fled from Afghanistan to deal with their military defeat, political breakup, ideological downfall, and economic bankruptcy.5

Some Christian fundamentalist leaders responded to bin Laden with their own inflammatory rhetoric. Founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network, former presidential candidate, and host of the 700 Club, Pat Robertson boldly asserted, Islam is not a religion of peace but intent on world domination. He characterized Muslims like bin Laden as satanic and motivated by demonic power.6 Jerry Falwell, a Baptist minister and founder of the Moral Majority, said in an October 2002 CBS 60 Minutes interview, I think Muhammad was a terrorist. I read enough of the history of his life written by both Muslims and non-Muslims, [to know] that he was a violent man, a man of war. Although Falwell subsequently apologized for his remarks, his comments triggered Muslim-Hindu rioting in India the following Friday that killed at least five people.7 Many Christians agree with Robertson and Falwell; the two fundamentalist preachers are far from alone in demonizing Islam and believing that Islam and Christianity are engaged in a global conflict.

For bin Laden and his sympathizers, for those who agree with Robertson and Falwell, and for many Jews, Christians, Muslims, and people of other faiths or no faith, the conflict between Islamist terrorists and the West appears to be a religious war. What is the truth? Are Islam and Christianity at war, locked in an inevitable struggle to the death? Does bin Laden speak for Islam in declaring that everyone in the United States, and by implication, Europe and other non-Muslim nations, must convert to Islam or die? Do Robertson and Falwell speak for Christianity in their denunciations of Islam? What do Islam and Christianity really teach? What is a Christian perspective on war? How does that compare to a Muslim perspective on war? When and how, if ever, can a nation, from a Christian perspective, morally wage war?

On September 11, 2001, I was an active duty as a Captain in the U.S. Navy Chaplain Corps. For months after that pivotal day, people — sailors and Marines, their loved ones, and other chaplains — asked me those kinds of questions almost daily. They wanted to understand the religious perspective on what was happening in the world and what constituted a Christian response to those events. In 2002, the Navy transferred me to the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA, to serve as the school's senior chaplain. My duties there included teaching ethics to several thousand mid-career officers from all branches of the U.S. armed forces. Warriors — individuals in the armed services — who identified themselves as Christians wanted to know what their faith had to say about war and terrorism. Warriors of all faiths and no faith inquired whether the GWOT was really a religious war. Almost all, anticipating orders to Iraq or Afghanistan after their studies, wanted to understand their likely foe better. Civic organizations, as well as civilian Jewish and Christian congregations, extended speaking invitations to me, concerned about the same issues.

Since my retirement from active duty in the U.S. Navy at the end of 2005, other economic, social, and political issues compete for media attention, diminishing the nation's focus on war and terrorism. Some news commentators now describe both Iraq and Afghanistan as forgotten wars, waged by America's all volunteer force out of the spotlight of public attention. Yet the questions linger; people wonder about the efficacy and ethics of the U.S. GWOT, the invasions, and the prolonged occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. This book is the product of my efforts to understand the issues and to provide honest answers rooted in the Christian faith to important questions about war and peace.

In the course of its two thousand year history, Christianity developed and in varying degrees subscribed to three mutually exclusive views about the morality of war. Crusaders believe that God sometimes instructs Christians to wage war. They typically describe a war that God has commanded as a holy war or crusade. Does God ever order Christians to wage a holy war or crusade? If so, what does Christianity teach about such wars? Chapter 1 answers both questions with an uncompromising negative: holy wars and crusades are always inherently incompatible with Christianity. No threat justifies profaning God's name by claiming to wage war in God's name.

Christian pacifists hold a position diametrically opposed to that of crusaders. Pacifists contend that Christians should never engage in warfighting under any circumstances, that warfighting is inimical to the Christian goal of peace. What do Christians mean by peace? What is pacifism's message in this age of terrorism and nuclear weapons? Must a Christian pacifist object to all war or can Christianity justify selective conscientious objection, i.e., recognizing the necessity of lethal force in some situations but not others? Chapter 2 addresses those questions, highlighting the ongoing importance of the pacifist witness as a check on rampant militarism and of non-violent peacemaking in a broken world. Yet pacifism, by itself, is an insufficient response to horrendous evil. The chapter concludes by developing a Christian rationale for selective conscientious objection, an essential but widely neglected correlate of Just War Theory.

Christian Just War Theory advocates have sought a via media, a middle ground, one that affirms the primacy of non-violent peacemaking but also acknowledges that Christians, on occasion, rightly respond with lethal force to end a greater evil. Chapter 3 outlines Just War Theory as broadly understood within the Christian tradition and then explores two important issues. What, if any, updating of Just War Theory does the post-Cold War era require? And, how does the first Gulf War in 1991 measure up against Just War Theory standards? Answering the first question entails developing a third paradigm, jus post bellum, in a manner that is analogous to and complementary of Just War Theory's existing jus ad bellum and jus in bello paradigms. An analysis of the first Gulf War then demonstrates the model's utility, demonstrating that the first Gulf War was an unjust war with an unjust ending.

The world's three major monotheistic religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — collide violently not only in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict but also as a subtext of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Many Muslims and Christians, as already noted, attribute the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to an inherent incompatibility between Islam and Christianity. Too often public debate about these conflicts occurs without any real knowledge of what the three religions teach about war and peace, preventing meaningful and constructive dialogue.8 Thus, Chapter 4 briefly presents both Jewish and Islamic perspectives on war. The age of electronic communication and increased global migration makes learning about other faiths imperative. Understanding the three major monotheistic perspectives on war can help to avoid demagoguery that needlessly inflames as well as diminishing support for well-intentioned but misguided public policies that exacerbate instead of ameliorate conflict. Christians, Jews, and Muslims should be allies in forging swords into plows,9 sharing a common commitment to peace and largely overlapping ideas about war and warfighting.

Symbolizing the importance of interfaith conversation and its potential contribution to the global quest for peace, the scriptural quotations that begin each chapter are from the Jewish Bible. Christians incorporated that Bible into theirs; Muslims venerate both the Jewish and Christian Bibles in addition to the Holy Koran. In spite of deep, sometimes violent, abiding conflicts, the world's three great monotheistic religions have much in common. Choosing selections from the Jewish scriptures emphasizes that commonality in a way otherwise not possible. The translation (the New Revised Standard Version), however, is a Christian translation, reflecting my identity as a Christian priest.

Globalization and the United States' status as the world's economic behemoth and only superpower have eliminated most of the U.S.'s historic isolationist tendencies. Increasingly, globalization affords the U.S. no realistic alternative to continuing its engagement with other nations and peoples. However, since World War II, a growing militarism has shaped much of that engagement, arguably often escalating rather than reducing global conflict.10 Teddy Roosevelt's metaphorical big stick remains highly visible and threatening, eclipsing other foreign policy instruments. When an international crisis develops, one of the first questions, if not the very first question, a U.S. President asks is, Where are the aircraft carriers? President Bush's response to 9/11, invading first Afghanistan and then Iraq, certainly fit this pattern of an immediate and primary reliance upon the military to deal with foreign problems.

Chapter 5 focuses on the second Gulf War (GWII), the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. The first section reviews the historical and cultural context that led to Saddam's rise to power. This affords an indispensable preface for the rest of the chapter, evaluating how GWII measures up against the Just War Theory standards. Was GWII a just war from a Christian perspective, a war in which Christians could have fought with a clear conscience? Does adopting a Muslim ethical perspective on GWII lead to a different assessment? In spite of President Bush having declared an end to major combat operations in 2003, fighting erupted almost daily for years in numerous places across Iraq. The incessant conflict killed thousands and degraded the quality of life for Iraqis. What moral obligations, if any, did the United States and its coalition partners incur when they invaded Iraq? How, from a Christian perspective, can the U.S. best fulfill any such obligations? What might a more just ending to GWII have looked like?

The U.S. had invaded Afghanistan two years before Gulf War II and remains enmeshed there even after withdrawing its military forces from Iraq. From a Christian perspective, was the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan morally justified? Did Just War Theory criteria effectually shape combat between the Taliban and the U.S.? After sketching the war's context by summarizing Afghanistan's troubled history, Chapter 6 answers those questions and then analyzes the extended occupation of Afghanistan by the U.S. and its NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) allies from a Christian perspective. Does the controversial occupation represent genuine progress toward peace? Or, has the occupation caused additional alienation and suffering? In other words, has the Afghanistan war forged swords into plows or plows into swords? Is the world a better, safer place because the United States invaded and occupied Afghanistan? From a Christian moral perspective, what policies should shape future U.S. and NATO efforts in Afghanistan? Answering those questions requires examining U.S. reliance on risk-transfer tactics and the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs); both tactics may appear at first glance to offer benefits but, upon closer examination, both pose significant ethical difficulties. The analysis concludes by drawing lessons from a comparison of the U.S. war in Vietnam to the war in Afghanistan.

Unlike books on war and peace that approach the subject through a single, narrowly-focused lens, this volume provides a view through a single lens (i.e., Christianity) but with a wide angle focus, integrating experiences and insights from personnel in the armed services, military science, history, ethics, Islam, and Judaism. Too often, Christians operate with tunnel vision, seeing only the Christian tradition and its religious resources. That narrowness embodies a dishonest hubris, the presumption that Christianity contains all of the answers to all of life's questions. In fact, the best information and insights from every field of knowledge inform a genuine Christian perspective, which then charts the way forward by the light that Christians believe God manifested in Jesus of Nazareth. Using this type of wide-angle lens, Christians engage the world knowledgably and realistically without compromising their Christian identity.

Examining GWII and the Afghanistan war using Christian Just War Theory with a wide-angle lens shows why both wars were unjust and both have sown the seeds of future discord and conflict rather than moved the world closer to peace. Hopefully, one positive legacy of these wars will be an increased wariness among Christians toward crusades and militarism. The sword, even when necessary, never brings peace. Thus, Christians will do well to emulate the commitment of their pacifist brothers and sisters to just peacemaking.

Shared commitments to peace and Just War Theory's broad outlines transcend the three great monotheistic religions, inviting interfaith cooperation in forging swords into plows. Just War Theory's jus ad bellum paradigm can help Christians (and others) to identify those occasional times when war is necessary to prevent the triumph of evil and provide an argument against war at other times. The jus in bello paradigm provides warriors guidance on how to fight justly and citizens an ethical framework for advocating limits on unnecessary violence. Perhaps most importantly, the jus post bellum paradigm offers a practical, proven model for forging the swords of war into the plows of peace.

Chapter 1: Holy Wars and Crusades

Blessed be the Lord, my rock,

who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle;

my rock and my fortress,

my stronghold and my deliverer,

my shield, in whom I take refuge,

who subdues the peoples under me. (Psalm 144:1-2)

Like all new U.S. Navy chaplains, I spent my first six weeks of active naval service attending the Chaplain Basic Course. The course taught us about the Navy and began the process of transforming us from civilian priests, ministers, and rabbis into chaplains and military officers. My most disturbing experience during the course was discovering that one of my thirty-four colleagues, a fundamentalist Baptist minister, prayed daily for the battle of Armageddon to begin. Based on his reading of the Bible, he believed that an epochal battle between good and evil — the battle of Armageddon — would herald Christ's second coming and the establishment of his one thousand year reign on earth. My colleague was convinced that this battle would occur in Palestine when the Soviet Union invaded Israel.

Twenty years earlier, as a youth just out of high school, this Baptist had served as a U.S. Marine in Vietnam. He relished recounting his exploits as a waist gunner in Marine helicopters where, in his words, he had killed commies for Christ. This new chaplain repeatedly professed his desire to serve only with the Marine Corps (chaplains assigned to the U.S. Marine Corps, a component of the Department of the Navy, are in fact Navy chaplains). Although military chaplains are noncombatants, prohibited under the Geneva Conventions from carrying weapons, my colleague hoped desperately that he and the Marine unit to which he was attached would be in Israel when the Soviets invaded so that he could once again kill commies for Christ.

Before I met this man, I had naively thought that Christians no longer believed in holy wars and crusades. Since then, I have discovered to my dismay that many Christians continue to believe that God sometimes commands people to wage war. Holy war is not a uniquely Christian phenomenon, as shown in Chapter 4's discussion of Judaism and Islam. In this chapter, an examination of the broad category of holy wars and its important sub-category of crusades shows why both are incompatible with Christianity.

A. Holy wars and crusades

The Oxford English Dictionary defines war as a state of armed conflict between different nations, states, or armed groups. The noted German theoretician of war, Karl von Clausewitz, defined war as a continuation of political commerce … by another means.11 Holy war constitutes a distinct category of wars, theoretically continuing not only political commerce but also divine-human commerce. Although scholars have proposed more detailed holy war paradigms,12 at its simplest a holy war is a war fought at God's behest, for God, and by or with God's help. This discussion of Christian holy war utilizes that framework to examine the three functions of holy war in the Old Testament, considers an inter-testamental example of a holy war, and finishes by exploring Christian attitudes toward holy war in the New Testament, the early Church, and since.

Christians have traditionally regarded the Old Testament record of the wars Israel waged to conquer the Promised Land as the primary prototype for Christian holy wars (cf. Joshua 1-12. Scriptural references illustrate Biblical themes and are not an exhaustive list of passages in which a theme appears.). However, accepting the Biblical narrative as a prima facie accurate historical record requires ignoring common sense. For example, consider the scriptural account of Israel's exodus from Egypt. The six hundred thousand male Israelites that Moses allegedly led in the exodus from Egypt (Exodus 12:37; Numbers 11:21), walking ten abreast, would form a line approximately thirty-four miles long. Assuming each male had a wife and two children triples the number of people in the exodus, producing a column about one hundred miles long, or one third of the distance between Egypt and the Promised Land. Egypt's population at the time of the Exodus was roughly three million people. Six hundred thousand Israelite slave families would have totaled more than half of Egypt's population. In that case, revolt in situ would have made more sense than embarking on a long, arduous journey into the unknown. Absolutely no historical data exist to indicate a depopulation of Egypt approaching anything near that magnitude. Indeed, archaeologists have found no evidence that Israel's exodus from Egypt actually occurred. The lack of historical evidence is unsurprising. In an era long before the advent of printing presses, the electronic news media, and the internet, a group of slaves running away was hardly an event of which any overlord would want to keep a lasting record.

Historians hypothesize that Israel's conquest of Palestine was a slow process. A loosely connected group of Semite slaves, led by a man named Moses, may have cooperated in order to escape from their Egyptian masters. That shared experience bound them together, uniting people from multiple clans and tribes. Their wanderings eventually brought them to Canaan. They arrived during a period spanning several decades or longer, when other Semite nomadic tribes were also encroaching upon the Canaanites. These nomadic herders, alone and in conjunction with the former Egyptian slaves, infringed first upon Canaanite grazing lands or empty territory, then slowly conquered or dominated Canaanite settlements. This process strengthened the invaders' ties to one another. Eventually, all of the Semitic settlers in Canaan adopted the exodus story as their story, a narrative that gave them a common history, common deity, and common identity.13

Understanding that the Biblical account intends to create a common national identity rather than to record a factual record of historical events explains the Bible containing contradictory accounts of Israel's possession of Canaan. For example, the book of Joshua depicts a holy war version of conquest in contrast to the slow, gradual process of occupation described in the book of Judges.14

This less romanticized version of Israel's roots and occupation of the Promised Land coheres well with a careful reading of Scripture. Israel, according to the Scriptural narrative, did not conquer Jerusalem, Canaan's capital, until David was Israel's king, over a century later (2 Samuel 5:6-10). According to Scripture, God gave Israel, the people of the covenant, the laws in the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament that contain the narrative of Israel's history prior to the conquest of the Promised Land. These laws generally presume that Israel is no longer a nomadic people. Among other topics, these laws concern plowing, reaping, buying, and selling houses in cities, administering justice at the city gates, etc. The various law codes in the Pentateuch notably do not address specific aspects or problems unique to nomadic life, raising questions about why nomads would write down (or preserve via oral history) instructions irrelevant to their lives.

Correctly understanding the process by which Israel developed as a nation and then inhabited the Promised Land greatly diminishes the significance of holy wars for Christian theology. Old Testament holy wars of conquest were literary devices intended to consolidate Israel's identity as a nation and justify its possession of Palestine. These holy wars are not a model for how God commands Christians (or anyone else) to oppose evil. Furthermore, this corrective avoids mistakenly juxtaposing a New Testament image of God as love with, or in some theologies even subordinate to, an Old Testament image of a warrior God. The varying concepts of God found in the different chronological layers of Scripture point to a complex, evolving image of God rooted in both justice and mercy.

Recognizing that Old Testament claims of God giving the land of the Canaanites to Israel in perpetuity and God commanding God's people to wage war on another group or nation are at best historical anachronisms, and perhaps even human projections onto the deity, emphasizes the importance of viewing similar, contemporary claims with equal skepticism. Those who assert that they speak authoritatively for God often do so rashly and time proves the putative prophet to have been a false prophet.

United States history would be very different had the European Christians who settled the North American continent taken that warning to heart. Inspired by Israel's identity as God's chosen people, these settlers for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries created and embraced a narrative of manifest destiny (sometimes known as American exceptionalism). The U.S. was the land of freedom, the land of the new Israel, the land to which people emigrated to build new and better lives for themselves and their families. That narrative included tragic, evil corollaries. Settlers ignored and devalued Native Americans, people of color, and people from non-European nations. The Indian wars, slavery, and the banana wars all partially resulted from the widespread, uncritical acceptance of this narrative of manifest destiny. Claims about God's will, whether voiced three thousand plus years ago or today, require careful scrutiny before one obeys.

If people cannot wage war with an unshakable confidence that they do so at God's behest (the first element of a holy war), then fighting for God (the second element of a holy war) becomes a much more tenuous endeavor. If the fighting was not at God's behest, what assurance can anyone have that God desires the combat to occur or that God desires the spoils of victory? The Scriptural precedent of killing all captives (Deuteronomy 7:2; Joshua 9:24; 1 Samuel 15:3; 1 Samuel 15:8) and destroying all plunder (Judges 6:4) because both belong to God presumes that God actually won the victory and the Israelite army was merely the visible instrument of, or perhaps even incidental to, God's victory.

What evidence is there that Israel fought battles or wars by or with God's help (the third element of a holy war) as promised in the Pentateuch? Scriptural accounts of God dramatically giving victory to Israel (e.g., in causing the walls of Jericho to fall down (Joshua 6) or the sun and moon to stand still (Joshua 10:12-14)) reflect the development of a common, nation-building narrative by Israel rather than actual historical fact. For the sun to appear stationary in the sky, the earth would have to stop rotating on its axis. That cessation would immediately have dramatic consequences for tides, weather, and other geo-physical forces. The moon can appear stationary only by ceasing its orbit around the earth, effecting not only tides and weather, but also causing earth's gravity to pull the moon into the earth because the moon would have lost its counterbalancing centripetal force. No evidence that any of those consequences occurred exists.

What other type of evidence might prove that holy wars were fought by or with God's help? Suggesting that in a holy war God provides individuals with the courage, strength, or wisdom to achieve victory precludes objective analysis. How can one prove that any measure of those qualities comes from God or simply results from the exigencies of particular a situation? For example, Elisha may not have literally seen God's heavenly army ready for battle on the hills surrounding besieged Samaria. Alternatively, Elisha's report may refer to wishful thinking, a dream, or to a metaphorical seeing intended to bolster courage and flagging spirits (2 Kings 6:15-19). Scientific research has shown that reports of super-human strength in times of crises, once attributed to God's assistance, result from an adrenalin rush and