War in the Bible: an Examination of Biblical Conflict and Violence

The Bible doesn’t flinch at portraying the world’s violence, especially during wartime. And while there is no such thing as a kind and gentle war, you might be surprised to learn that Israel was held to a higher standard of engagement than her neighbors. The inhumanity and cruelty wasn’t shared equally among the Near East nations.

In Blessed Are the Peacemakers, Dr. Helen Paynter offers a biblical theology of human violence. Paynter’s work explains what Scripture says about violence in the world and the Christian response to it, offering an unshrinking examination of the human condition and unwavering hope. 

The following article is adapted from Blessed Are the Peacemakers. Here she examines:

• The normalization and seasonal cycle of military action
• The connection between obedience and military victory
• Weapons of war in the Bible
• Military conduct among Israel and her neighbors
• Terrorism as a weapon
• The treatment of prisoners
• The ecological impact of warfare
• And more

When kings go off to war 

At the beginning of the David-Bathsheba account in 2 Samuel 11, there is a telling phrase, often overlooked as readers rush through to the well-known part of the story. “In the spring, at the time when kings go off to war . . .” (v. 1).

To some extent, there is a pragmatism about this statement. Spring refers to the time when the first harvest is over, and there is a long dry spell before the autumn harvest. In the absence of a large standing army, spring was the season when men could most easily be spared from agricultural work. [1] Yet the phrase also sounds a note of grim inevitability: springtime = wartime. We see a similar idea in 1 Kings 20:22, “Strengthen your position and see what must be done, because next spring the king of Aram will attack you again.”

The reference to “kings going to war” is immediately followed by the statement that David did not go but rather stayed at home. Coupled with his indolence in the next verse—lounging about in bed in the daytime and wandering on the palace roof with no better thing to do than ogle the local women—this amounts to a critique of his character. The role of a king was to lead the people into battle (e.g., 1 Sam 8:20).

Such normalization of military action is seen in many places in the unfolding story. There are local skirmishes in Genesis between the patriarchs and their neighbors (e.g., Gen 14). Newly escaped from Egypt, Israel is attacked by a number of armies, most notably the fearsome Sihon and Og (Num 21:21–35; Deut 3:1–11), and the Amalekites, who attack the people at the trailing, weak rear (Exod 17:8–16; Deut 25:17–18).

Israel’s cycle of conflict

Eventually the people enter the land of Canaan through a series of conquests (see esp. Joshua 6–11), beginning with Jericho. At this point it is starting to become apparent that Israel does not possess a lucky charm that guarantees them victory in every military conflict. In particular, disobedience to God is likely to result in defeat (Josh 7:15; cf. Num 14:39–45).

This pattern continues in the book of Judges, where the partially dispossessed nations attempt to reclaim their territory. The book contains several cycles, not arranged chronologically, [2] that follow this pattern: disobedience—defeat—raising up of a judge—obedience—victory. This is summarized in Judges 2:

The Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord and served the Baals. . . . In his anger against Israel the Lord gave them into the hands of raiders who plundered them. . . . Whenever Israel went out to fight, the hand of the Lord was against them to defeat them, just as he had sworn to them. They were in great distress.

Then the Lord raised up judges, who saved them out of the hands of these raiders. . . . Whenever the Lord raised up a judge for them, he was with the judge and saved them out of the hands of their enemies as long as the judge lived; for the Lord relented because of their groaning under those who oppressed and afflicted them. (Judg 2:11–18)

The project of the conquest and defense of the land was a profoundly theological one. God had promised the land to Abraham (e.g., Gen 12:7), and he was the divine commander who determined when the people were to go to battle and when they were to remain at home (e.g., 1 Sam 30:7–8). The soldiers were to be consecrated before battle (Deut 23:9–10). Often the ark would precede the people into battle (e.g., Josh 6:1–15). Victory was granted or withheld by the Lord (1 Kgs 20:13); in fact, sometimes the Lord intervened directly (Josh 10:9–14). The conclusion of many battles was the dedication of the spoils to the Lord (e.g., Josh 6:17).

In 1 Samuel 4 we encounter a flagrant attempt by Eli’s sons, Hophni and Phinehas, to manipulate God into granting them victory. The people had suffered a military defeat by the Philistines for an undisclosed reason (although the clue may be that the battle had not been sanctioned by God), suffering four-thousand battle casualties. In response, Hophni and Phinehas led the people back against the Philistines, this time preceded by the ark of the covenant. The outcome was disastrous: thirty-thousand men were killed, including Hophni and Phinehas. But most catastrophic of all, the ark itself was captured by the enemy. The God of Israel would not be treated as a talisman.

Did obedience always lead to victory? 

The time of the kings was marked by frequent military engagement, as we saw earlier. It is now no longer an infallible pattern that obedience resulted in victory, and disobedience in defeat. The reforming king Josiah, for example, dies in battle against the Egyptians (2 Kgs 23:29; 2 Chr 35:20–27). Nevertheless, in the large storyline the final defeat of Israel by Assyria and Judah by Babylon are firmly attributed to the nation’s covenantal unfaithfulness (2 Kgs 17; 21:10–16).

Military action is not confined to international conflict. The Old Testament speaks of at least three full-blown civil wars. One followed the appalling gang rape, murder, and dismemberment of the Levite’s wife, described in Judges 19–21. The crime was conducted by Benjamites, and the outrage provoked the rest of Israel to muster against Benjamin, with catastrophic consequences. The second was centered around the attempt by David’s son Absalom to displace him from his throne (2 Sam 15–18). The third took place on the death of Solomon, when his son Rehoboam rejected the people’s plea for leniency (1 Kgs 12:1–24). The factional group was led by a former military general named Jeroboam, and the conflict resulted in the permanent division of the nation, with the northern half, Israel, taking Jeroboam as its first king. Rehoboam remained king of the southern nation, Judah, which retained the Davidic kingship thereafter.

Weaponry in the Bible 

Early in the story, Israel was poorly armed compared to its neighbors. When they first came out of Egypt, they probably would not have been well-equipped. In the early days of the conquest, they are clearly portrayed as being the inferior in military strength. The Philistines, for example, had iron-smelting technology, which Israel lacked (1 Sam 13:19–22). Horses and chariots were the crack military equipment of the day, and when we read of them (e.g., Exod 14:9), a shiver of fear should run down our spines, particularly in the earlier parts of the story when Israel did not possess such equipment.

The Old Testament is by no means unambiguously in favor of militarism. At this point, however, it might be helpful to identify how the conduct of war, as viewed in the Bible, is quite different from the conduct of other ancient Near Eastern cultures.

The conduct of war by Israel and her neighbors 

So how did Israel and its ancient Near Eastern neighbors conduct war? It is slightly risky to generalize, because we are talking about a range of societies with a wide geographic and chronological spread, but essentially war in the ancient Near East was brutal and violent. However, the weight of evidence suggests that Israel was, by statute and in practice, more restrained that its neighbors. Very helpful work has been done on this topic by William Webb and Gordon Oeste. They argue that the Old Testament shows God continually nudging his people forward in a series of what they term “redemptive movements.” The ethics within a text should be compared with what they would have been without the divine limitation. When such a technique is applied, it can be seen that God is constantly moving his people onward.

OT war texts should be understood within an incremental, redemptive-movement ethic, an understanding that acknowledges elements of the ugly and the beautiful. The ethical problems in the war texts are real, not just apparent. While saddened by the degree to which God must bend down to act in co-agency endeavors within our fallen world, we recognize also a wonderful, positive side that ought to be celebrated—the redemptive movement happening in the biblical war texts when understood within the ANE context and/or canonical setting. That which is incrementally redemptive awakens our hope of complete redemption. [3]

We will look briefly at a range of examples in military conduct.

Using terror as a weapon 

The Assyrians conducted what might be called psychological warfare or an “ideology of terror” in order to assert their dominance in a region. [4]

They were deliberately brutal in their treatment of captives, as we shall see below. The Bible represents the psychological element of Assyrian warfare when King Sennacherib’s emissary comes to besiege Jerusalem (2 Kgs 18:17–37). The Rabshakeh, as he was termed, sought to undermine morale in the city by making public threats and an assertion of superior military strength. Mindful of the effect of his words, the Judean officers ask him to speak in Aramaic, which was not widely spoken in Judah at the time. In response, the Rabshakeh redoubles his threats in the vernacular Hebrew.

Was it only to your master and you that my master sent me to say these things, and not to the people sitting on the wall—who, like you, will have to eat their own excrement and drink their own urine?” Then the commander stood and called out in Hebrew, “Hear the word of the great king, the king of Assyria! This is what the king says: Do not let Hezekiah deceive you. He cannot deliver you from my hand. Do not let Hezekiah persuade you to trust in the Lord. (2 Kgs 18:27–30)

The people of Israel would have had good reason to be scared. The Assyrians were notorious for the brutality of their treatment of their captives.

The treatment of captives 

An Assyrian frieze of the aftermath of the conquest of Lachish can be found in the British Museum in London. It represents some of the atrocities they perpetrated against their captives, here described by Boyd Seevers:

They impaled some captives on poles, killed or dismembered others, apparently flayed still others, and deported the surviving inhabitants before looting and burning the city. . . . They also blinded; decapitated; removed noses, ears, and extremities; and created piles of bodies or body parts in front of targeted cities. [5]

The binding of captives was often cruel, too. With reference to Egyptian tomb art, Mark Janzen describes how captives are portrayed. Of one, for example:

His arms are pinned behind his back in a manner that is disturbing to behold and physically impossible to duplicate without injury. His shoulders are forced back far enough to allow his elbows to meet at his spine. His arms are then bent back, making an X-shape, with his left and right hands aligning vertically with their respective shoulders. He is bound precisely at the elbow joints, which are bent back in severe fashion. Such a binding would have caused severe damage to the joints and muscles of the shoulders and chests (deltoids and pectorals, respectively), including dislocation of the shoulder, while cruelly injuring his elbows, perhaps shattering them. [6]

In the early chapters of Amos, the prophet gives a prolonged invective against the pagan nations, which is largely oriented toward war crimes they have committed. These include the use of iron sledges to kill captives (1:3), the enslavement and sale of people (1:6, 9), attacks against women (1:11, 13), and the desecration of corpses (2:1). [7]

The Old Testament histories record a number of instances of such mutilation committed against Israelites in order to shame them (Judg 16:21; 1 Sam 10:27–11:11; 2 Sam 10; 2 Kgs 25:1–7). [8] However, there is little to suggest that such conduct was standard practice in Israel. An exception is found in Judges 1 where the men cut off the great toes and thumbs of the conquered king Adoni-Bezek. Surprisingly, he seems to accept his fate phlegmatically, as fitting recompense for the way that he himself had had seventy thumbless and toeless kings scrabbling about beneath his table for scraps (1:7).

With regard to a number of the other practices we have considered above, William Webb and Gordon Oeste consider Israel to be significantly more humane than their pagan neighbors. [9] The practice of stripping captives naked to shame them was not an approved practice for Israelite warriors. Nor is there evidence that body-binding torture was practiced in Israel. The practice of selling conquered communities into slavery, as we have seen, invited severe opprobrium. It was not Israelite practices to dig up the graves of their enemies and scatter their bones. Ripping open pregnant women was viewed as deplorable (e.g., 2 Kgs 15:16). The impaling and displaying of captives was not conducted routinely, and it only appears to have been practiced against dead captives and for a few hours (see, e.g., Josh 10:26).

The ecological effects of warfare

The ecological effects of war are also clear in the ancient Near Eastern literature. Here is a fairly representative example from an Assyrian inscription:

The strong walls, together with 87 towns of their neighborhood I destroyed; I leveled to the ground. I set on fire the houses within them; and their roof beams I left in flames. I opened up their well-filled granaries. And food beyond counting I let my army devour. Their orchards I cut down; and their forests I felled. All their tree trunks I gathered; and I set on fire. [10]

By contrast, the book of Deuteronomy prohibits the felling of fruit trees in times of war:

When you lay siege to a city for a long time, fighting against it to capture it, do not destroy its trees by putting an ax to them, because you can eat their fruit. Do not cut them down. Are the trees people, that you should besiege them? However, you may cut down trees that you know are not fruit trees and use them to build siege works until the city at war with you falls. (Deut 20:19–20)

Law does not necessarily control conduct, of course. The book of Judges records the actions of the would-be king Abimelech, who salted a city to render it uncultivable (Judg 9:45).

Sexual violence in warfare

War rape was another horrific consequence of war that was considered normal in the ancient Near East. We see a hint of this in the song of Deborah, where she is envisioning what the mother of the slain Canaanite commander Sisera will be imagining. (Note that she is not describing Israelite practice but an Israelite perspective on Canaanite conduct.)

Through the window peered Sisera’s mother;
behind the lattice she cried out,
“Why is his chariot so long in coming?
Why is the clatter of his chariots delayed?” . . .
“Are they not finding and dividing the spoils:
a womb or two for each man.” (Judg 5:28–30) [11]

War rape was the archetypal demonstration of victory. As William Webb and Gordon Oeste put it:

Ancient male warriors celebrated victory with the ultimate “we beat them” ritual that expressed their success in battle and the complete possession and humiliation of their enemies—by phallic penetration, thrusting, and ejaculation within the most protected “territory” of the enemy. . . . Rape enacted defeat at a far deeper psychological level than mere killing on the battlefield; it took from the opponents the most prized persons and property they had failed to protect. Sexual violation of the enemy’s beloved daughters and wives offered a ritualized climax to the killing frenzy on the battlefield. [12]

Israel’s attitude to war rape is a little more ambiguous. Certainly, there was provision for a man to marry a female captive (Deut 21:10–14), with no suggestion that her consent should be sought. However, William Webb and Gordon Oeste make a convincing argument that the conduct of battle by the Israelites in this regard also would have been distinctive from that of the nations around them. [13] First, there are a number of pieces of evidence to suggest that battlefield rape was unacceptable. Because war was viewed as a holy action, conducted with the sanction of the deity, worship practices (which, in Israel, absolutely prohibited cultic prostitution) appear to have influenced battlefield conduct. In 1 Samuel 21:2–5, David protests to Ahimelech that his soldiers have not been sexually active for days. Moreover, war rape is not represented in Israel’s literature or artwork, unlike, for example, the art and literature of Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome, in all of which it is prominent and emphatic.

In contrast, Deuteronomy 21:10–14 sets out in some detail how a captured woman, taken in battle and brought into the home of an Israelite soldier, was to be treated. First, there was a month-long waiting period to permit her to grieve for her parents. Within the ancient world this would have been regarded as quite a long period of mourning. Second, there was a set of assimilation rituals involving the removal of the woman’s hair, the trimming of her nails, and the changing of her clothes. These were mourning customs, and this provision conveys the idea that the woman’s grief was not to be overlooked. Third, no sexual activity was to take place until the woman had been bound to the man by a marriage covenant, as suggested by the words “then you may go to her and be her husband and she shall be your wife” (v. 13). Fourth, the woman was not to be sold as a slave. If the man chose to divorce her, she was free to go where she pleased. Finally, concern is expressed within the text for the woman’s honor: “You must not sell her or treat her as a slave, since you have dishonored her” (v. 14). Webb and Oeste conclude, “That the biblical authors would care at all about the honor of a divorced female war captive is nothing short of amazing.” [14]

Naturally we feel unsettled when we read of the forced marriage of female captives, but Webb and Oeste’s argument is that we should feel such discomfort. In its day it represents a significant move along what they term the “redemptive trajectory,” but thankfully we have moved further in the same direction toward God’s ultimate goal.

The ban: destroying enemy territory

In many ancient societies, war was concluded by a ritualized destruction of the conquered territory and its peoples. This is often referred to as “the ban”; the ancient term for it, with slight variations across the ancient Near Eastern languages, was herem. It involved great destruction—the firing of cities and the putting of at least some of their inhabitants to the sword—and was viewed as a quasi-sacrificial activity where the conquered people and spoils were given over to the deity. For example, on a stone inscription known as the Mesha Stela, the king of Moab describes how he performed the ban (here translated “I devoted them”) to his god Kemosh:

Kemosh said to me, “Go, seize Nebo from Israel,” So I went at night and I attacked it from the break of dawn until noon when I seized it and I slew everybody—seven thousand men, boys, ladies, girls, and maidens—for to the warrior Kemosh I devoted them. [15]

In company with the other ancient Near Eastern nations, Israel also sometimes conducted the ban against its enemies. For Israel, the ban was to be performed, by divine command, upon seven people groups who were inhabiting Canaan: the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites (Deut 7:1–6). It was not to be used indiscriminately; the Philistines, for example, were not subject to the ban.

War in the New Testament

Where warfare is normal and even normative in the Old Testament, it is not so in the New. The way that the people of God are to organize themselves is wholly different in the two testaments. In the Old Testament, they form a theopolitical entity, a nation with (at least in theory) autonomous existence with a set of laws to govern them, which is administered by a king who is guided by the priests and prophets. In the New Testament there is never any attempt by the early church to organize themselves in such a way. Here, the rule of God is expressed in terms of citizenship of his kingdom while continuing to operate as subjects of Rome. This makes a huge difference to the ways that violence might be experienced or wielded by the two expressions of the covenant people.

The Old Testament expresses a much wider range of violence than the New. This is not because the cultures within which ancient Israel found itself were inherently more violent than the Greco-Roman world. Far from it. But the concerns of the Old Testament are broader. It spends more time in what we might call “social” stories, and its concerns embrace the whole range of the human experience. By contrast, the New Testament narratives are limited to three years in the life of Jesus and a few years in the time of the early church. Moreover, the epistles are focused on the early church and a narrow range of pastoral issues they were facing. Violence is ever present behind the New Testament text. For instance, consider the ways that the Jewish leaders are repeatedly plotting Jesus’s death, or Paul’s frequent references to the persecution of the early church. But explicit violence only bubbles to the surface infrequently—at the martyrdoms of John the Baptist and Stephen, for example, and—supremely—at the cross.

We have considered the ubiquity and ubiquitous brutality of warfare in Israel and across the ancient world. We had read frankly stomach-churning accounts of the weaponization of terror, the brutal treatment of captives, especially captive women, damage to agriculture, and the wholesale destruction of communities. Nevertheless, there are some glimmers of difference between Israel and her neighbors. Ancient Israel appears to have conducted herself with more restraint, both on the battlefield and afterward, than her pagan neighbors did. This is evidenced both in laws and historical records (biblical and extrabiblical).

Dig deeper with Blessed Are the Peacemakers

Dr. Paynter goes on to examine many other topics related to violence in the Bible. As she explains in the introduction: 

It is the task of this book to consider questions such as these by hosting a conversation between Scripture and (contemporary and historical) thinkers on the subject of violence, all with attention to violence’s (contemporary and historical) victims. And by so doing, perhaps we can discern, and learn to walk in, wisdom’s paths of peace.

If you’re interested in what the Bible teaches us about violence and how we can use those lessons to become more peaceful people, check out Blessed Are the Peacemakers or Helen Paynter's Blessed Are the Peacemakers video lecture series.

1. Seevers, Warfare in the Old Testament, 68.
2. One of the strongest pieces of evidence that Judges is not arranged chronologically is the appearance of Aaron’s grandson Phinehas at the end of the book (Judg 20:28).
3. Webb and Oeste, Bloody, Brutal and Barbaric?, 20.
4. K. Lawson Younger, Ancient Conquest Accounts: A Study in Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical History Writing, JSOTSupp 98 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1990), 66.
5. Seevers, Warfare in the Old Testament, 239.
6. Mark D. Janzen, The Iconography of Humiliation: The Depiction and Treatment of Bound Foreigners in New Kingdom Egypt (Memphis: The University of Memphis, 2013), 61.
7. Non-burial, or the disrespectful treatment of a corpse, was appalling in the ancient mind.
8. Tracy M. Lemos, “Shame and Mutilation of Enemies in the Hebrew Bible,” JBL 125.2 (2006): 225–41.
9. Webb and Oeste, Bloody, Brutal and Barbaric?, 263–87.
10.  Webb and Oeste, Bloody, Brutal and Barbaric?, 263–87.
11. Translation slightly modified to represent the coarseness of the underlying Hebrew. The NIV’s “a woman or two” is more precisely rendered “a womb or two.”
12. Webb and Oeste, Bloody, Brutal and Barbaric?, 101.
13. Webb and Oeste, Bloody, Brutal and Barbaric?, 99–127.
14. Webb and Oeste, Bloody, Brutal and Barbaric?, 125.