Ever since Marcion, the picture of the God of the ancient Israelites as a God of war has been an occasion for caricature and embarrassment for Christians. That is one of the reasons why both Christians and Jews have developed ways to read those stories that might avoid ascribing to God qualities that we do not praise in men and women. The above chapter did not address that embarrassment, since its concern was not our modern reading of the holy war heritage but how that heritage made sense in the first century as background to Jesus’ and his contemporaries’ thought about God’s possible intervention in history
Older interpretations of how Christians should understand the wars of YHWH most often sought simply to set them aside. Some have sought to resolve this on the grounds of a “new dispensation” after the model of Jesus’ repeated “but I say to you” in Matthew 5. This was done by the Czech Brethren of the fifteenth-century “First Reformation,” by "Anabaptist"-type pacifists since then, and by Tolstoy. Jesus being God’s qualified envoy inaugurating a new age, he had every right to change the rules.
In a different form of the same logic, the wars of the early Hebrews can be set aside on the more general grounds of the post-Enlightenment notion that we moderns are qualified, by the mere fact of our modernity to rule on which elements of an ancient culture we choose to find usable. Thus it is we, in place of Jesus, who have the right to declare “ancient good uncouth.”
Both of these postures are still very much alive among us; their simplicity makes them more accessible than the more careful historical-anthropological angle which I here have assumed.
The above chapter interprets only one dimension of the legacy of the Hebrew story of YHWH/God helping Israel in war: namely the difference which that heritage, remembered as Jews in the age of Jesus must have remembered it, should make for our interpreting the setting of Jesus’ decisions. Yet there is much more to say about how the Old Testament story of YHWH as warrior should be taken in its own right.
Almost simultaneously with the first publication of The Politics of Jesus, my more analytical chapter, “If Abraham Is Our Father,” addressed the challenge of how the Christian can own the Israelite history, in such a way as to see the gospel as an organic prolongation of the original early Israelite experience and vision, rather than as a rejection or reversal.
In 1980 Millard C. Lind’s Yahweh Is a Warrior exposited with much greater scholarly depth the same perspective. I have sought once more to capsule this message briefly in “ ‘To your tents, O Israel’; The Legacy of Israel's Experience with Holy War.”
The general theme of how Christians can understand the wars of YHWH has since continued to draw widespread attention. Other studies have built upon the Hebrew understandings of faith, power, and nationhood, reaching beyond the issue of war itself among these are dissertations on the Hebrew Scriptures by Gerbrandt and Ollenburger and on Ephesians 6 by Thomas Yoder Neufeld.
The numerous works of Walter Brueggemann and Norman Gottwald support in a broader way the above chapter’s concern for letting the ancient texts themselves dictate how we should discern the unity of the canonical corpus as a witness for justice. They also find in the Hebrew story when empathetically and critically read, values compatible with rather than contradictory to the New Testament.
