Holy war in the Bible: 7 facts critics of jihad pass over

Deuteronomy 20 is the Torah’s law of warfare. It opens with exemptions: a man who has built a house and not dedicated it, planted a vineyard and not eaten from it, or betrothed a wife and not married her, is sent home, as is the man who is afraid (20:5–8). It then gives two rules for enemy cities.^[1]

For a city “very far from you”, Israel is first to offer terms of peace. If the city accepts, its people become forced labourers. If it refuses, Israel besieges it, and when God gives it into their hand they are to “put all its males to the sword”, taking the women, children and livestock as plunder (20:10–15). For the cities of the peoples of Canaan, the rule is different: “you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall devote them to complete destruction, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the Lord your God has commanded” (20:16–17).^[2] The reason given is that they would otherwise teach Israel their abominable practices.

The Hebrew term for this destruction is herem, the devoting of a city and its people to God by killing them. It is a religious act, commanded by God and carried out as a duty. By the definition the critic uses, a war fought on God’s command for a religious purpose, it is holy war.

The command to Saul against the Amalekites is the most direct of these texts. The prophet Samuel tells Saul: “Thus says the Lord of hosts … Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey” (1 Samuel 15:2–3).^[3]

Saul spares the king, Agag, and the best of the livestock. Samuel tells him that because he rejected the word of the Lord, the Lord has rejected him as king, and Samuel himself then “hacked Agag to pieces before the Lord in Gilgal” (15:22–33).^[4] In the narrative, Saul is condemned for sparing what he had been told to destroy.

The Quran contains no comparable command. Its fighting verses are addressed to adult combatants, and the Prophet forbade the killing of women and children. Ibn Umar رضي الله عنه reports that a woman was found killed in one of the campaigns, and the Prophet condemned the killing of women and children.^[5] Abu Bakr رضي الله عنه’s instructions to the army sent to Syria, recorded in the Muwatta of Malik, forbid killing women, children and the old, cutting down fruit trees and destroying inhabited places.^[6] A Christian reader is entitled to explain 1 Samuel 15 by its setting. The same courtesy is owed to the Quran’s verses on fighting.

The law of Deuteronomy was not left on the page. In Numbers 31, Moses sends an army against Midian “to execute the Lord’s vengeance”. The soldiers kill every male and bring back the women and children as captives. Moses is angry with the officers: “Have you let all the women live?” He orders them to kill every male child and every woman who has lain with a man, and to keep alive for themselves the young girls who have not (31:1–18).^[7]

The book of Joshua records the conquest of Canaan in the same terms. At Jericho the Israelites “devoted to destruction by the edge of the sword all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep and donkeys” (6:21). At Ai, twelve thousand men and women fell (8:24–25). Of the southern campaign the summary says: “He left none remaining, but devoted to destruction all that breathed, just as the Lord God of Israel commanded” (10:40).^[8]

Many Christian and Jewish scholars read these accounts as idealised, written centuries after the events, and point out that the archaeology of Canaan does not show the sweeping destruction the book describes. Others read them as history and defend them as God’s judgment on a corrupt society, a view found in the Bible itself (Genesis 15:16, Deuteronomy 9:5).^[9] Both readings are argued in good faith. Neither removes the commands from the canon, and neither turns the God who issued them into a God who never commands war.

The title “Lord of hosts”, Yahweh Sabaoth, occurs more than two hundred times in the Hebrew Bible. “Hosts” means armies, and the title names God as commander of the armies of Israel and of heaven. After the crossing of the sea, Moses and Israel sing: “The Lord is a man of war; the Lord is his name” (Exodus 15:3). David says to Goliath: “I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel … for the battle is the Lord’s” (1 Samuel 17:45–47).^[10]

The Psalms take up the theme in worship. Psalm 18, which David sang on the day God delivered him from his enemies, says: “He trains my hands for war … I pursued my enemies and overtook them, and did not turn back till they were consumed” (18:34–37). Psalm 149 calls on the faithful to sing with “the high praises of God in their throats and two-edged swords in their hands, to execute vengeance on the nations and punishments on the peoples, to bind their kings with chains” (149:6–8).^[11] Psalm 137 ends with a blessing on whoever dashes the infants of Babylon against the rock (137:9).

These texts are sung in churches and synagogues to this day. Christians interpret them spiritually, as the soul’s struggle against sin and evil. That is a legitimate reading, and it is close to the way many Muslims speak of the greater jihad, the struggle against the self. A critic who accepts the spiritual reading of Psalm 149 and rejects any reading of jihad except the military one is applying two standards.

The argument rests most heavily on the contrast between the Old Testament and Christ. Jesus did teach his disciples to love their enemies and to turn the other cheek (Matthew 5:39–44), and the early church did not take up arms. That deserves to be said plainly.

The New Testament does not abolish the warrior God, however. It moves him to the end of time. In Revelation, the rider on the white horse, called Faithful and True and the Word of God, “judges and makes war”; from his mouth comes a sharp sword “with which to strike down the nations”, and “he will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty”. The kings of the earth and their armies gather to make war against him and are killed, “and all the birds were gorged with their flesh” (Revelation 19:11–21).^[12] In the Gospels, Jesus says that he came “not to bring peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34), and on the night of his arrest he tells the disciples that whoever has no sword should sell his cloak and buy one (Luke 22:36–38).^[13] Christian interpreters explain these sayings in various ways, most of them non-military, and those explanations should be heard.

The New Testament also leaves the Old Testament wars in place as examples of faith. Hebrews 11 praises those “who through faith conquered kingdoms … became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight”, naming Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah and David (11:32–34).^[14] Paul calls the soldier’s life a model for the believer (2 Timothy 2:3–4). The New Testament reads Joshua’s wars as acts of faith and does not repudiate them.

The Torah’s war laws contain limits of their own. Deuteronomy 20:19–20 forbids cutting down fruit trees during a siege: “Are the trees in the field human, that they should be besieged by you?” Deuteronomy 21:10–14 regulates the treatment of a captive woman, who must be given a month to mourn her parents and may not be sold as a slave if her captor later dismisses her.^[15]

The rabbis went further, and their method resembles that of the Muslim jurists. Maimonides, in his code of Jewish law, rules that no war may be waged against anyone, the seven nations of Canaan included, until peace has first been offered to them, reading the offer of peace in Deuteronomy 20:10 as applying to every war.^[16] The Mishnah records the view that the nations had been mixed together since Sennacherib, king of Assyria, resettled the peoples he conquered, so that no one could any longer be identified as an Ammonite or a Moabite.^[17] Later authorities applied the same reasoning to Amalek, so that the command of 1 Samuel 15 could no longer be carried out against any living people.

This is the same kind of work that Muslim jurists did with the fighting verses: reading each command in its setting, binding it with conditions drawn from other texts, and protecting those who do not fight. A critic who accepts the rabbinic limits as a faithful reading of the Torah has no ground to treat the jurists’ limits on 9:5 as evasion.

The critic grants that the Crusades happened and treats them as an aberration. They were proclaimed and conducted by the Church as religious acts.

At the Council of Clermont in 1095, Pope Urban II called on the knights of Europe to go to the aid of the Eastern Christians and to free Jerusalem. The council’s decree granted that “whoever for devotion alone, not to gain honour or money, goes to Jerusalem to liberate the Church of God can substitute this journey for all penance”.^[18] The crusader took a vow, wore the cross on his clothing and received a spiritual reward for fighting. Later popes extended the same privileges to wars against Muslims in Spain, pagans in the Baltic and heretics in southern France. Bernard of Clairvaux, writing for the Knights Templar, said that the soldier of Christ “kills safely and dies more safely”, and that to kill an enemy of Christ was not homicide but “malicide”, the killing of evil.^[19]

Thomas Aquinas, whom the critic cites as the guide to a just war, set three conditions for it: the authority of the ruler, a just cause and a right intention.^[20] The Islamic law of war, written down centuries before Aquinas, set conditions of its own: the authority of the imam, an enemy who fights or breaks a covenant, an offer of terms before battle, and the protection of those who do not fight. The two traditions were asking the same questions, and the jurists of each answered them from their own scriptures.