In the Beginning There Was the Holy War : Part 2

Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today's World
by Karen Armstrong

(Page 2 of 2)

The Angel of Death passed over the houses of the Jews and killed the firstborn son in every Egyptian family. Every year Jews celebrate this saving event in the feast of Passover, for it was a graphic demonstration of their status as the chosen people: God had drastically discriminated between themselves and the Egyptians. After this catastrophe, Pharaoh decided to let the Israelites go and Moses led his people out of Egypt. But before they had got very far Pharaoh changed his mind. He and his army pursued the Jews and caught up with them at the Reed Sea (usually misleadingly translated Red Sea). It seemed that the Israelites would be herded back to slavery or even exterminated, but God intervened once more. He parted the waters of the sea so that his people could cross dry-shod, but drowned the whole Egyptian army when they tried to follow.

This story of violent miracles was obviously a mythical version of the Hebrews' escape from Egypt, but the myth was crucial in forming the Jews' view of themselves. It shows what is involved in their view of salvation. God's people have to act to save themselves, even though their position seems hopeless or dangerous. God will always help them in miracles that suspend the normal course of nature, and the salvation of the chosen people means the annihilation of their enemies as two sides to a single coin. Salvation is the violent separation of the just and the unjust. The next stage in the story of the Exodus reveals the archetypal paradigm that has recurred in all three of the monotheistic religions, when a holy journey or a migration becomes a holy war.

The Israelites were now an independent people, but their salvation was not yet complete. They were still only a collection of tribes who had been unused to controlling their own destiny and they had to learn how they were to live as God's chosen people. They did not journey directly to the Promised Land, but for forty years they lived as nomads in the Sinai Peninsula. It was a holy journey during which, the Bible tells us, they were deeply dependent upon God, who fed them with manna and guided them step by step. Most importantly, on Mount Sinai God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, the basis of the Torah or the law. This was God's greatest gift to his people, because it imposed the divine order on the world and was a revelation of God's will. By observing the 613 commandments of the Torah, which governed the smallest details of everyday life, the Jews naturally acquired a unique identity, which they believed to have been directly inspired and shaped by God. Throughout their history Jews have revered and studied the Torah, which they believe God gave to Moses during the forty years in the wilderness. That this formation of a new Jewish self should have begun during a journey was significant. Traveling and migration are evocative symbols of spiritual passage. The Israelites were traveling away from shame and oppression to dignity and freedom, from desolation to intimacy with God, from helplessness to self-determination. Journeys and migrations have also been crucial and formative events for Christians and Muslims.

One of the Ten Commandments given to Moses on Mount Sinai was "Thou shalt not kill." Indeed most of these commandments are concerned with an absolute respect for the inalienable rights of others, and this is one of the greatest legacies of Judaism to the rest of the world. But, as they prepared to enter the Promised Land, God told his people that they would have to engage in a ruthless war of extermination. By taking his people back to Canaan, Moses was taking them back to their roots because of God's original promise to their father Abraham. They believed that the land was theirs, but there were other people living there already who had made it their home for centuries, and naturally they were not going to hand over their country without a fight.

These people were in the way of the divine plan; they were also essential enemies of the new Jewish self. Because they opposed values and plans that were "sacred" to the Jews and essential to God's plans for them, they had to be annihilated. The normal human rights that Jews were commanded to extend to other people did not apply to the Canaanites, who had become the enemies of God. This absolute hostility is a characteristic of the holy war. Because the Canaanites were obstacles to Jewish fulfillment they had to be exterminated and there was no possibility of peaceful coexistence. "I shall exterminate these," God told his people, "they must not live in your country" (Exodus 23:23, 33). It was not simply a territorial matter. The Canaanites had achieved a more advanced culture than the Israelites and their lifestyle would be very attractive to the weary nomads. They could destroy this newly emerging Jewish self and the new religion of monotheism, which was still so revolutionary that it was a fragile plant. The Israelites could very easily be seduced by the Canaanites' fertility cults and idolatrous faith. Therefore God gave Moses very clear instructions, frequently repeated in the Bible, about how these new enemies and their religions were to be treated:

When Yahweh your God has led you into the land you are entering to make your own, many nations will fall before you: Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations greater and stronger than yourselves. Yahweh your God will deliver them over to you and you will conquer them. You must lay them under a ban. You must make no covenant with them nor show them any pity. You must not marry with them: you must not give a daughter of yours to a son of theirs, nor take a daughter of theirs for a son of yours, for this would turn away your son from following me to serving other gods, and the anger of Yahweh would blaze out against you and soon destroy you. Instead, deal with them like this: tear down their altars, smash their standing stones, cut down their sacred poles and set fire to their idols. For you are a people consecrated to Yahweh your God. It is you that Yahweh your God has chosen to be his very own people out of all the peoples on the earth.

(Deuteronomy 7:1-6)

In a Jewish holy war, there was no question of peaceful coexistence, mutual respect or peace treaties. The little Jewish kingdom was an island of true religion in the ocean of Middle Eastern paganism. There was a religious siege and naturally a deep insecurity. Until the Israelites felt more confident, they could only fight their enemies to the death. When God has saved his people from the Egyptians the ordinary laws of nature had been suspended; so too when the Jews had to establish themselves in the Promised Land, ordinary morality ceased to apply. This is a crucial element in the holy wars of both Jews and, later, Christians.

Copyright © 2001 by Karen Armstrong.

About the Author

Karen Armstrong's first book, the bestselling Through the Narrow Gate, described her seven years as a nun in a Roman Catholic order. She has since published numerous bestselling books, including A History of God, Islam: A Short History, Buddha, The Spiral Staircase and most recently The Great Transformation. She is a freelance writer and she lives in London.