War in the Hebrew Bible: A Study in the Ethics of Violence (review)

116 SHOFAR Winter 1994 Vol. 12, No.2 Biale implies that the question of whether sex was "good" or "bad" was of importance in these sources. This assumption might hold true for some sources, but for each case it should be argued. There are other more minor problems in this book. Biale attempts to do too much in a small space. Sometimes he shuttles with dizzying speed from one methodology to the next, leaving ideas dangling. He correctly identifies, for example, control of sexuality with control of marriage and its wider anthropological ramifications in early Ashkenaz, but he neither develops this idea nor applies it to other historical periods. Occasionally he makes surprising historical leaps from discourse to reality, to no apparent purpose, as when he concludes from a single rabbinic tradition that "it would appear that those who lived in Palestine inclined toward remaining clothed while in the conjugal bed" (p. 52). Despite his continual claims that the cultures he is examining are not monolithic, he frequently describes them as if they were, juxtaposing writers from different places, some who lived over a hundred years apart. Some of his translations and interpretations of source material are highly questionable: explanatory notes should have been included. Finally, it is disturbing to note that the historical paradigm offered here is all too familiar: sexual dynamism in biblical times gave way to rabbinic anxiety and strategies of control which in the Middle Ages succeeded in stifling Jewish sexuality. Today, instead of the Zionists who will rescue the Jews, it is the Jewish American feminists who offer the most promise in "restoring" Jewish sexual health: "Indeed, with feminism, we come back full circle to the Bible, for if the role of feminism today is to serve as a kind of subversion of the traditional canon, this role recapitulates the sexual subversions of biblical culture" (p. 227). These are not mere quibbles. At the same time, they do not negate the importance of the book. Eros and the Jews will be of interest to the general reader, while serving as a starting point for the scholar. Michael L. Satlow Judaic Studies Program University of Cincinnati War in the Hebrew Bible: A Study in the Ethics of Violence, by Susan Niditch. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. 180 pp. $29.95. Susan Niditch is Chair of the Religion Department at Amherst College. Most prominent among her previous works is a study of biblical folklore Book Reviews 117 focused on the trickster. Here she has produced a lean, sophisticated study of the several different views of war at work iJ1 the Hebrew Bible. To introduce her topic, Niditch reminds us how our own American traditions of warfare owe much to the Bible. Causality such as this has prompted some biblical scholars to take up the matter of war, but not so many as one might expect. Moreover, recent developments in such disciplines as anthropology and the study of symbolism suggest that new tools are available for studying the biblical authors' wrestlings with war, violence, destructiveness. By several measures, then, the time is ripe for a close examination of the major biblical materials on war. Sifting through the major biblical traditions about war, Niditch finds seven principal topics. First and second are two types of ban, one in which enemies are killed as a sacrifice to God and one in which the killing of enemies is an act serving divine justice. Third comes the priestly ideology of war developed in Numbers 31. Fourth, various bardic views of war, probably developed in circles of warriors and singers, merit study. Fifth, Israelite tricksterism contains important angles for measuring popular understandings of war. Sixth, the Bible both (a) puts forward a pragmatic, expedient view of war, according to which any people simply does what it has to do to survive, and (b) criticizes this view-refuses to settle for crass pragmatism. Seventh and last, in Chronicles we find a somewhat revisionist view of warfare that stresses nonparticipation-confessing oneself powerless and letting God do the fighting. The ban (herem) devotes human beings to destruction. Niditch finds it to work in the biblical texts in two modes-to be of two main...