Much of the Old Testament seems to give a frank approval of war, and very brutal war at that. Some of the Old Testament material is even based on a document known as the "Book of the Wars of Yahweh" (see Num. 21: 14). Israel's military victories are often interpreted as the victories of God (see the stories of the conquest of Canaan in Judges). Nahum is a paean of exultation to God for having overthrown the enemy. Fragments of early laws justify revenge, such as "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," though this is offered as a check on even more indiscriminate revenge, and is thus a symbol of moral advance! There are disturbing passages in the psalms:
O daughter of Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall he be who requites you with what you have done to us!
Happy shall be he who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!
( Ps. 137: 8, 9)
These instances are deliberately cited as a sober reminder that we cannot use the Bible as a "static" book in which the same truths are found in all places. These are attitudes that modern Christians and Jews would not want to adopt today. It is important to remember that the Bible, as a record of the dealings of God with his people, gives the whole picture of those people. It is not just a record of the "nice" aspects of the relationship, but of the total relationship as it was -- good, bad, and indifferent. It is a tribute to the honesty of the Biblical writers and compilers that such passages were not surreptitiously removed as ethical insight deepened, for we find passages in other parts of the Old Testament of a distinctively different character.
This becomes clear in the thunderings of the prophets. Most of the "pro-war" passages in the Old Testament equate the doing of God's will with the military victories of the Israelites. It is the message of the prophets that no such equation can be made. God stands in judgment over the Israelites just as he does over the Assyrians or the Egyptians. He may, in fact, raise up nations to defeat the Israelites precisely because they have wrongly assumed that his will and theirs are identical (see Chapter 8). While this does not represent the outlawing of war, it is clear gain over the suggestion that a military victory equals God's approval.
The prophets also recognize the limits of what can be accomplished by war, political intrigue, and the indiscriminate use of power. Isaiah, for example, warns the people against too great a reliance upon the instruments of force, and he paints a vision of the universal reign of God, in which war shall be no more, and in which he clearly sees that war is not the highest fulfillment of God's holy will:
He shall judge between the nations, and shall decide for many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
( Isa. 2: 4)
The clear imperative of the Sixth Commandment, "You shall not kill" ( Ex. 20: 13), is frequently misunderstood. It needs to be said (even though chaplains sometimes make the point too uncritically in wartime) that this prohibition historically applied to those within the tribe of Israel only, and that the Hebrew word is closer to what we mean by "murder" than to "killing." For people today, however, it is increasingly difficult to see much difference between the inhuman slaughter of war and the act of murder.
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