Talk:War in the Hebrew Bible

Historicity and campainbox templates

Hi, I'd like to thank @BD2412: for making the effort to write this article. It's a good start on an important topic. I think a lot of improvements can still be made, including linking this to other articles, templates and just Hebrew Bible knowledge in general. I've added a short introduction to caution readers that biblical narratives of battles and wars may not always be historical, and in some cases clearly non-historical, while other cases are more difficult to judge. We should not present events as if they really happened when we've got no reliable evidence to say so. Just citing a Bible verse is not sufficient to establish historicity; we're going to need secondary sources that critically examine the texts and compare it to extrabiblical sources.

Also, I'd like to draw attention to the fact that there are also some military campaignbox templates in use which overlap with the material described here. These include Template:Campaignbox Campaigns of the Israelites and Template:Campaignbox Early Israelite campaigns (which I had just renamed to Template:Campaignbox Book of Joshua battles). I think it would be helpful if we could make a distinction between wars/battles attested only in the Bible, wars/battles attested only in extrabiblical sources (including attested in archaeology and such), and wars/battles attested in both. This seems to me a relatively easy and uncontroversial task of categorisation. Separating the historical military conflicts mentioned in the Hebrew Bible from the non-historical will be much more difficult, and probably something we can only do once we've established the scholarly consensus on each one of them. I've taken the War against the Midianites as an example, because that's a case study that I've happened to have worked on for some time recently. I've not really seen any scholars claiming that it really happened. On the other hand, the Fall of Nineveh (612 BCE), for example, which is described in Nahum 3 (although the Israelites were not involved in it), is so well-attested in extrabiblical sources that we have little doubt about it. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 20:59, 3 May 2022 (UTC)

@Nederlandse Leeuw: I only got this started. I would welcome any improvements along any dimensions that editors would like to pursue. BD2412 T 22:53, 3 May 2022 (UTC)

@BD2412: alright, thanks very much! I'm considering whether to dedicate a lot of time to improving this article, so I wanted to make sure that we're on the same page. You've already made a good start, I'm glad to have found this article and am considering in which dimension I would like to take it.

First, could you explain why you chose this title? The term "military activity" seems a bit odd; why not "war" or "warfare"? I think "Hebrew Bible" is better term already frequently used in English Wikipedia articles titles (such as Rape in the Hebrew Bible). Several books and articles carry the title "War in the Hebrew Bible", that seems pretty fitting here.

Second, would a different setup possibly be better for what you'd like to explain to the reader? The current setup is that of an alphabetical list of battles by geography. I'm not sure if that is the best, because some battles are part of larger wars (e.g. the Battle of Jericho is part of the Conquest of Canaan narrative), and the geography of some military conflicts is unclear (e.g. Numbers 25 seems to mix up Moab and Midian). But it circumvents several problems of other setups, such as chronology (because some events are hard to date and may even never have taken place), and by book (because some events are related multiple times in different books, such as the purported conquest of Canaan. This is an issue that the article Rape in the Hebrew Bible doesn't really have, which therefore lends itself well to a book-by-book analysis). An event-focused article like this could perhaps better be made a list, which refers to main articles if they exist, otherwise we run the risk of duplicating information. A different approach could be thematic, which focuses on aspects of warfare, such as the motives/justifications, the sacred versus the secular (e.g. when are we arguably talking about "holy/religious wars", and when "profane" ones?), the use of tactics and weapons, the occurrence of war crimes such as sexual violence or genocide, the ways authors chose to write about warfare and why, the portrayal of ethnicities, etc. That means we can also study texts that talk about war and military conflict in general, not just describing particular events as battles reports. For example, Lamentations is dedicated to the fall of Jerusalem, and therefore is one big reflection in the aftermath of a war. Other prophetic books are full of ponderings of wars that have happened, or predictions/visions/imaginations of wars that are yet to happen (sometimes these "predictions" appear to have been written down after the events have already happened), rather than concrete stories of battles with detailed tactics etc. I'm thinking that this approach to the article may have the most added value, but it does mean that the setup and contents of this article will change significantly. I'm wondering what you think about it and what you'd like to see. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 23:44, 3 May 2022 (UTC)

I am open to any changes that will make the article more informative to readers. As to the title, I wanted something broad enough to cover isolated military actions short of actual battles or wars. BD2412 T 00:05, 4 May 2022 (UTC)

I'm glad you're so inviting. Could you name examples of such military actions which aren't battles/wars? I myself was thinking about the Egyptian army of Pharaoh pursuing the Israelites crossing the Red Sea, but being held back by the pillar of fire, and then being drowned when the waters close again (Exodus 14 and 15). No actual fighting takes place, but that definitely was Pharaoh's intent. Would you want to include such examples?

Second, I think the term "war" would be okay in the title, even if it doesn't always fit the contents exactly. Again by comparison, some contents of Rape in the Hebrew Bible include non-penetrative sexual violence, which many definitions exclude from the term "rape". "Sexual violence" may thus be a better umbrella term. (But I did choose to exclude sexual harassment as too vaguely related to rape). Therefore, perhaps "warfare" is a better broader term? Wiktionary defines it as:

"1. The waging of war or armed conflict against an enemy."

2. Military operations of some particular kind e.g. guerrilla warfare."

I think that's broad enough for our purposes here. In my view, Pharaoh's pursuit would fall under warfare. (At least Pharaoh can't deport us to Siberia if he doesn't like the word "warfare"; besides, his "(special) military operation" is covered by meaning no. #2. ;).) What do you think? Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 00:39, 4 May 2022 (UTC)

I don't have anything specific in mind, just that the title should not be exclusive of something like a one-off raid that was clearly military in its composition, but not part of some larger conflict. BD2412 T 01:16, 4 May 2022 (UTC)

I think 'warfare' covers that pretty well. E.g. commerce raiding is 'a form of naval warfare', so if one attacks a single merchant ship of another state, that could be considered an act of war(fare), even if it's a one-off raid. It's also generally recognised that some 'wars' consist of a single battle (Kokkonen & Sundell 2017 Appendix), so the threshold isn't that high to designate a military conflict as a 'war', let alone 'warfare'. With that in mind, I'll proceed to rename this article 'Warfare in the Hebrew Bible.' We can always refine it further in the future, but this seems appropriate for our purposes so far. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 06:48, 4 May 2022 (UTC)

I've been invited over by @Nederlandse Leeuw from the discussion at Wikipedia:Templates_for_discussion/Log/2022_May_4#Hebrew_Bible_campaignboxes. In lieu of rewriting my points from there, I've simply copy the relevant section of discussion below, which concern the suggestion of replacing the campaignboxes or even some articles included within them with this one (and written before I'd had a chance to give this one a look-over):

While some articles might be reviewed for notability and potentially merged into the pages for the biblical book that describes them, they could not all be adequately merged into the Warfare in the Hebrew Bible - and for that matter, I firmly believe they shouldn't be anyway, since warfare as an article title on Wikipedia usually indicates a description of the manners, organisation and culture of waging war rather than a list of military engagements as wars of articles are (see Ancient warfare, Anglo-Saxon warfare, Early Germanic warfare et al.). In this regard, which already seems beyond the scope of debating the campaignboxes alone, I would have to oppose.

Glancing back through the edit history, it seems from the form of BD2412's original article before Nederlandse Leeuw's edits, as well as what they said above re: "something broad enough to cover isolated military actions short of actual battles or wars", that this article might have been suited for a "List of biblical battles" page. However, with the edits, that situation has changed, and while I can still see this being a useful article, it doesn't really match the scope of the other "warfare" articles above since those by and large deal with the organisation, customs and manners of how warfare is waged by a given group, rarely if ever citing specific battles. It does fit in with the "Military history of" articles (Military history of Italy during World War II being one such example), but even then the semi-historical or fictionalised nature of the conflicts described may raise objections to that (calling it "military history" may in itself be an overstepping in neutrality terms). I don't really have much of an idea, but I did feel it was pertinent to point out that the naming is peculiar, and by the strict reading of WP:TITLECON may not hold up. That said, I'm sorry to say I'm currently a little stumped for further suggestions. Benjitheijneb (talk) 22:11, 5 May 2022 (UTC)

@Benjitheijneb: Thank you for your imput, that is quite helpful. As you can see above in my discussion with @BD2412:, I am also uncertain about what the best title for this article is and what its contents and scope should be.

To start with contents and scope: indeed, the original setup was kinda like a "List of biblical battles" (or as I described it "an alphabetical list of [Hebrew Bible] battles by geography"), but with a lot more information than is usual for a List article. As I also noted: 'An event-focused article like this could perhaps better be made a list, which refers to main articles if they exist, otherwise we run the risk of duplicating information'. In fact, that is already the case. BD2412 has copypasted a lot of text from the main articles about these battles (and I have used excerpts to add a few more). It is fine to summarise a main article in a (sub)section of another article (typically an overview article of a series of interconnected main articles, e.g. a war article with sections linking to main articles about the battles of that war), with a 'Main article' link at the top. But if the contents of the section largely duplicate the text of the main article, the added value of the section, as well as the overview article as a whole, becomes a bit questionable. To give it more added value as an article, I proposed (and made some initial efforts) to make this a more thematic article about how war(fare) is described in the Hebrew Bible (in the same style as other 'X in the Hebrew Bible' articles). But I do understand that it is quite example-heavy for this purpose.

To proceed with title: I came up with the word 'warfare' as an attempt to cover both BD2412's desire to be "broad enough to cover isolated military actions short of actual battles or wars" (such as "a one-off raid that was clearly military in its composition, but not part of some larger conflict"), as well as war as a biblical literary theme (which I'd like to primarily write about), because the word 'warfare' seemed to suit both purposes. You correctly point out, however, that WP:TITLECON advises against this interpretation, as 'Ancient warfare, Anglo-Saxon warfare, Early Germanic warfare et al.' are about 'the manners, organisation and culture of waging war', which is neither the focus of my nor BD2412's intentions with this article, namely analysing the military contents of the Hebrew Bible. A warfare or military history article should have something like "Ancient Israel(ite)" in the title; it's an article one could plausibly write, but it should be separate from this one. Maybe we should then go for the other option I proposed above: "War in the Hebrew Bible"?

Refocus or split? My current thinking is that we could get the most added value out of this article by focusing on war as a literary theme in the Bible, and to significantly reduce the contents dedicated to specific examples (as the main articles can probably explain that best), perhaps even to the point that they become a condensed list of Hebrew Bible battles that becomes one of, say, 5 sections in this article. But I'm not sure if that is what BD2412 intended, as I would be sort of "hijacking" his article for a rather different perspective of Hebrew Bible military conflicts that I'd like to write about. Maybe our intentions are not reconcilable within the same article? Perhaps we need three or four separate articles, namely "List of Hebrew Bible battles" with a condensed description of each battle (perhaps including some info on historicity) and links to any main articles about those battles (for BD2412's purposes), "War in the Hebrew Bible" as a literary theme (for my purposes), and "Ancient Israelite warfare" / "Military history of ancient Israel" about 'the manners, organisation and culture of waging war' and a historical record/perspective of ancient Israelite wars (for anyone else interested)? Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 08:56, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

PS: I'm starting a Warfare in the Hebrew Bible#List of Hebrew Bible battles as an experiment. We could always split it off later as a separate article if that turns out to be more practical or desirable. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 13:43, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

https://www.livescience.com/59911-ancient-biblical-battles.html Useful source Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 02:51, 15 May 2022 (UTC)

 Comment: FYI the campaignbox discussion was closed as merge, so I merged the three templates into the navbox Template:The Bible and warfare as suggested by Hog Farm and taking into account the suggestions of Benjitheijneb (thanks for the imput!). In theory, we could later also add some battles mentioned in the New Testament and Deuterocanonical books, as this would be in line with the theme 'The Bible and warfare'. This article, "Warfare in the Hebrew Bible", will be the main article for now. I'm still open to shortening 'warfare' to 'war' if that better fits established English Wikipedia conventions. The future of this article is still a bit uncertain, but I'm open to your suggestions about what to do with it. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 17:45, 24 May 2022 (UTC)