Abstract
Boyd Seevers’ book is a study of warfare in the Old Testament era, examining in turn the military history, weaponry, organization, and strategy of notable Middle Eastern states from this period. Beginning with Israel, the book then works through Egypt, Philistia, Assyria, Babylon, and Persia. When the author feels that there is sufficient material (as with Israel, Egypt, and Assyria), the discussion of the state is spread out over two chapters. The other three are confined to one chapter each. Each section opens with a short piece of fiction, told from the point of view of a combatant from the state in question. Seever relies primarily on evidence from the Bible, from various inscriptions and texts such as the Amarna letters, and on archaeological evidence.
There are two major problems with the book. The first is that evidence is often sparse. Few, if any, surviving texts from this era are concerned with purely objective accounts of battles and armies, as opposed to making use of them for religious and political propaganda. Furthermore, as the author himself notes, the various armies, weapons, and tactics employed by the states in question did not differ very dramatically. As such, the nation-by-nation structure of the book seems a misguided decision.
The second and more serious problem concerns the author’s very evident conservative theological beliefs. This often leads to an incongruously moralizing tone entering accounts of military history (‘The Egyptian army resumed its march northward towards Carchemish, and the Judean nation resumed its march towards apostasy and destruction.’) but also entails the Old Testament version of history being enshrined as the unimpeachable truth. The fact that the texts of the Old Testament were composed and compiled over a long period of time and in numerous different genres (culture hero myth, family saga, satire, prophecy, poetry, etc.) is disregarded. The Old Testament is treated solely as factual history. The arrival of the Israelites in Canaan, for instance, relies unquestioningly upon the book of Joshua – the twelve tribes of Israel, led by Moses and Joshua, arrive en masse from Egypt. Alternative views, such as Albrecht Alt’s theory of peaceful infiltration or Norman Gottwald’s theory of peasant uprising, are not discussed or even acknowledged. This failure to engage critically with the primary text deprives the book of most of the potential insight it might have offered.