Triumph and Trauma: Justifications of Mass Violence in Deuteronomistic Historiography

1 Cultural trauma and the justification of mass violence in historiography

May that dreadful, stormy day – like rain that has fallen – never come back again.

May that dreadful, stormy day – that struck down the people – be utterly undone.

May it be locked up – as if by a door, barred against the night.

May that dreadful, stormy day not be given a place in treasured memory. ^[2]

These lines from the Lament for Ur reflect, in the early second millennium bce, on a catastrophic event at the end of the third millennium bce, namely the destruction of the Third Dynasty of Ur under king Ibbi-Sîn by its enemies.^[3] The “day that struck down the people” refers to mass killings as part of violent warfare. While the text claims to blot out the memory of these events, paradoxically, it enshrined their commemoration for centuries. The “Catastrophe of Ibbi-Sîn” was handed down in the Mesopotamian literary tradition through the second and first millennia bce, as it was applied to ever recurring events of violent destruction.^[4] A pivotal element in the aetiology of the catastrophe was its theological interpretation: the key agents were not humans, but rather the gods whose wrath caused disaster in the human sphere.^[5]

In the fourteenth century bce, Hittite scribes developed the first works of elaborate historiography, especially under king Muršiliš II. The Deeds of Suppiluliuma in connection with The Plague Prayers of Muršiliš present historiography, as Jan Assmann has argued, that explains the disaster of an epidemic as a consequence of human guilt and divine wrath.^[6]

Guilt is only one incentive – albeit a very powerful one – for memory work, reconstruction of the past, self-examination, and the writing of history. It stems from the experience of suffering, which struggles against two premises: meaningless chance and cyclical recurrence.^[7]

Systematic historiography from the perspective of human guilt can be seen in Hittite, Neo-Babylonian, and, most elaborately, in biblical historiography.^[8] Deuteronomistic historiography was written, as Martin Noth argued, “with the final historical catastrophes in view,”^[9] that is the downfall of the Northern and Southern Kingdoms of Israel and Judah around 720 and 587 bce. Deuteronomistic historiography has been a prime example for the application of trauma theory to its interpretation.^[10]

Ancient historiography suggests that collective suffering is an important incentive for historiography, and human guilt a key notion for explaining it. Assmann’s concept of “cultural memory” concerns the essential function of historical memory for collective identity. In Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001), Dominick LaCapra analysed the relationship between historiography and collective trauma, as he claimed that “all myths of origin include something like a founding trauma, through which the people pass and emerge strengthened; at least they have stood the test of this founding trauma.”^[11]

Sociologists have explored the notion of “collective trauma” since Kai Erikson’s work on the flood catastrophe in Buffalo Creek (1972), who defined it as “a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of communality.”^[12] The notion of “historical trauma” is used in work on American Indian/Native Alaska Communities as referring to “a series of traumatic assaults that have had enduring consequences for families and communities.”^[13] Jeffrey Alexander’s concept of “cultural trauma,” in contrast, is disinterested in what actually happened to a given society through collective suffering, but methodologically concentrates on the imagination and construction of trauma narratives that redefine the group’s collective identity.^[14] What actually happens to societies in collective suffering, however, is a different matter from how they create narratives about it; both aspects deserve attention. I shall therefore use “collective/historical trauma” for reconstructions of actual collective suffering that caused large-scale social disintegration and transgenerational suffering,^[15] while “cultural trauma” refers to how suffering is represented in historiographical narratives by carrier groups to reconstruct a new collective identity for the future.

Collective trauma is frequently caused by “mass violence,” which includes “killings, but also forced removal or expulsion, enforced hunger or undersupply, forced labor, collective rape” etc.^[16] Sociological analysis suggests that mass violence has been related, in modernity, to nation-building.^[17] While nineteenth century nationalisms involved long and complex ideological and institutional processes, wars frequently catalysed nationalist fervour and in-group cohesion.^[18] In this context, Julius Wellhausen considered war the cradle of Israel as a nation.^[19] Yet, “it’s not war itself,” as Jacob Wright has pointed out, “but war commemoration that has served as an engine for Israel’s ethnogenesis as a people.”^[20] Nationalist narratives regularly invoke heroism and victory in war, but the notion of cultural trauma indicates that collective suffering from violence can serve narratives that strengthen collective identity as well. As Aleida Assmann puts it, “the triumphant and the traumatic are the two modalities according to which mythic narratives construct a sense of national identity.”^[21] Both aspects occur in biblical historiography.

For the analysis of trauma narratives, Alexander singles out four aspects: the pain suffered, the victim group, the relation of the victim to the wider audience, and the attribution of responsibility.^[22] While each of these aspects deserves attention, my focus in analysing Deuteronomistic historiography will be the issue of responsibility, which proves more complicated than a simple victim-perpetrator dichotomy, since biblical historiography negotiates in-group, out-group, and divine responsibilities. Moreover, historiographical representations of mass violence often involve “justifications,” which is here used as an umbrella term, “subsuming divergent speech acts and pragmatics which have in common that they seek to make mass violence appear as ‘just’.”^[23]

In what follows, collective suffering in the history of Israel, its narrative representation and justifications of mass violence will be analysed in Deuteronomistic historiography, concentrating on the accounts of Israel’s conquest and loss of the Promised Land. While it is generally acknowledged that the historiographical complex in Genesis to Kings and, within it, Deuteronomistic historiography in Deuteronomy to Kings, grew in several stages of compositional and redactional processes,^[24] I am here interested in the ideological features of the exilic and post-exilic compositional stages of these texts that foster a collective identity of emerging Judaism.^[25]

2 Justifications of mass violence in Israel’s conquest of the land

The historicity of the biblical stories that narrate Israel’s conquest of the Transjordanian (Num 21:21–35; Deut 2:16–3:17) and the Cisjordanian land (Joshua 1–12) has long been questioned and is today generally dismissed.^[26] The archaeological evidence suggests that some sites that went into decline in the Late Bronze Age were partially resettled in the early Iron Age, while many new settlements emerged in the hill country.^[27] The stratigraphy of prominent sites such as Jericho and Ai – conquered by the Israelites according to Joshua 6; 8 – were not inhabited during the period referred to in the biblical accounts so that they cannot be considered as reflecting historical reality. The Early Iron Age settlement of communities that came to define themselves as “Israel” in subsequent centuries^[28] was a slow, gradual, and mostly peaceful process rather than one achieved through military conquest. It is all the more interesting to ask why this process is presented as an extremely violent conquest in biblical historiography and its ideological rhetoric. In what follows, I shall concentrate on the justifications given for the demand to annihilate the Canaanite peoples (especially in Deut 7; 12:29–31; 18:9–12; 20:15–17) before considering the conquest narratives, since these texts are most immediately relevant to what is here conceptualized as mass violence.^[29]

3 Justifications of mass violence in Israel’s loss of the land

In contrast to the largely fictional character of the stories of Israel’s conquest of the Promised Land, warfare in the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires involved frequent execution of mass violence as a matter of historical fact. The Neo-Assyrian Empire was based on expansion politics from the late tenth to the seventh centuries BCE, which involved regular violent warfare, including raids, conquests, sieges, and naval operations.^[64] In raids, “the army advanced deep into enemy territory, plundering, killing, and burning all along the way in order to destroy the enemy’s livelihood.”^[65] Assyrian tactics involved (frequently two-way and mass) deportations.^[66] Extreme forms of violence such as the extraction of foetuses from the wombs of women were applied in exceptional cases of punishment for rebellion.^[67] Assyrian warfare was accompanied by a broad arsenal of justifications that were grounded in divine commands^[68] and a mythological framework in which “the submission of the chaotic other was not merely morally tolerable but morally imperative.”^[69] Neo-Babylonian kings, especially Nebuchadnezzar II, struggled to take over the territories formerly dominated by the Assyrians. The Babylonians produced less propagandistic display of their warfare than the Assyrians, and their deportation strategy was one-way.^[70]

The Kingdoms of Israel and Judah were affected by Assyrian and Babylonian warfare and mass violence, especially in the conquest of Samaria and ensuing deportations (around 720 bce),^[71] Sennacherib’s campaign against Judah that included, among many other towns, the destruction of Lachish (701 bce),^[72] and the Babylonian sieges and conquests of Jerusalem with ensuing deportations (597 and 587 bce), and the city’s destruction (587 bce).^[73] Deuteronomistic historiography narrates these events in 2 Kings 17–25, framed by two comparable accounts of the invasions of Samaria and Jerusalem in 2 Kings 17; 24.^[74] The following analysis concentrates on the representation and etiological justifications of mass violence, before looking at how these issues are addressed in preceding texts, especially in Deuteronomy.

2 Kings 17–25 refers to mass violence committed by the Assyrians and Babylonians quite sparingly. The voice of the narrator generally appears like a detached reporter in describing military defeats of Israel and Judah. The three-year siege of Samaria, the city’s conquest, and the deportation of the population are reported in extremely terse matter-of-fact style (2 Kgs 17:5–6; cf. 18:9–11). Similarly, Sennacherib’s conquest of “all the fortified cities of Judah” is narrated in a single verse (18:13), while the sparing of Jerusalem is elaborately unfolded (18:17–19:37). The devastation of Judah by Chaldean and other bands under Jehoiakim’s reign is formulated in a single phrase (24:2). The first siege of Jerusalem under Jehoiachin is, again, reported tersely (24:10), while the first deportation is unfolded in greater detail (24:14–16). Jerusalem’s second conquest is narrated more elaborately than the first, including a reference to severe famine (25:1–3). The only killings mentioned in the course of the conquest and destruction of Jerusalem are the “slaughter” (šḥṭ) of king Zedekiah’s sons (v. 7) and the “smiting” (nkh) of 71 members of the city’s elite in Ribla (vv. 18–21). The description of the city’s destruction refers to the burning of buildings and fortifications (vv. 8–10) and the temple’s despoliation (vv. 13–17),^[75] but no casualties are mentioned. The second deportation to Babylonia (v. 11) and the flight of “all the people” to Egypt (v. 26) are mentioned without any further detail. All in all, the description of the fall of Jerusalem, the “darkest days of biblical Israel,” is “reticent… dry and laconic.”^[76]

Readers may easily imagine the mass violence that these events involved. Even more so, it is striking how little is said about it. Never do we read that ordinary men, women, and children fell victim to the Assyrian or Babylonian invasions. Never are their troops agents of the verbs “to smite” (nkh),^[77] “to kill” (mwt hi.),^[78] or “to destroy” (šmd). Only once, in 2 Kgs 24:2, the Chaldean and other troops are said “to make” Judah “perish” (ʾbd hi.), but even here, according to the Masoretic text tradition, Yhwh is the principal agent as the one who sends them.^[79] The motif of the “ban” (root ḥrm) occurs but one single time in the voice of Sennacherib’s messengers who refer to “what the kings of Assyria have done to all lands, banning them” (2 Kgs 19:11), but never is this measure said to have been taken against any town in Israel or Judah. King Manasseh of Judah is accused of having spilled streams of innocent blood (21:16; 24:4), but the Assyrians and Babylonians are never accused of this crime.

While the voice of the narrator is quite terse in its accounts of the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests, some other voices in the narrative make more drastic claims about these events. The Rabshakeh refers to the “men sitting on the wall, who are doomed with you to eat their own dung and to drink their own urine” (2 Kgs 18:27). Another reference to the hardship of siege is found in Hezekiah’s message to the prophet Isaiah: “This day is a day of distress, of rebuke, and of disgrace; children have come to the birth, and there is no strength to bring them forth” (19:3). Isaiah refers to the devastation of towns during Sennacherib’s invasion and adds, “their inhabitants, shorn of strength, are dismayed and confounded; they have become like plants of the field and like tender grass, like grass on the housetops, blighted before it is grown” (19:26). In the context of Manasseh’s sins, a divine word, conveyed via anonymous prophets, announces: “I am bringing upon Jerusalem and Judah such evil that the ears of everyone who hears of it will tingle. I will stretch over Jerusalem the measuring line for Samaria, and the plummet for the house of Ahab; I will wipe Jerusalem as one wipes a dish, wiping it and turning it upside down” (21:12–13).^[80] These metaphoric expressions are effective, as they refer to unspeakable events by concealing rather than revealing them, which forces addressees to activate their imagination to decode their message.

Although the description of the physical violence committed by the Assyrian and Babylonian armies is described in the most terse and general terms, much energy is spent on their explanation. Some political issues are mentioned as causing effects,^[81] but theological rationalizations and justifications are foregrounded, and they consist of two basic ingredients: divine wrath, caused by human sin. The most extensive reflection on this matter is provided in 2 Kings 17. The fall of Samaria is said to be caused by sin that provoked divine anger (17:7–18, 20–23; cf. 18:12); guilt is also attributed to Judah in an anticipatory aetiology of its fate (17:19). Manasseh’s sins are considered decisive for the fate of Judah (2 Kgs 21; 23:26) so that Josiah’s cultic purges are in vain (2 Kings 23) and even Yhwh’s temple is doomed to fall victim to his anger (23:26–27). As foreseen by prophets (21:15–16), king Josiah (22:13), and the prophetess Huldah (22:16–17), divine wrath is the ultimate cause for Babylonian invasions (24:3–4) and Jerusalem’s destruction (24:20). After this final theological reasoning, the actual description of Jerusalem’s fall is marked by “theological silence.”^[82]

The narration of 2 Kings 17–25 is prepared, however, by extensive historiography, including divine and prophetic revelation, especially in the Book of Deuteronomy. The grand aetiology of the ultimate disasters of Israel and Judah is elaborately prepared by manifold Deuteronomistic thematic threads: divine law that, if broken, inevitably leads to ruin.^[83] The issue of mass violence is most drastically unfolded in “rhetorical maximalism” in Moses’ curses of Deuteronomy 28.^[84] Especially the “siege curses” (28:49–57) provide scenes that are “missing” from the Deuteronomistic narrator’s account without any restraint.^[85] The “grim-faced nation showing no respect to the old or favour to the young” (28:50) could be applied to both the Assyrians and the Babylonians.^[86] Dispersed among the nations, Israel will suffer from emotional distress that is comparable to symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (28:64–67).^[87]

The preceding survey of 2 Kings 17–25 suggests that its representation of mass violence committed by the Assyrian and Babylonian armies is marked by avoidance, metaphorization, and theologization. Drastic and detailed descriptions are avoided by the narrator. Prophetic voices are introduced for metaphorical elaboration (esp. 19:26; 21:12–13). Both the narrator and prophetic voices emphasize theological reasons for the suffering: human sin that led to divine wrath. Since human sin justifies the anger of Yhwh, it serves the purpose of theodicy.^[88] Insofar as the justified divine wrath is the ultimate cause for the aggression of human agents against Israel and Judah, the Assyrians and Babylonians are indirectly justified as well. Their acts are not subject to moral judgment, since they are but instruments of divine wrath.^[89]

4 Conquest and defeat: contrasts and continuities

In Deuteronomistic historiography, the contrasts between the topics of the conquest and the loss of the land go together with the contrasting roles of Israel as perpetrator and victim of mass violence. In the representation of the actors of mass violence, it may surprise that Israel is portrayed as committing the murder of the entire population of many cities East and West of the Jordan with explicit and repeated references to the killing of women and children, while such acts are never attributed to the Assyrian and Babylonian armies. This, again, contrasts with the historiography’s relationship to historical reality, since the Israelites’ acts are attributed to an imagined past, whereas the violence actually suffered at the hand of the Assyrians and Babylonians is presented in general and distant terms, without detailing any gruesome experience in the historiographical account – although anticipated in the curses of Moses.

As to the justifications of mass violence, both narratives strongly emphasize theological aspects, but in quite different ways. While the concept of the “ban” (ḥrm) is central to the ideology of Israel’s conquest, it plays hardly any role in the representations of the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests. Israel’s extermination of the Canaanites is elaborately motivated by the discourses of Moses in Deuteronomy. In contrast, no divine or prophetic word conveyed to the Assyrians or Babylonians is reported in 2 Kings 17–25.^[90] Israel’s extermination of the Canaanites is essentially justified and motivated as a necessary means to protect Israel from being contaminated by Canaanite cult practices. Israel’s defeat at the hand of the Assyrians and Babylonians, in contrast, is principally explained by Israel’s and Judah’s own misconduct in the cultic sphere.

The latter point directs towards a line of continuity between the violence suffered by the Canaanites and the Israelites. According to this line of Deuteronomistic thought, committing the same kinds of abominations, including child sacrifice, caused both the Canaanites and the Israelites to lose their land.^[91] This historiographical pattern is made explicit in Deuteronomy and Kings: Because of sin, Israel suffers the same fate “like the nations” (kagôyīm) that “Yhwh is making perish before you” (Deut 8:20) and that “Yhwh carried away before them” (2 Kgs 17:11).^[92] Both fall victim to the wrath of Yhwh, which is thus a governing principle of Deuteronomistic historiography.^[93] A related pattern of historiographical reasoning is obedience towards Yhwh. Both the conquest of the land and its loss are grounded in Moses’s discourses of Deuteronomy. The conquest of the land is grounded in his command and motivation, its loss in his warnings and curses.^[94] Because of obedience, Israel was able to conquer the land, because of disobedience, Israel and Judah lost their land.

5 Triumph and trauma: Deuteronomistic justifications of mass violence

The triumph and trauma of Israel’s conquest and loss of the promised land frame Deuteronomistic historiography. Both aspects of the story contribute to constructing collective identity for Israel, that is, an implicit audience that identify with “Israel,” and both contain justifications of mass violence that can be illuminated by trauma theory. Historically, the military conquests by the Assyrians and Babylonians of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah in the eighth to sixth centuries bce, inflicted upon them complete destruction as political entities and entailed waves of mass violence that caused “collective trauma” (in Erikson’s sense) on the respective populations. The scribal elite that was deported to Babylonia 597/587 bce invested creative energy to recover cultural identity by composing and redacting Deuteronomistic historiography, thus producing a monument of “cultural trauma” (in Alexander’s sense).

The distance and lack of empathy with victims seen in the historiographical presentations of the falls of Israel and Judah in 2 Kings 17–25 has been interpreted as repression: “the narrative erases the psychological trauma of the exiles.”^[95] While it is true that the narrative gives hardly any room to individual traumatic experience, it does represent the disaster of the communities of Israel and Judah as body politic. Can such a narrative of ultimate defeat serve the purpose of reconstructing collective identity of a community to be restored in the future?^[96] If Deuteronomistic historiography envisions any future community of Israel or Judah, it insists that the ultimate failure must be acknowledged, not principally as a defeat at the hand of human agents, but as one inflicted by the failures of the kings and people of Israel and Judah.

In this sense, both narratives – of the conquest and the loss of the land – could be read as an attempt at recovering agency. Against the background of the experience of helpless exposure to mass violence and ultimate defeat, the story of the conquest of the land could serve as a counterfactual narrative that celebrates a primordial victory, involving phantasies of the perpetration of orgies of mass violence that are, at the same time, an expression of utmost obedience towards divine command. While these imaginations may well appear, to the modern mind, as a psychological distortion, they are comprehensible as the consequence of traumatic suffering. The attribution of guilt to the victims of mass violence works, in the conception of Deuteronomistic historiography, for the demise of preceding cultures in the land, whose archaeological remains are still visible as warning testimonies “until this day” (e.g. Josh 8:28),^[97] as well as the blows of destruction suffered by Israel and Judah themselves. The representation of the defeat in 2 Kings 17–25 reduces the agency of the human aggressors to a minimum and attributes full responsibility to the defeated and their deity. Against the experience of utter helplessness, history – and the future – are placed in the hands of the audience. If there is to be any future for them and their representatives, they must take responsibility for their own fate in terms of obedience towards Yhwh and the Torah of Moses.^[98] In this sense, Deuteronomistic representation and justification of mass violence, even in the ultimate defeat of Israel and Judah, provide the seed of resilience for the defeated.

The positive explication of the collective identity of Israel, to which Deuteronomistic historiography points its readers, is Deuteronomy itself. Deuteronomy presents wars as the “cradle of the nation” of Israel and provides large-scale justifications of mass violence: the wars of conquest under Joshua are sanctioned by divine will and a necessary means to protect the collective identity of Israel as “sacred nation” (Deut 7:6). At the same time, the terrible violence envisioned as a consequence of Israel’s disobedience in the curses of Deuteronomy 28 leads to the perspective of a small remnant of Israel among the nations (Deut 4:27) who are supposed to return to obedience (4:29–30) and to the land. The restoration of prosperity does not involve any demand of violence (30:1–10).^[99] Obsessed with self-blame and the need to take responsibility for everything that had happened, Deuteronomistic historiography desperately strives, in the end, to break through the vicious cycles of history.

While trauma theory may help to understand the justifications of mass violence in Deuteronomistic historiography of Israel’s conquest and loss of the promised land as a recovery of agency by the victimized group, the problem of the transmission of these justifications, inscribed in authoritative textual traditions, remains. The justifications have been mitigated in much of the history of their interpretation,^[100] but they have also seen a problematic history of consequences.^[101] The collective trauma inflicted by Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian imperialism has generated justifications of mass violence that have been inscribed into the cultural canon of Judaism and Christianity. In a period that sees renewed justifications of war and killings of civilians, this legacy requires deep analysis and efficient response.