Holy War and Herem · The Hard Texts Through the Cross

Definition

The framework for reading the Hebrew Bible’s warfare texts: the wars YHWH commands or fights, and especially herem, the “devotion to destruction” of enemy populations and spoil. Numbers introduces the theme in earnest: the war with Arad and the herem vow (21:1 to 3), the defeat of Sihon and Og (21), the citation of a lost war-poem collection called the Book of the Wars of the LORD (21:14), and above all the war against Midian (chapter 31), one of the hardest chapters in the Torah. The framework names what these texts are and are not, sets them in their ancient Near Eastern context, and reads them through the cruciform hermeneutic: the God revealed in the crucified Jesus is the criterion by which the warrior-God texts are finally understood. It is honest that this is hard ground. It refuses both the easy dismissal that pretends the texts aren’t troubling and the triumphalist endorsement that turns them into a license for violence.

Key proponents

Modern

Tremper Longman III and Daniel Reid, God Is a Warrior (Zondervan, 1995), tracing the divine-warrior theme from the exodus through the cross to the final judgment, the canonical-trajectory reading.
N.T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began (HarperOne, 2016), on progressive revelation and the cross as the climax of God’s dealing with evil: the warrior who wins by dying.
Brian Zahnd and Greg Boyd, the cruciform re-reading of the warrior-God texts (Boyd, The Crucifixion of the Warrior God, 2017, and the accessible Cross Vision, 2017).
Paul Copan and Matthew Flannagan, Did God Really Command Genocide? (Baker, 2014), the ANE-hyperbole and limited-war reading: drive-out rather than annihilate, and all as conventional war-rhetoric.
Richard Hess, on the rhetoric and demography of the conquest accounts.
Christopher J.H. Wright, The God I Don’t Understand (Zondervan, 2008), on the Canaanite question with pastoral honesty.
Walter Brueggemann, on the divine warrior and the rhetoric of violence within Israel’s own testimony.
Marty Solomon and Jewish-context readers, on herem in its ANE world and the gap between the text’s world and ours.

Premodern witnesses

Origen (c. 184 to 253), Homilies on Joshua and Homilies on Numbers, the dominant patristic strategy: the wars are read figurally as the soul’s battle against sin and the powers, defusing the literal violence.
Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335 to 395), who openly struggled with the morality of the conquest and the death of the Egyptian firstborn, and read such texts figurally rather than as models.
Augustine (354 to 430), City of God and Contra Faustum, who held both a figural reading and the seeds of just-war reflection, distinguishing YHWH’s specific historical commands from any general license to violence.
Thomas Aquinas (1225 to 1274), who developed the just-war tradition that arose, in part, to constrain Christian violence, not to license it.
A cautionary witness: the crusade-era and colonial misuse of these very texts is the standing warning. They have been weaponized before, which is precisely what the cruciform reading resists.

See How We Read for the longer lineage of this and the other frameworks on this site.

Core insights

What herem is. The Hebrew root ch-r-m means to devote something irrevocably to God, often by destruction. It removes spoil or population from ordinary human use and places it entirely under God’s claim. It is a sacral category before it is a military one (see the holiness logic in Clean and Unclean and Outside the Camp). To miss that it is a worship word, not just a war word, is to misread it from the start.

The ANE context. Israel’s neighbors used the same vocabulary. The Moabite Mesha Stele (ninth century BCE) records King Mesha devoting an Israelite town to his god Chemosh with the same root. Herem belongs to the shared rhetoric of ancient Near Eastern warfare; it is not a uniquely Israelite invention. That matters for how the totalizing language reads: utterly destroyed and men and women are, in their own world, stock formulas of victory rhetoric (Hess, Copan), the way an ancient king would describe a campaign.

Numbers’ warfare texts. The theme breaks in across the second half: the herem vow at Hormah after Arad attacks (21:1 to 3); the defeat of Sihon and Og on the way (21:21 to 35); the fragment of the Book of the Wars of the LORD (21:14), evidence of an old war-poem tradition; and the war against Midian (31), provoked by the Baal-Peor seduction (25), which contains the hardest commands in the book. The framework does not soften chapter 31. It sits with it.

The faithful readings are a spectrum, not a single solution. Serious, orthodox readers land in several places, and each captures something true:

Progressive revelation (N.T. Wright, Christopher Wright): God meets a violent ANE people where they are and leads them, over a long pedagogical arc, toward the non-violence revealed at the cross. The warrior-texts are early steps, not the destination.
ANE hyperbole and limited war (Copan, Flannagan, Hess): the annihilation language is conventional war-rhetoric; the actual commands were largely about dispossession and driving out, which is why Judges shows the Canaanites still present.
Cruciform refraction (Boyd, Zahnd): the texts hold a true revelation refracted through a violent cultural lens; the cross is the clear photograph, and the violent portraits are read as accommodated and ultimately corrected by the crucified God.
Divine judgment (the classic reading): the conquest is YHWH’s bounded judicial act against entrenched evil (Genesis 15:16, the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete), not a template for human imitation. The site presents these as the live options and does not pretend the tension fully dissolves.

The divine-warrior trajectory ends at the cross. This is Longman’s decisive move. The divine-warrior theme does not vanish in the New Testament; it is transformed. Jesus is the warrior who fights, but his weapons are not Israel’s. He conquers the real enemy, sin, death, and the powers, by dying rather than killing: he disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him (Colossians 2:15). Revelation’s warrior-Messiah is robed in his own blood and strikes only with the sword of his mouth (Revelation 19), and the Lamb conquers precisely by being slain (see The Cruciform Hermeneutic).

The cross is the criterion. The cruciform reading does not erase the herem texts. It reads them as steps in a long process whose endpoint is the God who forgives his enemies from the cross. Any use of these texts to authorize human violence runs directly against the trajectory the texts themselves are on. The warfare is finally reassigned: we do not wrestle against flesh and blood (Ephesians 6:12).

Honesty over tidiness. The posture this site takes, consistent with its whole lane, is to hold the difficulty in the open: neither to weaponize the conquest texts nor to pretend they are not troubling. The aim is to help a reader see the lens before deciding whether to wear it. None of the proposed solutions is made a hill to die on; the framework lays out the faithful options and keeps the cross at the center.

Implications. This framework lets the Numbers commentary, and later Deuteronomy and Joshua, handle warfare honestly and consistently rather than improvising at each hard verse. It actively resists the crusade-style misuse of these texts, and it connects the Old Testament’s divine warrior to the New Testament’s cruciform victory, where the war is real but the weapons have changed.

Where it shows up in Scripture

Exodus 15:3, The LORD is a man of war, the divine warrior’s debut in the Song of the Sea
Numbers 21:1-3, the herem vow at Hormah after Arad’s attack
Numbers 21:14, the lost Book of the Wars of the LORD
Numbers 21:21-35, the defeat of Sihon and Og
Numbers 31, the war against Midian, the hardest text in the book
Deuteronomy 7:1-2; 20:16-18, the herem command against the Canaanite nations
Genesis 15:16, the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete, the judgment rationale
Joshua 6 to 11, the conquest accounts, with the drive out / land still remains tension (11:23; 13:1)
Judges 1 to 2, the conquest shown as incomplete, evidence for the hyperbole and limited-war readings
1 Samuel 15, the Amalekite herem and Saul’s failure
Psalm 24:8, the LORD, strong and mighty, the LORD, mighty in battle
Colossians 2:15, the cross as the disarming of the powers
Ephesians 6:10-18, the warfare reassigned to the spiritual realm
Revelation 19:11-16, the warrior-Messiah robed in his own blood, the sword of his mouth

Common misreadings to avoid

Weaponizing the texts. Using herem to justify modern violence, conquest, or ethnic cleansing inverts both the trajectory the texts are on and the God revealed at the cross.
Dismissing the texts. Pretending they are not there, or that they have nothing to teach, is not honest reading. The framework sits with them rather than around them.
Flattening to a single solution. Progressive revelation, ANE hyperbole, cruciform refraction, and divine judgment each catch something real; treating any one as the whole answer overclaims.
Reading herem as ordinary genocide on purely modern terms. It is a sacral category in an ANE rhetorical world. That context does not make it comfortable, but it changes what the text is doing.
Imitation. The conquest is presented as a unique, bounded, divinely-commanded judgment, not a pattern for the people of God to repeat. The New Testament explicitly reassigns the warfare (Ephesians 6).
Letting the difficulty drive you out of the text or into proof-texting. The cruciform center can hold these texts without resolving every tension, and that is more honest than a tidy escape.

Holy War and Herem: The Divine Warrior, Read Through the Cross

Definition

Key proponents

Core insights

Where it shows up in Scripture

Common misreadings to avoid

Further reading