Beyond Holy War: The Study of War in the Hebrew Bible Since Gerhard von Rad

This essay surveys the development of scholarship on war in the Hebrew Bible from Gerhard von Rad’s formulation of the holy-war paradigm to recent studies of ideology, memory, and literary representation. It argues that the historiography of biblical warfare is best understood not as a succession of competing theories but as a progressive expansion of scholarly questions. Early research sought to reconstruct the institution of “holy war” underlying biblical narratives. Subsequent scholarship increasingly emphasized historical development, the Divine Warrior tradition, multiple war ideologies, and the literary and theological diversity of the biblical texts. More recent studies have turned to ethics, cultural memory, identity formation, and the representation of violence. Rather than replacing one another, these approaches have collectively transformed the study of biblical warfare into an interdisciplinary field encompassing military history, theology, literary criticism, anthropology, and memory studies. The essay concludes by suggesting that the continuing vitality of the field lies in its expanding range of questions rather than in the search for a new overarching paradigm.