A brief update to my most recent post:
I am taking Old Testament this semester, so a lot of my thoughts have been directed toward those books and stories. After the fire and the evacuation and everything else, I found myself thinking about the Israelites after being given the law, and specifically about holy war as described in Deuteronomy 20. It gives an outline for how to conduct war – ostensibly if Israel followed God’s battle plan, he would win the battle for them.
I started thinking about the actual battle procedure though; even though God often won battles for the Israelites, is that to say that he did it without allowing Israel to incur loss? It’s difficult to imagine that throughout all the fighting not a single Israelite died. Then I read the following passage from Judges 20. It concerns a series of battles between Israel and the tribe of Benjamin:
