“Biblical histories do accord well with contemporaneous records, and even provide insights into military principles of the era.”

By Douglas Brown

FEW TODAY might consider the Old Testament to be among the most reliable of historical records. Many view it as a little more than a collection of Israelite mythology, often compiled centuries after the events it describes. Yet to write it off completely would be a mistake. The Old Testament does in fact contain many revealing details about life in the first millennium BC Near East, as well as narratives covering a number of historical events of the era.

Indeed, some writers and historians, like Chaim Herzog, Mordechai Gichon, and K.A. Kitchen, have devoted entire books to showing how the Biblical histories do accord well with contemporaneous records, and even provide insights into military principles of the era.

Consider these six tactics described in the Old Testament and how they tie in with the wider field of military history.

The sling is mightier than the helmet

David’s storied contest with Goliath in I Samuel 17 is one of the most famous episodes of the Old Testament. Goliath, a towering Philistine champion dressed from head to toe in armor, challenges the Israelite army to send their best to face him. None have the stomach to confront the behemoth except the young David. Although courageous, the youthful Israelite is dwarfed by his colossal opponent. After refusing the bulky and unfamiliar armour offered by King Saul, David chooses to face Goliath without any mail and carries just a sling and five smooth stones. Goliath responds to his challenger with withering scorn—only for David to sink a stone in his forehead. After Goliath falls, the young victor cuts off his enemy’s head with the Philistine’s own sword.

Some have raised doubts about David’s ability to dent Goliath’s skull through a helmet with a slingshot. But ancient history bears out the sling’s lethality. The ancient historian Livy records that at the catastrophic Roman defeat against Hannibal at Cannae in 216 BC, the Roman consul Lucius Aemilius Paullus, surely wearing armour much better than Goliath’s, was severely wounded by one of Hannibal’s slingers from the Balearic Isles, eventually taking him out of combat. He was later killed in the Roman rout. Rome later found slingers especially valuable against Parthian cataphracts, cavalry that was armoured head to toe and against whom arrows were useless.

The siege of the moles

The wealthy, clifftop Etruscan city of Veii was a tough nut to crack in the early history of Rome. A siege at the turn of the 5^th century BC dragged on for years until Roman general Marcus Furius Camillus was given command as dictator. Camillus had his sappers carve an underground route through the cliff into the temple of Juno – a backbreaking excavation that was carried out around the clock in six-hour shifts. When the final assault came, a team of handpicked Roman infantrymen burst into the temple from underneath to take the defenders from behind and open the gates.

II Samuel 5 and I Chronicles 11 portray a very similar stratagem employed by King David (the now grown slayer of Goliath). Having seized the citadel of Jerusalem, David still needs to take the main city from the Jebusites. He promises command of the army to whoever will lead a crack force up the tzinor, a tunnel through the rock connecting Jerusalem with its water supply at the Gihon Spring. His nephew Joab leads the assault, which helps take the city. This story was further authenticated by the discovery of Warren’s Shaft, a 50-foot vertical ascent from the waters of the Gihon up to the place where buckets of water were lowered from to draw the water.

Follow the leader

Israel’s King Ahab was a religious disaster but had reasonable success as a general, defeating the neighbouring kingdom of Aram on several occasions and even standing up to the Assyrians at Qarqar in 853 BC. At the Battle of Ramoth Gilead, described in in II Kings 22, King Ben-Hadad of Aram confirms Ahab’s reputation by ordering his chariot corps, “Fight neither with small nor great, save only with the King of Israel” (verse 31, King James Version). Ahab, warned by the prophet Micaiah that he would not return from Ramoth as punishment for his apostasy, has his ally Jehoshaphat of Judah dress in his royal robes in his chariots while Ahab assumes common dress. The Arameans pursue Jehoshaphat by mistake, until he cries out to the Lord, at which point they recognize the deception and break off pursuit. Ahab, on the other hand, is hit by a lucky shot from an arrow and killed.

Seeking out the enemy commander is a time-honoured tactic. Consider Alexander the Great confronting Darius III at Issus (333 BC). Perhaps a closer parallel to Ben-Hadad’s tactic comes from Vlad III Dracula of Wallachia’s campaign against the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II in AD 1462. Faced with 60,000 Turkish troops and 120 cannon, Dracula had little choice but to stage a guerrilla campaign with his 30,000 men.

As the Turks pushed ever deeper into Wallachia, Dracula decided on a bold roll of the dice. Taking his best cavalry, he led a night assault into the Ottoman camp to capture Mehmed himself. Mistaking a rich tent for the sultan’s, Dracula’s soldiers killed the two viziers lodging in it. The Turkish Janissaries rallied around the real sultan’s tent and defended it bravely. Dracula’s other force led by an intimidated boyar failed to engage, possibly saving Mehmed’s life.

Fake-out

Israel under Joshua won a significant victory in its first action in Canaan: the seizure of Jericho. As the jubilant Israelites marched next on the city of Ai, they had no idea the terrible cost they were about to pay. One of their own, a man named Achan, had secretly pocketed some of the plunder from Jericho, thereby violating Joshua’s directive that spoils were to be sacrificed to Heaven. Angered, God delivered Joshua’s men into the Canaanites’ hands, and Israel suffered a defeat.

Having rectified the situation with Achan’s execution, Joshua resolved to play on Ai’s sudden overconfidence. Setting two forces in ambush, Joshua and the main army formed up against the Canaanites and then feigned a retreat. As the men of Ai pursued, one force seized the vacated city while the other hidden force hit the men of Ai in the rear. When Joshua’s force turned about, the men of Ai were in a hopeless position and were utterly defeated.

The campaign for Ai played out very much like the Battle of Hastings on Oct. 14, 1066. As William the Conqueror’s knights attacked the English line on the ridge, the charging Bretons on the left, horrified by the horrendous wounds inflicted by the English battle-axes, broke and ran. The Normans in the center, hearing that William had been killed, joined them. William doffed his helmet to show he was still alive, but the English right had already broken ranks in pursuit. Had Harold II’s English all advanced, they likely would have overwhelmed William’s army. The English centre and left stayed in position, however. William rallied his troops and cut off and annihilated the English who had charged ahead. William, sensing an opportunity, staged one or possibly even two more feigned retreats, luring out more English to their deaths. The tenacious English still held their reduced position until Harold’s death by a stray arrow caused his army to disintegrate.

Marshals of the camp

The Book of Numbers devotes considerable space to the Israelites’ wanderings through the Sinai. Of 12 tribes, three are camped in each cardinal direction around a core of the Levites and God’s Tabernacle, where Moses and the priests encamp. Each tribe has its own banner.

Interestingly, the Romans used a similar camp for their castra, also consisting of three or four permanently assigned portions with their own insignia around a headquarters in the center. The Protestant Dutch even used the Israelites’ model as a blueprint for their own camps in the Eighty Years War against Spain.

Egyptologist K. A. Kitchen brings up the most interesting tidbit about the Israelite camp. Controversy has raged for two centuries about whether the Hebrews originated as slaves in Egypt who left in the Late Bronze Age (somewhere between 1450 and 1250 BC) under the man who wrote the Pentateuch, Moses, or if they came from Mesopotamia and compiled the Five Books of “Moses” after the Babylonian Captivity (586 BC). The camp in the Pentateuch closely resembles the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses II’s camp at the Battle of Qadesh (1274 BC), with a central rectangular command tent very similar in dimensions and furnishings to the Tabernacle, and the four divisions encamped on each side. Assyrian camps before the Captivity, in contrast, were oval to save space. The Pentateuch in this respect thus resembles its Late Bronze Age setting in Egypt better than an Iron Age Mesopotamian influence.

A 3,000-year-old trick still works

I Samuel 14 offers a riveting account of the Battle of Michmash. While the Israelite and Philistine armies wait in their camps, the latter are encamped on good, high defensive ground at Michmash. Prince Jonathan of Israel and his armour-bearer find a path up the heights between two sharp rocks. They ascend and kill 20 Philistines, demoralizing the enemy in their camp, who think they are surrounded and withdraw, fiercely pursued by the Israelites.

During British General Edmund Allenby’s campaign in Palestine against the Ottomans in 1918, the British found themselves likewise facing the Turks at Michmash prior to marching on Jericho. The generals called for a frontal assault up the hill, which would surely have proven costly. However, the brigade major remembered the name Michmash and looked up the passage on Jonathan’s exploit. When he presented the story to the brigadier, they sent out scouts who found the path between the sharp rocks, lightly defended. A company ascended the heights at night and surprised the Turks, who found themselves surrounded and were all either captured or killed.

Douglas Brown is a Texas-based writer who specializes in military history and historical fiction. His novel The Honorable Spy was released by Cheetah Publishing in July of 2022. Buy it on Amazon HERE. Follow him on Twitter @DougBrownAuthor or Instagram at douglasbrownauthor, or like his Facebook page, “Douglas Brown – Author.”

 

Sources

Gilbert, Vivian. The Romance of the Last Crusade: With Allenby to Jerusalem. New York: William B. Feakins, Inc., 1923. Google Book.

Herzog, Chaim and Mordechai Gichon. Battles of the Bible: A Military History of Ancient Israel. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2006.

Howarth, David. 1066: The Year of the Conquest. New York: Penguin Books, 1981.

Kitchen, Kenneth A. On the Reliability of the Old Testament. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2006.

Livy. The War with Hannibal. Translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt. London: Penguin Books, 1972.

Melegari, Vezio. The Great Military Sieges. Translated by Rizzoli Editore. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1972.

Newark, Tim. Warlords: Ancient, Celtic, Medieval. London: Brockhampton, 1998.

Sheppard, Si. Roman Soldier versus Parthian Warrior: Carrhae to Nisibis, 53 BC-AD 217. Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2020.