This project addresses the rhetoric of warfare, specifically within and as expressed by ancient Jewish texts. To this vast field of research, ranging from some of the earliest Greek epics and histories, through to modern conflicts, I have sought to develop a new framework by which we can access the ancient world. In doing so, I aim to reassess afresh some of the violent legacies of texts that have held an important place in various histories of the world. Of the works selected for this study, some are found in the Tanakh, many more in Christian Bibles. These works have contributed to a vast and varied array of cultural understandings for the constitution of appropriate resistance, justifications for violence, and even expectations for the outcome of warfare. My contention is that by establishing a framework to situate these specific texts within a cultural milieu and analyse them together, we can begin to unpack some of the ideology inherent in a long-standing tradition of warfare rhetoric. This will be undertaken by analysing the presentation and content of pre-battle speeches in ancient Judaism. This discussion will examine the means by which warfare was justified in antiquity, exploring how the pre-battle speech, otherwise described as a pre-battle exhortation or harangue, was presented as a means to motivate violence in ancient Jewish work.
Prior to this project, there existed no systematic study of an entire corpus of pre-battle speeches within one ancient ethnic group. The rhetorical models for pre-battle speeches (known in Roman literature as cohortationes and in Greek literature often as either protreptikos or paraenesis) provide a firm basis for initial categorisation of Jewish examples, but these forms may also be expanded in light of this project’s analysis. The project's core objectives consisted of collecting and analysing all pre-battle speeches from Jewish literary output from prior to the end of the first century CE. These speeches have been analysed for how they are presented in narrative as ritual in nature and informative for the creation of in-group and out-group identity. The project has undertaken an approach to reveal how such speeches can justify violence but deploying core motivational factors that threaten the in-group, or goals that the group is understood to share. The use of these threats and goals further centres such concerns in the creation of the audience, both on the narrative level and as a reading audience for these ancient texts.
