ABSTRACT
A paradigmatic example from the Bible is the story of the slaying of King Ahab. The conventional descriptions of theocratic history represent the cultural norms of the time, and their use in the Hebrew Bible reflects the period that gave rise to the narratives contained in the collected writings constituting the Bible. Two important methodological factors have to be kept in mind when reading (i.e. interpreting) biblical texts: the accommodation of linguistic utterance to cultural meaning; the relation of narrated story to the historical events it purports to portray. While assigning all the motifs about war in the Bible to the linguistic conventions of common ancient Near Eastern military and ideological practices may be the wisest course, it does not really answer any of the questions raised by the topos ‘Yahweh’s war’. The more complex questions of the relation of the Qumran writings to a specific historical period need not concern us here.
