ABSTRACT
In the actual life of the Hebrews warfare played an important part, though the state was not organised upon a military basis, and the standing armies, that is, the seasoned soldiers who were kept from industrial pursuits or who were hired from neighbouring peoples, as was the case even in the time of David, were not large—a few thousand at the most. Kings were forced to rely chiefly upon levies from among the peasantry; and such troops made, as might naturally be supposed, sorry work of warfare, though the Hebrews, like other Semites, were not lacking in soldierly qualities. Fortunately for them the Hebrews were seldom opposed by forces more disciplined than their own before the Assyrian armies in the ninth century began to devote attention to them. We have to do then, in this chapter, with warfare not so much as an art as an occasional practice or diversion, and the effects of it as so prosecuted upon the social life. That warfare was sometimes with them a diversion, a raid being made or a campaign being undertaken with the hope of spoil, we know. Whatever may be true of progressive nations to-day, morality was among the old Hebrews largely a matter of locality.
