ABSTRACT
We begin our search here at the conclusion of Weber’s ‘Science as a Vocation’ because, like nearly every officially sanctioned act of mass death since the fourteenth century, the Great War too was at heart a religious conflict – i.e. a conflict over which combatants self-consciously sacrificed their material bodies for the sake of immaterial values. And it was this sacrifice to which Weber called attention at the conclusion of his address when he spoke of the ‘prophetic pneuma, which in former times swept through the great communities like a firebrand, welding them together’.1 Of course the great communities of which Weber spoke in his address were not in fact those whose soldiers faced one another between 1914 and 1918 across the no man’s lands of Western Europe. Nor was the prophetic spirit that in August 1914 swept through these great communities like a firebrand, self-evidently the same spirit that had swept through the communities of the modern world’s Great Powers. The communities to which Weber was referring in his address were the communities whose members composed the ancient tribes of Yahweh. And the prophetic pneuma he had in mind was the spirit of Yahweh’s prophets. So then why begin searching here in ancient Palestine for an explanation for state sanctioned mass death in modern times?
