DISSERTAZIONI DI DOTTORATO
2025-2026

GALADIMA Bitrus Markus

Subverting kingship and propagating yahwism
Ideology and Function of the Laws on Warfare in Deuteronomy

Mod.: Prof. R.P. Paul BÉRÉ, S.J.

This dissertation is an exegetical study of the laws on war in Deuteronomy 20 which deals with war preparation and conduct, 21:10-14 which deals with the treatment of women captives of war, and 23:10-15 which deals with purity and holiness in the war camp. While these war laws do not appear together as one continuous literary unit, they all share an unmistakably common theme and opening formula (20:1; 21:10; 23:10), casuistic form (in protasis and apodosis), and fundamental motifs such as assurances of Yhwh’s presence with Israel, Yhwh delivering victory and the enemy into Israel’s hands (cf. 20:1, 4, 13; 21:10; 23:15), etc. These commonalities are considered in this study as creating connections that invite a synchronic reading of all the war laws together, which this dissertation does for the first time, rather than as isolated individual pericopes, as it has been done in past scholarship.

The study seeks to answer the question: what is the function and ideology of the war laws in Deuteronomy? Since war is one of the main duties of the king in the Former Prophets and related ancient Near Eastern literature, and Deuteronomy’s war laws zero-state the king and other common features of warfare, I argue in this study that Deuteronomy’s war laws reflect the taking over and reuse of the motif of war, prominent in biblical and ancient Near Eastern royal propaganda, to subvert royal ideology and to propagate, instead, Deuteronomy’s theological agenda which demands exclusive faith in and faithfulness to Yhwh, reflecting perhaps the exilic/early postexilic reality of Israel/Judah hallmarked by the demise of the monarchy and the temple.

The study employs synchronic literary-historical approaches of reading law as narrative and reading biblical material in light of comparable ancient Near Eastern literature, thus showing how Deuteronomy’s war laws reflect and/or deflect from the portrayal of warfare in other biblical and comparable literature in the wider ancient Near Eastern literary, religious and socio-cultural milieu. The narrative reading of laws, demonstrated and advanced in the studies of Harry P. Nasuti, “Identity, Identification, and Imitation” (1986), Bernard S. Jackson, Law, Fact and Narrative Coherence (1988), Meir Sternberg, “If-Plots: Narrativity and Law Codes” (2008), Jean-Pierre Sonnet, “If-Plots in Deuteronomy” (2013), and more systematically developed in Assnat Bartor’s study, Reading Law as Narrative (2010), essentially implies a close reading of laws, analyzing them in terms of all those elements that are of interest to narratology, such as voice or persona, point of view, gapping, repetition, structure, the text’s artful use of language, its play of ideas, conventions, tone, sound, imagery, plot, and characterization, thus focusing attention not only on the laws’ abstract legal content (the norms, principles or policy prescriptions), but also on their concrete elements (the situations, characters and events), as well as on how the laws engage and involve the reader in communicating their value system.