Does belief in an independent moral standard aid or hinder justice?
Origins of the Just War: Military Ethics and Culture in the Ancient Near East by Rory Cox. Princeton University Press, 2023. 536 pp., $45.00
The earliest physical evidence of warfare between human beings comes from an ancient cemetery in the Nile Valley just south of the Egypt-Sudan border. The place is known as Jebel Sahaba. Here archaeologists discovered the remains of sixty-one human beings, part of a hunter-gatherer society 14,000 years ago. Forty-one of the dead showed signs of injury from projectile points or blunt force trauma to the head. Several skeletons still had arrowheads embedded in their bones. Men, women, and children alike were found with the unmistakable signs of violent death.
Jebel Sahabaâs cemetery was once thought to be the scene of a prehistoric massacre, but more recent research found that two-thirds of the bodies featured numerous healed wounds while one-fourth showed signs of immediately fatal injuries. Rather than a single event, it seems that constant low-level warfare was simply a fact of life for those who lived along the banks of the Nile in the Stone Age.
Warfare, if not as old as humanity itself, is pretty close. But what of the moral dimension of war? When did people begin to divide wars into justified and unjustified, and when did they begin to think that there is a right and wrong way to fight them? A new book by medievalist Rory Cox (whose first book examined the rarely studied Christian pacifism of the medieval English theologian John Wyclif) seeks to investigate the early history of the concept of a just war. A lack of written sources rules out the Stone Age. Instead, Cox turns to Egypt and Hatti, two empires of the late second millennium BC, as well as the somewhat later society of ancient Israel as recorded in the Hebrew Bible.
In Egypt, the concept of maâat or divine cosmic order suffused thought about what constituted a just war. Maâat was contrasted with isfetâdisorder, chaos, and violence. One of the chief duties of the Egyptian pharaoh was to uphold maâat, and in the late second millennium this meant expanding the territory under Egyptâs control at the expense of foreign lands that represented isfet. Egyptian attitudes towards war in royal inscriptions and literature were brutally simple: Whatâs good for Egypt and the pharaoh is good. Conquest is good when done at the expense of enemies of Egypt, and bad when done to Egypt by foreigners. Victory was a sign that the gods were on Egyptâs side. Otherwise, Egypt would not have won the war.
Just war theory has long considered separately the question of just reasons to go to war (jus ad bellum) and questions of proper conduct when fighting a war (jus in bello). Cox argues that Egyptâs attitude towards the former led to a complete lack of moral constraints governing the latter. âOnce hostilities had begun,â he writes, âthere appear to have been no recognizable restraints imposed upon ancient Egyptian armies.â
Royal inscriptions celebrate the mass slaughter and enslavement of the pharaohâs enemies. Mutilation of the bodies of enemy dead was an institutionalized practice in Egyptian warfare. The fate of captives was entirely at the pharaohâs discretion and those who were enslaved could count themselves fortunate. Cox quotes an especially bracing passage from the inscriptions of the pharaoh Amenhotep II (r. 1427-1401 BC) in which he describes digging two trenches into which dozens of Canaanite prisoners were herded and then burned alive. Amenhotep stayed up all night watching over the burning pyre.
The kingdom of Hatti had similar ideas about the relationship of the gods to victory in war. Victory was ultimately due to the favor of the gods and defeat a sign that the gods were unfavorably disposed. However, unlike Egypt, which rarely lost a battle during the height of its empire and never admitted it when they did, frequent succession struggles and political instability in Hatti meant that Hittite kings inevitably lost quite a few battles.
Hittite kings considered defeat to be a sign of divine abandonment. After suffering multiple defeats at the hands of Assyria, the Hittite king Tudhaliya IV (r. 1237-1209 BC) offered a prayer to the goddess Arinna promising to never again neglect a religious festival and to make a large offering to the goddessâs shrine on Mount Tagurka if she would reverse his military misfortunes. When a plague devastated the empire for two decades during the reign of Murshili II (r. 1321-1295 BC), the Hittite king offered a series of prayers in which he asked if the gods sent the plague because his father (the king Suppiluliuma I) had broken a treaty by launching an attack on Egyptian territory in Syriaâa treaty that had been sworn by the god Teshub. He offered to make restitution to the god for his fatherâs violation of his oath.
By seriously considering the possibility that they had brought negative consequences on themselves by acting unjustly, the kings of Hatti were at least willing to look in the mirror and consider, as the classic Mitchell and Webb sketch asks, âAre we the baddies?â A similar self-examination took place in ancient Israel, where military defeat was taken as a sign not of the righteousness of the enemies of the Israelites but as a sign of a lack of righteousness on the part of Israel towards Yahweh.
Cox justifies the inclusion of Israel by arguing that ancient Israel was the most influential of the three societies he profiles. Furthermore, the Old Testament gave rise to later Christian just war theory, which in turn underlies most of modern international humanitarian law. Yet Cox also sees little difference between Israel and its earlier neighbors: Yahweh was a national warrior god in a covenant relationship with a particular people, and âthe source for all legitimate warlike actions conducted by Israel.â
Coxâs analysis focuses almost entirely on texts directly connected with armed conflict, and only makes brief forays into broader ideas about the anthropology of the human person present in each of the three cultures. In the case of ancient Israel, several of the authors of the Hebrew Bible clearly saw something more than a god who controlled whether his people won or lost wars as a tool of divine discipline. The (likely post-exilic) author of Ecclesiastes famously declared that there was âa time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavensâ including âa time for war and a time for peaceâ (3:8 NIV). But even the mid-eighth century prophet Amos challenged the idea that Yahweh was exclusively concerned with the fortunes of the Israelites, asking rhetorically:
âAre not you Israelites
 the same to me as the Cushites?
 declares the Lord.
âDid I not bring Israel up from Egypt,
 the Philistines from Caphtor
 and the Arameans from Kir? (9:7 NIV)
Amosâs prophecies were a warning to those in the kingdom of Israel who believed that the kingdomâs prosperity was proof of divine favor. If Amos was willing to state that Yahweh brought Israel out of Egypt and into Canaan at the same time that he brought two other nationsâenemies of Israelâout of their previous homelands into new regions, this opens the door to a new view (later expressed fully by the author of Ecclesiastes as well as the second and third portions of the book of Isaiah) that Yahweh sat as a judge with authority over all the world, working through the political machinations of various nations in order to achieve some greater purpose.
While many ancient Israelites undoubtedly held to a view of God as described by Cox, the writings of the Hebrew Bible show a shift in understanding. As Mario Liverani put it in his recent study of Assyrian imperialism, âin the pre-axial age, God fights for us and with us, and in the post-axial age we fight for God.â This shiftâaway from viewing the divine as a force in symbiotic relationship with human beings and towards viewing God as an independent source of order and moralityâis fully apparent in the works of the prophets of ancient Israel. This has tremendous implications for the evolution of thought on what constitutes a just war. Rather than simply getting a powerful god on oneâs side, deciding that a war is just or not would instead turn towards measuring human conduct in war against an independent moral standard.
Cox does not recognize such a shift. In the bookâs far-reaching conclusion, Cox argues that all concepts of a just war promulgated in the ancient Near East were essentially self-serving, a way to justify what these societies already wanted to do. He then extends this critique to all theories of a just war, ancient and modern. All such theories are self-legitimizing coping mechanisms designed to alleviate guilt by reconciling war with societyâs moral convictions, and to motivate soldiers to risk their lives for a worthy cause. âThe uncomfortable truth,â Cox writes, âis that societies often want to wage war (or fantasize about their ability to do so), especially those members of society who profit the most from war spoils or from territorial expansion. To do so, they require ethical systems that maintain their self-image as ârighteousâ and âgood,â convincing their populations that killing is permissible (even laudable) and that dying is an acceptable risk.â
In Coxâs view, just war traditions are therefore always culturally relative, as is justice itself. He goes so far as to suggest that, like the Egyptians who were certain of their own superiority over foreigners, certainty about the morality of oneâs cause makes modern warfare worse and legitimizes torture and atrocities. In the final sentence of the book, he concludes that if we hold to fewer absolute truths about war, âwe may be more reluctant to go to war in the first place, or a little less vicious when we do.â
Coxâs assertion that adopting a more relativistic attitude towards morality in warfare would lead to a reduction in violence deserves to be seriously challenged. A firm early rebuttal comes from Book 3 of the Roman orator Ciceroâs dialogue De Re Publica, in which the character Lucius Furius Philus argues that every culture has its own customs and ideas of justice: The Egyptians worship animals in their temples, while the Greeks portray their gods in human form, and the Persians have no cultic images at all. The Gauls and Carthaginians practice human sacrifice, while the Cretans and Aetolians believe piracy to be an honorable profession. One must conclude, Philus argues, that there is no natural law that determines justice. Justice is entirely relative, and therefore there is nothing wrong with Rome conquering others, plundering their lands, and enriching themselves with the spoils of empire.
Variations of this argument have been used to justify nearly every atrocity in history: âWe are only doing this because of what they didâ is exactly the kind of self-legitimizing discourse Cox describes, yet it measures itself relative to the other rather than against a standard of absolute morality.
When German Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel issued his infamous Barbarossa Decree exempting German soldiers from court-martial for committing crimes against Soviet civilians, he justified it by arguing that âthe breakdown in 1918, the time of suffering of the German people after that, and the numerous blood sacrifices of the movement in the battle against national socialism were decidedly due to the Bolshevist influence, and that no German has forgotten this.â The 1971 song âThe Battle Hymn of Lt. Calleyâ attempted to exonerate William Calley of guilt for the My Lai Massacre by describing Vietnam as a land âwhere all the rules are broken and the only law is might.â In the aftermath of the sadistic violence, mass rape, and torture inflicted upon Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023, senior Hamas leader Ghazi Hamad justified the atrocities to the Lebanese TV channel LBC by arguing that âWe are the victims of the occupation. Period. Therefore, nobody should blame us for the things we do. On October 7, October 10, October one-millionth, everything we do is justified.â
When I taught De Re Publica in a course on ancient imperialism, my students nodded along in agreement with Philusâ argumentâright up until they were confronted with his terrifying conclusion. Fortunately, Cicero brings in another character, Gaius Laelius, to offer a solution: There are in fact universal laws of morality, and actions such as waging of war can therefore be judged just or unjust. If moral certainty can lead someone to commit atrocities with a clear conscience, relativism can lead us to justify them all the more easily.
Christopher W. Jones is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Union University and an associate member of the Centre of Excellence in Ancient Near Eastern Empires at the University of Helsinki. He specializes in the history of Neo-Assyrian empire, and is currently working on a book titled âThe Structure of the Late Assyrian State, 722-612 B.C.â
Image: British Museum, Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (r. 668â631 BC)