a very late Christmas present gives me an idea

My brother gave me the book Battles of the Bible. This is a very cool Christmas gift. My brother and I have both been interested in military history for a while, he much more so than me. Well, we've been talking over the years about the military history of the Bible and in one of those not-quite-surprising paradoxes secular military historians have a habit of taking the Bible as history more seriously than most biblical scholars? Why?

Not because soldiers are necessarily believers but because when the oldest coherent battles are described as having been in that strategic stretch of semi-arable land connecting three continents it's sort of the pit-stop of every would-be global empire. Anyone who lives there will have to get used to constantly fighting military campaigns and being the playground for other empires fighting each other in military campaigns.

See in the abstract we can read biblical narratives about how such and such a king didn't trust in the Lord and made an alliance with so and so but we have to keep in mind the geographic and military realities of the time and place. Spiritualizing the content about how individual Christians should trust God to be faithful is pretty useless not because we shouldn't trust God but because if we fail to appreciate the terrain of the Promised Land we fail to appreciate the very real reasons Israelite leaders were tempted to the alliances they were tempted to.

When Christians say God doesn't give you anything you can't handle they need to put their crack pipes down and consider the military situation Israel inevitably found itself in over and over again. God CONSTANTLY asked the impossible of them but that impossible came in the form of "Trust me to do what you can't possibly do for yourself." If we don't appreciate the military realities of what God asked of Israel and, equally important, how and why Israel habitually failed then we risk misunderstanding how our temptations are, as the scriptures say, nothing except that which is common to all men.

But I still have that big project on the DCAU to work on amid a constantly rescheduled "Christmas" event. Just because my brother managed to get me a present doesn't mean the family Christmas even has actually happened yet.