The Religious Vows and the Holy War

Extract

It was our Lord himself who taught us that it is holy to be poor and chaste and obedient. But even as he spoke, and indeed for many years before his time, other Jews had already realized this independently, and had been striving in their own ways to practise these very virtues. The descriptions of the sect known as the Essenes in the records of Josephus and Pliny the Younger, and especially the new discoveries at Qumran, all bear striking witness to this fact. Where then did the idea originate that man can enter into closer union with God through poverty, chastity, and obedience? Clearly it was in the Old Testament, the common source on which our Lord and the Essenes both drew. And when we attempt to trace the idea back to its Old Testament roots, the trail leads us not, as we might have expected, to the temple, or to the altar, nor even, in the last analysis, to the vows of the Nazirites, but beyond this still further back to the remote nomadic past of ancient Israel, to what was probably one of the oldest of her traditions, the tradition of the Holy War.