Excerpt from The Chaplain, Vol. 25: March-April, 1968 But old literalness has faded. Who would now think of sending all the clergy of a nation into hostile territory in advance of the tanks and infantry, yet this is precisely what Joshua's order for the crossing of the Jordan amounted to, and it is probably one more reason why military analysts have shied away from Old Testament campaigns. They have trouble with the fact that where a 20th century commander says I did this, Moses would have said, Jehovah did it. Gideon's victory over the Midianites and Amalekites is an example. Theologians and historians both lose sight of the military significance of an operation at least as brilliant as Marathon, where the odds were only five to one, and as courageous as Thermopylae, yet history has left it nameless. Most people now think of war as a man-made evil contrary to God's will. The ancients had the reverse View; they believed that war was God's will. Conscience operated in the opposite direction to our own, with the result that when men had vindictive and bestial impulses it was because the deity meant them to do the things these impulses resulted in. The ancient soldier (whose morale problems were rendered far more acute by primitive conditions) tended to unleash all his frustrations and fears in a savage violence spurred by the belief he was doing the deity's work. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.