Chapter 54: National Defense
Update: 4/13/20
When you go to war in your land against an adversary who oppresses you, then you must sound an alarm with the trumpets. I, the Lord your God, will call you to mind and save you from your enemies (Numbers 10:9).Now Deborah, a prophetess (the wife of Lappidoth), was a leading judge in Israel at that time. She used to sit under the palm of Deborah between Ramah and Bethel in the hill country of Ephraim, and the people of Israel came to her to settle their disputes. She sent for Barak son of Abinoam from Kedesh in Naphtali. She said to him, “The Lord, the God of Israel, commands you, ‘Go to Mount Tabor, and take with you ten thousand men from Naphtali and Zebulun. I will draw out Sisera, the commander of Jabin's army, to meet you by the Kishon River, with his chariots and his army, and I will give you victory over him’” (Judges 4:4–7).
On that day Deborah and Barak son of Abinoam sang this song: “When the leaders take the lead in Israel, when the people gladly volunteer for war—we praise the Lord!” (Judges 5:1–2).
In Mosaic Israel, it was expected that the fighting men would assemble to defend the nation. According to Mosaic law, this could only be done with the public support of the priests. Numbers 10 specifies that there had to be two trumpets. In order to assemble the nation in a call to battle, the priests had to blow these two horns. In short, the decision to go to war was not a monopoly decision of civil magistrates. The ecclesiastical leaders of the nation had to approve. Their support of the war was the only way that it could be a lawful assembling of God’s holy army. After the conquest under Joshua, the only form of war that was likely was defensive war. I discuss this in Section B.
In the case of Deborah’s war, some of the tribes refused to send any warriors. She criticized them in her song, but that was all. There were no negative sanctions available to the national government to compel tribal leaders to send men into battle. There were also personal exemptions from battle. “The officers must speak to the people and say, ‘What man is there who has built a new house and has not dedicated it? Let him go and return to his house, so that he does not die in battle and another man dedicates it. Is there anyone who has planted a vineyard and has not enjoyed its fruit? Let him go home, so he will not die in battle and another man enjoy its fruit. What man is there who is engaged to marry a woman but has not yet married her? Let him go home so that he does not die in battle and another man marries her.’ The officers must speak further to the people and say, ‘What man is there who is fearful or fainthearted? Let him go and return to his house, so that his brother’s heart does not melt like his own heart.’ When the officers have finished speaking to the people, they must appoint commanders over them” (Deuteronomy 20:5–9). [North, Deuteronomy, ch. 46] “When a man takes a new wife, he will not go to war with the army, neither may he be commanded to go on any forced duty; he will be free to be at home for one year and will cheer his wife whom he has taken” (Deuteronomy 24:5).
The army of Israel was not a standing army. It was a volunteer army. It was a defensive army after the conquest. It was not used to expand the borders of the nation. It was used to defend the borders of the nation. It did not usually operate outside the geographical borders of Israel.
In the modern world, the nation that comes closest to the biblical model is Switzerland. It does not have a centralized government that possesses significant authority. Is a decentralized nation politically, somewhat like the tribal system of Mosaic Israel. Men are expected to serve in the military, and they train every year in the basics of national defense. The standing army is tiny. It does not operate outside of the nation’s borders. There is widespread support for the military. The nation has not had to defend itself militarily since the invasion by France in 1798. The French departed in 1815 after the defeat of Napoleon. Ever since, Switzerland has maintained its neutrality and its independence.
The economic issue has to do with the taxation required to maintain a modern army. Anarcho-capitalists deny that the state should exist. They deny that there should be any compulsion associated with national defense. There should be no taxation, no conscription, and obviously no single chain of military command. There has never been a treatise written by an anarcho-capitalist that explains how a nation could defend itself from invasion on this basis. More than any other practical question, this is the question that the anarcho-capitalists must answer. The public, including economists, will never take this position seriously until there is at least one detailed, systematic book that is grounded in economic theory and illustrated by historical examples.
In 1963, Murray Rothbard wrote an essay, “War, Peace, and the State.” He opposed the state. He opposed war between states. “Any war against another State, therefore, involves the increase and extension of taxation-aggression over its own people.” He concluded with these words. “A final word about conscription: of all the ways in which war aggrandizes the State, this is perhaps the most flagrant and most despotic. But the most striking fact about conscription is the absurdity of the arguments put forward on its behalf. A man must be conscripted to defend his (or someone else's?) liberty against an evil State beyond the borders. Defend his liberty? How? By being coerced into an army whose very raison d'être is the expunging of liberty, the trampling on all the liberties of the person, the calculated and brutal dehumanization of the soldier and his transformation into an efficient engine of murder at the whim of his ‘commanding officer’? Can any conceivable foreign State do anything worse to him than what ‘his’ army is now doing for his alleged benefit? Who is there, O Lord, to defend him against his ‘defenders?”
In the third edition of Human Action (1966), Mises wrote on war and conscription. The following passage is clearly a response to Rothbard’s position. Mises completely rewrote Section 6, “Freedom,” in Chapter XV, “The Market.” The 1949 edition did not include anything on conscription.
But as conditions are in our age, a free nation is continually threatened by the aggressive schemes of totalitarian autocracies. If it wants to preserve its freedom, it must be prepared to defend its independence. If the government of a free country forces every citizen to cooperate fully in its designs to repel the aggressors and every able-bodied man to join the armed forces, it does not impose upon the individual a duty that would step beyond the tasks the praxeological law dictates. In a world full of unswerving aggressors and enslavers, integral unconditional pacifism is tantamount to unconditional surrender to the most ruthless oppressors. He who wants to remain free, must fight unto death those who are intent upon depriving him of his freedom. As isolated attempts on the part of each individual to resist are doomed to failure, the only workable way is to organize resistance by the government. The essential task of government is defense of the social system not only against domestic gangsters but also against external foes. He who in our age opposes armaments and conscription is, perhaps unbeknown to himself, an abettor of those aiming at the enslavement of all (XV:6).
The Mosaic law was not consistent with Mises’ view of conscription. There was conscription, but there were legitimate exemptions. An individual who refused to serve was not regarded as an enemy of the free society. But he had to offer a reason for his refusal to fight in defense of the nation. Fear was a legitimate excuse. The Mosaic law recognized that the presence of a fearful man in a military line of battle was a liability. If he broke and ran, this might trigger a disorganized panic retreat from the front lines. It was better not to have such a person in the military. However, there is no indication that someone was exempt from the taxation required to equip the military and its defense of the nation. He was therefore not a complete free rider from the point of view of humanistic economic analysis.
The right not to be conscripted is a fundamental right, according to biblical law. The likelihood that an entire nation would not enter the armed forces is extremely low. It has never happened in history. But the right not to be forced into the armed forces is a way for the public to veto the decision of the national government to go to war. This took place in the United States during the Vietnam War, beginning in 1965 and escalating until President Nixon abolished conscription in 1973. By then, most American troops had been withdrawn from South Vietnam. But there is no comparable biblical right not to pay the taxes required to sustain the military.
Economists speak of the problem of the free rider. The free rider is an individual who benefits from the expenditures of the civil government, but refuses to contribute money, labor, or anything else to the funding of the government’s program. Economists offer as their supreme example of the free rider the individual who will not contribute financially to the government’s program of military defense. They ask this: “If everyone had this right of refusal, how could the nation be defended militarily?”
With respect to conscription, biblical law is clear. Men do have this right of refusal. If there were a war in which all of the men refused to fight, or most of the men refused to fight, then the nation deserves to lose the war. Those who are willing to fight have no legal claim on those who refuse to fight. But, at the same time, if they do fight, and they win, those who refused to fight are legitimately subject to retroactive social condemnation. That is what Deborah did. She praised those who volunteered. “My heart goes out to the commanders of Israel, along with the people who gladly volunteered—we bless the Lord for them!” (Judges 5:9). She criticized those tribes that did not join in the battle against Sisera. “As for the clans of Reuben there were great searchings of heart. Gilead stayed on the other side of the Jordan; and Dan, why did he wander about on ships? Asher remained on the coast and lived close to his harbors” (Judges 5:16b–17). Even worse: “Curse Meroz!' says the angel of the Lord. ‘Surely curse its inhabitants!— because they did not come to help the Lord—to help the Lord in the battle against the mighty warriors’” (v. 23).
What about citizens and residents who do not wish to pay taxes to support the military establishment? There is no biblical example of the right of refusal to pay that I am aware of. Upon reaching the age of 20, every Hebrew male had to pay half a shekel to the temple (Exodus 30:13), but this was not a tax payment imposed by the civil government. It was a payment to the priests on this basis: the man’s membership in God’s holy army. [North, Exodus, ch. 58] The civil government did have the right to number the tribes in preparation for a war (Numbers 1:1–4). [North, Numbers, ch. 1] Tax money would have been used to conduct this survey. The civil government did have the right to have implements of war (Judges 20:18–48). Thus, the free riders in society did not have the right to rebel against taxation merely because taxes funded the military.
Under the Mosaic law, the rules of war made the creation of a military empire impossible whenever these laws were obeyed by the national government. The laws of war were part of the land laws of Israel. These laws ceased with the removal of Israelites from the land during the exile. After they returned, they were always under the rule of a foreign empire.
1. Laws of Warfare
Prior to this, Deuteronomy 20 established the basic laws of warfare. “When you march up to attack a city, make those people an offer of peace. If they accept your offer and open their gates to you, all the people who are found in it must become forced labor for you and must serve you. But if it makes no offer of peace to you, but instead makes war against you, then you must besiege it, and when the Lord your God gives you victory and puts them under your control, you must kill every man in the town. But the women, the little ones, the cattle, and everything that is in the city, and all its spoil, you will take as booty for yourself. You will consume the booty of your enemies, whom the Lord your God has given to you. You must act in this way toward all the cities that are very far from you, cities that are not of the cities of these following nations” (Deuteronomy 20:10–15). [North, Deuteronomy, ch. 48]
First, there had to be an offer of peace. Second, if it was rejected, that was a death sentence for every adult male in the besieged nation. The Israelites would know that these men would fight to the death, since the surrender meant death anyway. This would make resistance far more fierce. The leaders of Israel would hesitate to launch such a war. Third, they would certainly have to take the women and children back with them. To leave women and children undefended in a nearby nation would be to invite the invasion of that nation by an aggressive nation on the border of the defeated nation. This would mean that Israel would be facing an expansive enemy nation on its border. To avoid this, Israel would have to expand its borders in order to occupy this now defenseless nation. Israelite males would have to bring home captive females and children. The wives back home would not be favorable toward that. Because of polygamy, the husbands would be allowed to marry these women once they were brought home as slaves (Deuteronomy 21:11). [North, Deuteronomy, ch. 48:D] Clearly, Hebrew wives would not be favorable to foreign wars.
Israel’s theology was public as no other ancient religion’s theology ever was. Foreign residents living inside Israel were invited to go to a central city every seventh year and hear the reading of the law (Deuteronomy 31:10–12). [North, Deuteronomy, ch. 75] Foreigners would have been in contact with their home cities, especially if they were involved in trade inside Israel. There would have been widespread international dissemination of knowledge regarding Israel’s legal order.
Any foreign city that was unwise enough to goad Israel into an attack would have known in advance about Israel’s rules of siege warfare. Foreign rulers would have known two things: (1) it was suicide not to surrender before a siege began; (2) it was very expensive for Israel to lay a siege, both for time lost and the costs of assimilating the captives. This system of constrained warfare would have created incentives for foreign rulers to find ways other than military invasion to get what they wanted out of Israel’s rulers. Israel would be unlikely to attack a foreign city without extreme provocation, such as an invasion of Israel’s territory. This fact would have tended to place a protective barrier around Israel’s borders in times of its military strength, yet at the same time, Israel’s military strength would not have become a major threat to foreign nations. Israel was under restrictions—military, marital, economic, and geographical-ritual—that would keep it a defensive power only. This meant that Israel’s military strength would have promoted foreign trade rather than foreign wars. Israel would have been too dangerous to invade militarily, yet too restricted by the Mosaic law to invade on its own initiative. This meant that in times when Israel was mighty, these laws reduced the likelihood that Israel would engage in a systematic program of territorial conquest. It was too difficult for Israel to retain captured territory.
There is no evidence from Scripture that such foreign military campaigns were recommended by the prophets. They were legal when governed by Mosaic law, but they were not to become high-priority activities in the life of Israel. The most famous case of a tributary nation to Israel was Moab, which revolted against Israel after Ahab died. But Ahab had been more of a foreign king than an Israelite king, with his priests of rival gods. His son Jehoram was evil, although he destroyed his father’s image of Baal (II Kings 3:2). When Moab revolted against him, Jehoram called the king of Judah to help him subdue Moab. When the king of Judah asked Elisha to bless the campaign, Elisha said it was only for Judah’s sake that he would do so (v. 14). The campaign was initially successful, but when the king of Moab sacrificed his oldest son as a burnt offering on the wall of the city, this created indignation against Israel within the ranks of the alliance. The invading army broke up and went home (v. 27).
2. The Festivals
Without Israel’s permanent occupation of foreign cities, where the real estate could be used to support economically the women and children taken captive, Israel could not afford to engage in foreign military conquests. The requirement that adult Israelite males attend all three annual feasts placed geographical limits on the extent of the conquest. The farther away a conquered city was from Jerusalem, the more expensive the trips to the annual feasts would be for its Israelite residents.
The issue of geography posed a major problem for the Mosaic law. The festival laws would have to be reworked if the theocratic kingdom expanded; otherwise, theocratic expansion would have been impossible. How could Israelites residing in a distant city have attended the festivals every year? They couldn’t. The larger the theocratic empire grew, the more impossible it would have been for all of the faithful to have walked to Jerusalem, let alone to have lodged there for a week. It seems likely that sometime after the Babylonian captivity, from which comparatively few Israelites returned to Israel, the synagogue system replaced annual attendance at Passover. The Mosaic law’s festival requirements no longer were enforced rigorously on faithful men as a condition of covenantal faithfulness. There was no longer a holy army in Israel; the nation was under the administration of foreign pluralistic empires.
Before the exile, if a besieged city visibly converted to God through circumcision, would its inhabitants then have been required to march to the festivals? Only if its adult males became citizens of Israel, meaning that they became eligible to join Israel’s holy army. They could not become eligible to serve as judges if they did not make these annual marches. If proselytes who lived outside the land were not part of Israel’s holy army, then they were not required to attend the annual feasts. This was the case of Israelites living outside the land during and after the captivity. This meant that Israel could not create an empire through military action. Cities outside the land that converted to faith in the God of Abraham did not thereby become a part of Israel’s army or of Israel’s civil structure. They could not subsequently march against other cities and thereby pull national Israel into a conflict far from its original borders. These proselyte cities would pay their tithes to the Levites, but they could not legally extend Israel’s authority beyond the boundaries of the land which God had promised Abraham. They could extend God’s authority, but not national Israel’s. The distance from the official festival city made empire impossible.
Consider Paul’s absence from the feasts. He stayed in Corinth for a year and a half, teaching in the synagogue (Acts18:8–11). The author of Acts records that “we sailed away from Philippi after the days of unleavened bread, and came unto them to Troas in five days; where we abode seven days” (Acts 20:6). They had not been in Jerusalem for the Passover. They did not make it back to Jerusalem in time for the second Passover celebration for those who had been on journeys (Numbers 9:11). Paul did try to get back to Jerusalem by Pentecost (Acts 20:16). Nevertheless, in front of the Jewish assembly, Paul announced: ""Brothers, I have lived before God in all good conscience until this day" (Acts 23:1b). No one called his assertion a lie on the basis of his failure to attend Passover.
Israelites were required to keep separate from gentiles. Their food laws and other laws of ritual cleanliness forced this separation. Foreign cities were not places where Israelites who kept the Mosaic law would normally want to dwell. They might retain their separate identity as a captive people who were allowed to live under their own rules and leaders in ghettos, which most of them did from the Babylonian captivity until the nineteenth century, but they could not easily rule in foreign cities without breaking the Mosaic holiness laws, let alone the far more rigorous rabbinic holiness laws. Interaction with local gentiles was too restricted. So, their empire, if any, would have to be based on a system of tribute, not local law enforcement by resident Israelites. It would have been an empire of trade and taxes. Such far-flung empires are difficult to maintain without a strong military presence. This kind of foreign military presence was made difficult by the festival laws. It took Israel’s captivity outside the land to restructure the laws of the festivals. It took life in a foreign ghetto and submission to the civil laws of other gods. This restructuring was not the product of an Israelite empire; it was the product of non-Israelite empires. I use these Old Testament case laws as a way to explain why biblical law, when enforced, prevented the rise of empire.
A city in the ancient Near East, with its local gods, could become an empire only through the pluralism of idols. Israel alone could survive as a nation apart from a homeland without succumbing to pluralism, for Israel’s God claimed universality and exclusivity. Such a claim negated the possibility of a common pantheon (all gods) of idols. But Israel could not become an empire because of the Mosaic laws of ritual separation; it could at most survive as a ghetto subculture in foreign lands.
The costs of maintaining an empire constantly rise as the geographical limits of the empire expand. Empires can survive for a long time. The Roman empire is a good example of an empire that survived for centuries. But it came to naught at the end. Rising taxes increasingly impoverished the upper classes, and corruption at the top led to a series of assassinated emperors. The centralization of political power that every empire requires has negative effects on the domestic population. As taxes rise, productivity slows. The resources that are required to maintain the empire must come from somewhere. In the ancient world, in the initial phase of the empire, the invading troops could strip the defeated nation of assets, including the population itself. Rome established widespread slavery by means of its military conquests. But the costs of maintaining the empire always lead to the breakup of the empire. In the case of Rome, it led to the impoverishment of Roman citizens. It led to a loss of legitimacy for the central government. Citizens would no longer impute high value to their own citizenship. It meant the right to pay high taxes.
The development of a theocratic empire was virtually impossible for Israel under the Mosaic law. The annual festivals would have limited the geographical scope of the empire. The festivals made impossible the full-time occupation of distant foreign cities. Only after the return from Babylon, when Israel no longer was an armed holy army, could dispersion of the Israelite population take place. Evangelism by word and deed was to replace evangelism by post-war enslavement. The fact that attendance at the annual festivals was no longer enforced by excommunication after the return from Babylon is prima facie evidence that the required festivals had something to do with Israel as a holy army. Annual attendance was no longer enforced because it was no longer required. This indicates that the mandatory nature of the festivals was God’s deliberate restraint on the creation of an empire. When that threat disappeared in history, so did the requirement of attendance at each of the festivals. Israel could then evangelize by word and deed. Evangelism was clearly more important than the original Mosaic requirement of annual attendance. Until Israel sheathed its sword, it could not evangelize the world.
The Mosaic law placed limits on the expansion of the national government’s system of national defense. It did not eliminate the possibility of a national defense system, but it put distinct limits on this process. The most important one was the requirement that the priests support the war. But there were military exemptions which would have reduced the size of the Army if a sufficient number of young men refused to join the call of the nation to take up arms against an enemy. The most famous of all the protesters was Barak. He refused to join Deborah’s call to fight in the resistance unless she took responsibility for calling the troops to fight. “Barak said to her, ‘If you go with me, I will go, but if you do not go with me, I will not go.’ She said, ‘I will certainly go with you. However, the road on which you are going will not lead to your honor, for the Lord will sell Sisera into the hand of a woman.’ Then Deborah got up and went with Barak to Kedesh. Barak called for the men of Zebulun and Naphtali to come together at Kedesh. Ten thousand men followed him, and Deborah went along with him” (Judges 4:8–10). He refused to be conscripted except on his terms. He was willing to forgo whatever military honor there might be. He was not going to put his life at risk or anybody else’s life at risk on his own authority.
Christian judicial theory teaches that there is a legitimate function for the state to conduct warfare. National defense is a legitimate taxation expenditure. But the state’s authority is not unlimited. Individual males do have the right to refuse the call to serve in the armed forces. They have the right to veto such a call in their own lives. Mises was wrong when he wrote this: “He who in our age opposes armaments and conscription is, perhaps unbeknown to himself, an abettor of those aiming at the enslavement of all.”
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The complete manuscript is here: https://www.garynorth.com/public/department196.cfm