The Citizen-Soldier

This book is the first of its kind: a cultural and social history of the “citizen-soldier,” with special attention to the Hebrew Bible (my area of expertise). The wide-ranging work consists of three parts: 1) conscription and the emergence of “national armies” from Machiavelli to the French Revolution; 2) military organization in the ancient Mediterranean and Western Asia from the third to first millennium BCE; and 3) new perspectives on the Hebrew Bible that emerge from the comparative materials in Parts One and Two.

Focused on primary sources, and engaging recent research on these sources, the study illustrates how different models of armed forces have had a direct impact not only on collective identities and competing concepts of political community, but also on land-ownership and self-representation, civil religion and public ritual, the lives of minorities and the marginalized, competing hegemonic masculinities, the place of women in public life, reifications of a gender binary, and attitudes toward homosexuality.