Canter Bridge

It is these days considered a naive question to read ancient documents and ask ‘what really happened’. We are instructed that ‘actual events’ are inaccessible behind the interpretive curtain that necessarily separates all tellers of tales from the space-and-time events they describe. Further, what are ‘space-and-time’ events, and does it even make sense to speak of them apart from the ubiquitous interpretive lens?

There may come a time when such epistemological resignation begins to look absurd. In the meantime, readers unenlightened by this doctrine continue to wonder what really happened, say, on the day that the Moabites and Ammonites came in war against King Jehoshaphat’s Judah. Vastly outnumbered and with no tactical hope in the world, Jehoshaphat and his people ‘seek the Lord’, as though military survival could possibly be achieved by means of such a religious initiative.

The Chronicler tells us that Judah was instructed to hope in the Lord, told that this was not their battle but his, told that victory would come in an odd and praise-evoking manner. This scene ensues:

When Jehoshaphat had taken counsel with the people, he appointed those who were to sing to the LORD and praise him in holy splendor, as they went before the army, saying,

‘Give thanks to the LORD,
for his steadfast love endures forever.’

As they began to sing and praise, the LORD set an ambush against the Ammonites, Moab, and Mount Seir, who had come against Judah, so that they were routed.
For the Ammonites and Moab attacked the inhabitants of Mount Seir, destroying them utterly; and when they had made an end of the inhabitants of Seir, they all helped to destroy one another. When Judah came to the watchtower of the wilderness, they looked toward the multitude; they were corpses lying on the ground; no one had escaped. When Jehoshaphat and his people came to take the booty from them, they found livestock in great numbers, goods, clothing, and precious things, which they took for themselves until they could carry no more. They spent three days taking the booty, because of its abundance. On the fourth day they assembled in the Valley of Beracah, for there they blessed the LORD; therefore that place has been called the Valley of Beracah to this day. Then all the people of Judah and Jerusalem, with Jehoshaphat at their head, returned to Jerusalem with joy, for the LORD had enabled them to rejoice over their enemies.

Now this is an odd historiography and must surely separate us more than is necessary from the battleground’s brute facts. Trained in naturalism and skepticism from our mother’s breast, we find little real significance in this erstwhile inspiring story.

Perhaps that is our problem. It may be that centuries-full of Bible readers who discover an existential link between their own battles and the practice of a military science that begins with praise are something other than embarrassingly deluded. We may never understand ‘what happened’ in the battle that Jehoshaphat and his people famously never fought. At the least, we may not know a version of events that more truly reflects reality than the one bequeathed to us by a chronicler who—with so many subsequent readers—felt sure that his framing of the events was the truest one achievable.

In resigning ourselves to the limits of our acuity, we may find ourselves one step closer to humming the tune of Jehoshaphat’s musicians, who urged with vigorous confidence, ‘Give thanks to the LORD, for his loyal love endures forever.’ This may just be a turning towards the core meaning of history rather than away from it into the escapist, religious haze.