God's Own Take on the Matter

Patrick Henry Reardon’s column “As It Is Written…” in the latest Touchstone talks about war poetry. He cites an example from the Bible, Numbers 21:27-30, and comments:

Now what I find remarkable about this poem is that…this is not a poem about a battle of Israel but about a war between two pagan peoples… that had nothing directly to do with Israel.

The historian reasonably inquires then, what impulse directed the inspired author of Numbers to insert into the Sacred Text this little piece of pagan military poetry? I can think of only one reason: It was a good poem about a real war… It sufficed that this was a really good, robust composition about a known trial of arms.

These pagan verses, much like the secular aphorisms inserted into the Book of Proverbs, thus served to broaden the Bible’s own vista. Israel took care to preserve this Amorite poem for the same reason that Irish monks, as they copied the sagas of Greece and Rome, perceived that the epic quality of that literature raised it to the level of universal interest and sympathy. That is to say, the impulse prompting the assumption of this little poem into Holy Scripture was what we may call classical, and it reveals a bit of God’s own take on the matter.