God's Generals: The Military Lives of Moses, the Buddha, and Muhammad

Other Books By Richard A. Gabriel

The Madness of Alexander the Great (2015)

Between Flesh and Steel: Military Medicine From The Middle Ages to the War in Afghanistan (2013)

Man and Wound in the Ancient World (2012)

Hannibal: The Military Biography of Rome’s Greatest Enemy (2011)

Philip II of Macedonia: Greater Than Alexander (2010)

Thutmose III: Egypt’s Greatest Warrior King (2009)

Scipio Africanus: Rome’s Greatest General (2008)

Muhammad: Islam’s First Great General (2007)

The Warrior’s Way: A Treatise on Military Ethics (2006)

Soldiers’ Lives: Military Life and War in Antiquity: 4,000 B.C.E. to 1453 C.E. (2006)

Jesus The Egyptian: The Origins of Christanity and the Psychology of Christ (2005)

Ancient Empires at War, 3 vols. (2005)

Subotai The Valiant: Genghis Khan’s Greatest General (2004)

Lion of the Sun (2003)

The Military History of Ancient Israel (2003)

Great Armies of Antiquity (2002)

Sebastian’s Cross (2002)

Gods Of Our Fathers: The Memory of Egypt in Judaism and Christianity (2001)

Warrior Pharaoh (2001)

Great Captains of Antiquity (2000)

Great Battles of Antiquity (1994)

A Short History of War: Evolution of Warfare and Weapons (1994)

History of Military Medicine: Ancient Times to the Middle Ages (1992)

History of Military Medicine: Renaissance to the Present (1992)

From Sumer To Rome: The Military Capabilities of Ancient Armies (1991)

The Culture of War: Invention and Early Development (1990)

The Painful Field: Psychiatric Dimensions of Modern War (1988)

No More Heroes: Madness and Psychiatry in War (1987)

The Last Centurion (French, 1987)

Military Psychiatry: A Comparative Perspective (1986)

Soviet Military Psychiatry (1986)

Military Incompetence: Why The US Military Doesn’t Win (1985)

Operation Peace For Galilee: The Israeli-PLO War in Lebanon (1985)

The Antagonists: An Assessment of the Soviet and American Soldier (1984)

The Mind of the Soviet Fighting Man (1984)

Fighting Armies: NATO and the Warsaw Pact (1983)

Fighting Armies: Antagonists of the Middle East (1983)

Fighting Armies: Armies of the Third World (1983)

To Serve With Honor: A Treatise on Military Ethics (1982)

The New Red Legions: An Attitudinal Portrait of the Soviet Soldier (1980)

The New Red Legions: A Survey Data Sourcebook (1980)

Managers and Gladiators: Directions of Change in the Army (1978)

Crisis in Command: Mismanagement in the Army (1978)

Ethnic Groups in America (1978)

Program Evaluation: A Social Science Approach (1978)

The Ethnic Factor in the Urban Polity (1973)

The Environment: Critical Factors in Strategy Development (1973)

Copyright © 2017 by Richard A. Gabriel

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Pen & Sword Military, an imprint of Pen & Sword Books Ltd, 47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, S70 2AS

First Skyhorse Publishing edition 2017

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Dominic Allen

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-0866-2

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-0878-5

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

List of Figures and Maps

Introduction

Chapter 1. Moses: Israel’s First General

Chapter 2. Buddha: The Soldier Pacifist

Chapter 3. Muhammad: The Warrior Prophet

Chapter 4. Legacies of War

Notes

Bibliography

Index

List of Figures and Maps

Figures

Fig. 1. Ramses’ Military Camp

Fig. 2. Night Crossing of the Reed Sea

Fig. 3. Exodus Census List

Fig. 4. Israelite Army at Sinai

Fig. 5. Ramses’ War Tent

Fig. 6. Ravana in Full Battle Array

Maps

Map 1. Route of the Exodus According to Numbers 33, Verses 1–49

Map 2. Indo-European Migrations

Map 3. Aryan Invasions and Settlement Routes

Map 4. The Mahajanapadas, 600 BC

Map 5. Indian States, 500 BC

Map 6. Raids and Battles in Muhammad’s Arabia

In Memoriam

Jacqueline Brandt Weingartner 1922-2015

"Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt"

These are the tears of things and our mortality cuts to the heart

------ Aeneas

And For My Beloved Susan Whose Smile Entices and Eyes Beguile

Introduction

It is one of the more interesting curiosities of military history that the founders of three of the four ‘great religions’ – Judaism, Buddhism, and Islam – were also accomplished field generals with extensive experience in commanding men in battle. Moses, the founder of Judaism, commanded a tribal army that sacked an Egyptian supply depot, outmanoeuvred the Egyptians in a desert campaign, fought the Amelekites to a draw near Rephidim, created and trained the first Israelite national army at Sinai, defeated the Ammonites on the plain of Jahaz, destroyed fortified cities in the Jordan Valley, and left his successor, Joshua, a large, well-equipped, and professionally led army with which to attack Canaan. Muhammad, the founder of Islam, was a soldier too. In a single decade, he fought eight major battles, led eighteen raids, and planned thirty-eight military operations. He was wounded twice, and twice had his positions overrun before rallying his troops to victory. Muhammad was also a military theorist, organizational reformer, strategic thinker, operational level combat commander, revolutionary, the inventor of the theory of insurgency and history’s first successful practitioner of it. Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, and founder of Buddhism, was the son of an Aryan warrior chief and trained soldier who witnessed so much battlefield carnage that he suffered a psychological collapse. The experience of war was central to the lives of these three great men.

If the experiences of these men in war had not been significant, it is possible that their achievements as religious leaders might never have occurred. For all three generals, war and religion were so closely intertwined in their personalities that it is difficult to discern where the influence of one ended and the other began. This book attempts to do just that, and explores the military experiences of Moses, the Buddha, and Muhammad, and the role their war experiences played in their lives.

It is always difficult to be objective about the life of the founder of a religion. His personality and the events of his life are blurred by an aura of the miraculous, enhanced almost inevitably by the needs of his followers to believe. The earliest biographers, those closest to his lifetime, are often preoccupied not with historical fact as much as with glorifying in every way the memory of one they believe to have been the Messenger of God or even God himself. The result is a rich accretion of myth and miracle, mysterious portents and heavenly signs, of residues from other religions and traditions. The biographies of saviours and messiahs cannot usually pass as history. They are rather the propaganda of an expanding faith. It is the task of the historian to locate and explicate the truth that lies behind the myth. At the root of the effort rests the historian’s faith that the task can be accomplished at all.

This book deals with the military lives of Moses, Buddha and Muhammad and, as such, is a work of military history and not a work of religion or theology. As history, the social, economic and cultural environments in which each of the generals lived are addressed insofar as they had an important influence on their military lives. This, of course, includes their religious experiences. But their religious experiences are addressed only when they are relevant to military history. Muhammad’s reform of the marriage laws, for example, that permitted each man four wives, was mostly motivated by the need to find husbands to care for the widows and orphans of his troops killed at the battle of Badr. In another example, Moses’ crossing of the Reed Sea is more accurately seen as the crossing of a water obstacle at night rather than a divine intervention in which God parted the sea. A number of events in the lives of the generals that have often been treated as religious or even miraculous in nature can be just as easily understood as events with purely military causes, objectives and explanations. The author has made every effort to avoid religious analysis, judgements or conclusions, elements that have sometimes made previous biographies of our subjects unreliable. I repeat, this is a work of military history, not religion.

The fundamental sources from which the military lives of Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed can be reconstructed are the Old Testament, especially the books of Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy that contain the most details of Moses’s life; the texts of the Pali Canon that contain the oldest, if not the most complete account of Buddha’s life, and the Jaina texts; the Qur’an (Koran) and Ibn Ishaq’s monumental Life of Muhammed written less than a hundred years after Muhammad’s death.¹ Although the Bible, Pali Canon, and Qur’an are generally regarded as religious texts, nothing prohibits them from being read as epics that contain kernels of historical truth that can be understood by the military historian. Thus, for example, while Exodus identifies the ‘pillar of fire’ as being a divine instrument guided by Yahweh to lead the Israelites out of Egypt, nothing prohibits the historian from understanding it to be the usual means by which Egyptians commanded their armies to pitch or break camp, nor from noting that when Alexander the Great learned of the practice after conquering Egypt, he quickly adopted it for use by the Macedonian army. The Qur’an records that when on the verge of defeat in one of his battles, Muhammed was rescued by a flock of black-clad angels who attacked his adversary in the flanks at just the right time. The military historian is likely to see in the tale one of Muhammad’s tribal allies dressed in their traditional black robes arriving in the nick of time to rescue the Prophet.

The basic sources upon which this work relies, though generally regarded as essentially religious texts, can be alternately examined as historical sources of information and analyzed and compared with what we know of warfare at the time from other secondary sources. As noted, the basic sources are the original accounts that provide us with the details of the lives of the three generals found in the religious texts. In addition, Ibn Ishaq’s history of Muhammad’s life can be regarded as an original source, if by original sources we at least mean that the materials ought to have been written as close as possible to the events they record. Ibn Ishaq wrote only ninety years after the events he recorded. Compared to the ‘original’ sources often cited by ancient historians in the West, Ibn Ishaq’s work is almost contemporaneous with the events themselves. Plutarch, for example, wrote about events that occurred 200 to 600 years before he lived; Arrian’s history of Alexander was written 500 years after Alexander’s death; Curtius’ history of Alexander was written between 300 and 500 years after the events it records; and Livy wrote of events that occurred two centuries before he was born. Only a few ancient historians – Tacitus, Polybius, and Suetonius to name the most obvious – wrote about events that actually took place during their lifetimes. By any fair standard of proximity to events, Ibn Ishaq’s work qualifies as an original source.

The ability to understand a religious text from an historical perspective requires that one not read it at all as a religious text. The axiom that ‘the presumption of knowledge is the enemy of discovery’ is applicable here. If one regards a religious text as exactly that, one is likely to be blinded by claims of the divine to other perspectives that might have been revealed when examining the information contained within. Thus, if the Qur’an’s account of Muhammad’s own description of the physical symptoms he experienced when he heard the voices of God is read as a religious text, a physician is likely to overlook the fact that these symptoms are identical to those of malaria, a disease endemic to the oases of Arabia. The analysis of religious texts from an historical perspective requires a constant assessment of religious-based claims and events insofar as they might be explainable on a more empirical basis. This does not require the historian to reject the religious explanation as true or false. It only requires that the event may be explicable in more limited, that is historical, terms.

Having hopefully set aside the question of religious bias or antagonism, one might ask why write a book dealing with the military lives of the founders of the three great religions when it is obvious that hundreds of millions of the various faithful already believe that the accounts presented in the religious texts are truthful accounts of their lives? The simplest answer is that most readers are unaware that Moses, the Buddha and Muhammad were soldiers who can be shown to be competent military commanders quite apart from the influence of divine interventions that the religious texts presume. An analysis of their military lives apart from the issue of divine intervention not only affords the reader a new perspective regarding the accounts in the religious texts, but allows the reader considerable insight into the nature of warfare and military technique particular to the time when each of the great generals lived and fought.

To the historian, war is an artefact strongly influenced and shaped by the social order, the culture, and era in which it is fought. The culture that gave rise to the military exploits of Moses was radically different from the one that gave rise to those of Muhammad, and both are radically different from the Sakya-Aryan warrior culture that shaped the actions of the Buddha. To understand the military lives of our three generals, it is necessary to understand the socio-cultural context and the period in which they lived. An understanding of this larger context must rely heavily upon what are often referred to as ‘secondary’ source materials. Fortunately, there is a substantial secondary literature written by biblical scholars, Muslim historians and Indian scholars available on all three of our subjects through which the larger context of each of their lives can be bought to bear on the analysis. An important goal of this book is to provide the reader with an understanding of the larger context that shaped the lives of the three generals.

Always of interest to those of us who study war and its practitioners in an historical context are the lessons that can be gleaned from an analysis of war and its commanders. This book attempts to assess what might be called the influence of war upon the religious thinking of our three generals, as well as those aspects of their respective religious doctrines that can reasonably be said to have affected the course of military history. As is often the case, it is surprising how much might be learned from the experiences of those who have gone before us.

Chapter 1

Moses: Israel’s First General

The oldest fragments of the Bible may have been written down as early as 1000 BC and are contained in the Book of Exodus. Before that, the story of the Israelite Exodus existed only as an oral history passed from one generation to the next by tribal storytellers. The account of the Exodus became the central founding myth of the Israelites, explaining the origins of a distinct people and the establishment of a unique monotheistic religion. Over the next 600 years, the Bible was rewritten and redacted by no fewer than four major authors known to biblical scholars as the Yahwist (the earliest), Elohist, the Priestly source and the Deuteronomist. Each of these redactors rewrote segments of the original story in response to the challenges faced by the Israelites at the time of the redaction. The result was that some of the information that appears in the earliest books reflects the historical realities at the time of redaction.

Many of the elements inserted by the redactors found their way into the Book of Exodus. Thus, the claim of slavery in Egypt and the Israelites forced to make bricks ‘without straw’ to build Pharaoh’s new city probably came from the Israelites’ Babylonian experience, where both slavery and making mud bricks were common. Neither was found in Egypt. Slavery was not institutionalized in ancient Egypt and the pharaohs constructed their cities, monuments, and tombs of stone, not mud brick. It was probably not until after the Israelites returned from the Babylonian Captivity in the sixth century BC (597–538 BC), that the Bible as we know it was finalized. Whatever else it is, the Bible is a disorganized collage of legend, history, law, propaganda, politics, poetry, prayer, ethics, hygiene practices, genealogy, military tactics, dietary advice and even carpentry instructions.¹ Trying to tease the historical story of Moses and his military life from this bundle of tales is a challenge.

Moses The Man

Next to Yahweh, Moses is the most intriguing character of the Old Testament. Held in awe as the founder of one of the world’s great religions, respected as a national patriot who led his people out of slavery and the subject of endless writings and speculations, Moses has become a figure of history. And yet there is scant evidence beyond the Bible itself that the man ever existed. Whoever he was, Moses is regarded as the founder of Yahwehism and, ultimately, Judaism, a claim that may be accepted in the absence of any other explanation to the contrary.

The Bible tells us that Moses was born in Egypt to Israelite parents. His father was Amram, a man who married his aunt, Jochebed, in clear violation of the law against incest found in the Book of Leviticus. Much effort has been expended by theologians and religious historians to explain away this ‘inbreeding characteristic’, also found among the Patriarchs. Both Abraham and Isaac, for example, passed off their wives as their sisters.² The idea that the founder of a great religion should have been the product of incest is so embarrassing that one wonders why the later compilers of the Exodus saga included it, unless there was some truth to it. Its importance is that it supports the claim that Moses was born an Israelite and that he was not, as is sometimes argued, an Egyptian.

We have no knowledge of where within Egypt Moses was born. The claim that he was set adrift in a basket on the waters of the Nile to be found by Pharaoh’s daughter and raised at court can safely be ignored. The story is clearly a fabrication and contains elements that are common to the birth myths of other heroes of the ancient world. The birth myth of Sargon, the great Akkadian king who ruled in Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC, is so close to the Moses tale that some scholars believe that the Exodus compilers simply cut and pasted the story of Sargon into the Old Testament. The Sargon text appears below:

Sargon, the mighty king, king of Agade, am I

My mother was a changeling, my father I knew not….

My changeling mother conceived me, in secret she bore me.

She set me in a basket of rushes, with bitumen she sealed my lid.

She cast me into the river which rose not over me.

The river bore me up and carried me to Akki, the drawer of water…

Akki, the drawer of water, took me as his son and reared me.³

Sargon comes to the attention of the king and becomes his cupbearer. Introduced to court life, he becomes invaluable and is made king.

If we accept another element of the Moses saga that he was born close to the court of Pharaoh, it may have been that he was born among the Israelites living in and around Raamses and Pithom during the time of the Oppression. Ramses II ruled for sixty-seven years, and if he was the pharaoh of the Oppression, Moses could have been born just before Ramses’ reign and still had sufficient time to lead the Exodus under Merneptah, Ramses’ son and heir. If so, then from beginning to end, Moses would have been 72 years old, close to the 80 years claimed for him at the time of the Exodus.

One of the reasons why Moses was sometimes thought to be an Egyptian is that his name is Egyptian. ‘Moses’ is the Greek translation of the Egyptian word ‘mose’, meaning child, and is an abridgement of an usually more complete theophoric name such as Ptahmose (child of Ptah) or Amunmose (child of Amun). The name is a common one found on many Egyptian graves. It may seem curious that an Israelite couple should give their child an Egyptian name. But there is considerable evidence that some Israelites acculturated to Egyptian manners and ways, part of which was taking Egyptian names for their children. Moses, a fourth-generation Israelite resident in Egypt, probably was given an Egyptian name by his parents for similar reasons. Possessing an Egyptian name suggests that Moses’ family had already acculturated to some degree. It does not, however, prove that Moses was an Egyptian.

If Moses was an Israelite, one would think that he would be able to speak his ethnic tongue. We do not know what language the Israelites spoke. That it was some semitic tongue that dated back to the Patriarchal Period is almost certain. It was not, however, Hebrew. It was only after their arrival in Canaan, while still retaining some elements of their old language, that the Israelites developed a form of speech that eventually became biblical Hebrew. Hebrew seems to have grown out of a dialect of the northwestern Semitic languages spoken by the Canaanites.⁴ There is no reason to expect that the Israelites lost their language while in Egypt, but it is not unlikely that the more acculturated among them may have lost considerable fluency in the same manner that second generation American ethnics often understand the language of their parents and speak a few words of it, but have difficulty making themselves understood in the native tongue. This would explain why the Bible says Moses spoke with ‘aral sefatayim’ or ‘an uncircumcised lip’. This is often taken to mean that Moses suffered from some speech impediment, or that he stammered. More likely Moses spoke ‘like a foreigner’, that is his poor command of the Israelite tongue made it difficult for him to communicate with his Israelite kinsmen. Moses was likely an acculturated Israelite who had lost fluency with his native tongue and spoke it with an Egyptian accent.

The Bible tells us that Moses was adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter, educated at his court, and grew to be a ‘prince of Egypt’. None of this is rooted in biblical evidence, for the Bible reveals nothing at all about Moses’ childhood experience or his education.⁵ The Bible says only that ‘the man Moses was exceedingly important in the land of Egypt’.⁶ This description hints that Moses may have been some sort of leader in Egypt, either of his own people or as a governmental official of some authority. The Egyptian government often educated the children of foreigners in state schools as a way of insuring that they had someone to deal with directly on ethnic questions. If Moses was educated in this manner, he would have been sent to one of the Houses of Life near the palace, a scriptorium where reading and writing were taught, and where Egyptian history and religion were also subjects. He would have lived at the scriptorium and would have attended between the ages of 8 and 12 years. These circumstances may have contributed to the tradition that Moses was educated at the court of Pharaoh. To his countrymen, however, Moses would have appeared as an Egyptian nobleman wearing fine clothes and speaking Egyptian, even as he struggled with his own tongue.

We are not to imagine, however, that Moses rose in this manner from some lowly position. More likely, his family already had attained some status in Egyptian and Israelite society. Otherwise, it is difficult to imagine how any of these opportunities