Children of light and children of darkness – 10/22/2023 – Reinaldo José Lopes

I was stunned, a few days ago, to see a post from the official profile of the Prime Minister of Israel on the social network formerly known as Twitter. The phrase, deleted soon after, said: “This is a war of the children of light against the children of darkness.”

It just seems like a banal exercise in Manichaeism, right? Not when one considers that the expression reproduces, word for word, the title of one of the most famous documents of ancient Judaism to come down to us, the so-called War Scroll. It is very unlikely that precisely this manuscript was chosen as inspiration by chance — or that, in the end, the phrase was deleted.

The War Scroll, or “The War of the Children of Light against the Children of Darkness”, is one of the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls, found in caves in the Qumran region of the West Bank, and composed over a period that probably goes back to from the 3rd century BC to the 1st century BC

There is a huge academic debate regarding who lived at Qumran and who was responsible for writing and storing the manuscripts. Many of them are just very old copies of most of the books of the Hebrew Bible (or “Old Testament” for Christians). In any case, the War Scroll is one of the texts that seems to support the idea that the Qumran community was a sectarian Jewish group, which saw as enemies not only the pagans who had taken over their land but also other Jews, those outside the community.

It is a combat manual, with details on what to write on the trumpets and banners of the troops, on the shields, spears and swords of each combatant. But the enemies mentioned in the text, although they include historical adversaries of the people of Israel — such as the Philistines and the Assyrians — are collectively defined as “the army of Belial”, that is, of the Devil. The army of the “sons of light” fights alongside angels and, in the end, through the intervention of the “God of Israel”, they achieve a triumph in which all their enemies are destroyed forever.

This apocalyptic vision is likely the result of the national trauma produced by two foreign occupations in a row. First came the persecution of Judaism organized by the Greco-Syrian kingdom of Antiochus Epiphanes; then, the arrival of the Roman Empire, whose legions took Jerusalem and desecrated the Temple a few decades before the birth of Christ.

The great historical irony here is that the belief in a definitive military-mystical confrontation between the sectarian group and the rest of the world fell apart precisely when the Jews revolted against Rome and were defeated (66-73 AD). Judaism, rebuilt after this disaster and a second unsuccessful revolt against the Romans, largely abandoned the idea that God’s kingdom on earth could be realized through force of arms.

Resuming this logic in a world in which the destructive potential of our species would seem almost divine in the eyes of Jews and Romans 2,000 years ago is not at all auspicious. Furthermore, the Qumran sectarians did not differentiate between the external enemy and the Jews whose theological ideas differed from theirs. As absurd and inhumane as Hamas’ terrorist attacks have been, embracing this way of thinking can only be described as pouring gasoline on the fire.

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