iven,
a great battle ensued, and by sunset of one anxious day all was over in
one way or another. Upon this position of circumstances there was
neither any fair dispensation from personal service (except where
citizens' scruples interfered), nor any motive for wishing it. On the
contrary, by a very few days' service, a stigma, not for the individual
only, but for his house and kin, would be evaded for ages of having
treacherously forsaken the commonwealth in agony. And the preference for
a fighting station would be too eager instead of too backward. It would
become often requisite to do what it is evident the Jews in reality
did--to make successive sifting and winnowing from the service troops,
at every stage throwing out upon severer principles of examination those
who seemed least able to face a trying crisis, whilst honourable posts
of no great dependency would be assigned to those rejected, as modes of
soothing their offended pride. This in the case of a great danger; but
in the case of an ordinary danger there is no doubt that many vicarious
arrangements would exist by way of evading so injurious a movement as
that of the whole fighting population. Either the ordinary watch and
ward, in that section which happened to be locally threatened--as, for
instance, by invasion on one side from Edom or Moab, on another side
from the Canaanites or Philistines--would undertake the case as one
which had fallen to them by allotment of Providence; or that section
whose service happened to be due for the month, without local regards,
would face the exigency. But in any great national danger, under that
stage of society which the Jews had reached between Moses and
David--that stage when fighting is no separate professional duty, that
stage when such things are announced by there being no military pay--not
the army which is so large as 120,000 men, but the army which is so
small, requires to be explained.[8]

Secondly, the other inference from the phenomenon of no military pay,
and therefore no separate fighting profession, is this--that foreign
war, war of aggression, war for booty, war for martial glory, is quite
unknown. Now, all rules of political economy, applied to the maintenance
of armies, must of course contemplate a regular trade of war pursued
with those objects, and not a domestic war for beating off an attack
upon hearths and altars. Such a war only, be it observed, could be
lawfully entertained by the Jewish people. M