Stop the chaos!

Although defense against aggressors is an easily understood casus belli today, the idea of protection against chaos is more difficult for us to grasp. Contrary to the belief of many today that each person should allow others to possess their own personal narrative without any critique, the people of the ancient Near East thought that the world should be ordered in a certain way and a change in that order brought chaos. Even if this chaos happened outside the nation’s boundaries, it threatened the order of the entire world and needed to be dealt with before it spread and affected other areas.—Charlie Trimm in Fighting for God and King: A Topical Survey of Warfare in the Ancient Near East, SBL Press, forthcoming