My research area has been warfare in the ancient Near East and how that helps us understand the Old Testament. Given that the topic is warfare, it is not surprising that sometimes this addresses some very depressing topics. This post is a summary of an article I wrote on one of those topics: sexual assault in warfare, which has been a horrific aspect of warfare throughout history. Here is the bibliographic detail on the article (along with the link to the Amazon page for the book that provides more detail about the book as a whole):

Trimm, Charlie. “Wartime Rape in Ancient Egypt, Assyria, and Israel: The Differing Perspectives of the Powerful and the Weak.” Pages 365–88 in Brill’s Companion to War Violence in the Ancient Mediterranean World. Edited by Lennart Gilhaus. Warfare in the Ancient Mediterranean World 13. Brill, 2026.

Many accounts of this have been preserved in wars in modern time; for example, the large number of rapes during the Rwandan genocide has been well documented. Although in ancient times this would most likely have been similar, a survey of texts in the ancient Near East reveals very few records of battlefield rape. While the empires frequently described humiliation of their enemies, they rarely refer to wartime rape. However, the Hebrew Bible more clearly describes the brutal humiliation of women in the aftermath of battle, most likely because the Israelites were the victims of the practice.

When looking at the empires, Assyria has more texts about sexual assault in warfare than Egypt, but the most references to it are found in the Hebrew Bible. The Egyptians do not address it because in their ideology the Egyptian men who were victorious in battle were supposed to care for the women who were captured. This was part of the contrast that the Egyptians portrayed between their own men and the men of other places. Hence, to describe cases of sexual assault by Egyptian soldiers would go against this ideology.

However, Assyria portrays themselves as more violent than Egypt when it comes to humiliating their enemies. One point of similarity is the curse texts, as both the Hebrew Bible and Assyria employ the motif in curse texts. One of the clearest cases of wartime rape is a curse in Esarhaddon’s Succession Treaty: “May Venus, the brightest of your stars, before your eyes make your wives lie in the lap of your enemy.” Like in Assyria, we see a clear example of wartime rape in a curse in the Hebrew Bible: “You shall become engaged to a woman, but another man shall lie with her” (Deuteronomy 28:30). The narratives about warfare are also similar in both areas, as neither display very many references to wartime rape. While a few texts might obliquely hint at the practice, it is very restrained. The one exception is the biblical reference to the quotation from Sisera’s mother (Judg 5:30), which is much clearer than the ancient Near Eastern evidence. The main area of difference comes in the prophetic and lament material. The laments from the ancient Near East do not describe wartime rape, but Lamentations does: “Women are raped in Zion, virgins in the towns of Judah” (Lamentations 5:11). Unlike the laments in the ancient Near East that leave sexual assault in warfare unmentioned, Lamentations includes the full range of brutality in its description of the fall of Jerusalem. The other genre that refers to the practice is prophecy. For example, Isaiah says as part of the judgment against Babylon, “their houses will be plundered and their wives ravished” (Isaiah 13.16). Another clear reference is the future destruction of Jerusalem as described by Zechariah in these terms: “For I will gather all the nations against Jerusalem to battle, and the city shall be taken and the houses plundered and the women raped” (Zechariah 14.2).

The Hebrew Bible advances beyond the ethical perspective of the ancient Near East by daring to bring up the brutality of sexual violence in warfare. The topic that even the ruthless Assyrians refused to discuss is presented in brutal terms to readers of the Hebrew Bible, especially in the Sisera story, the laments, and the prophetic texts. In addition, these texts address not just the suffering of the Israelites, but also the foreign nations: the reader is challenged to sympathize with both insiders and the “other” who are suffering under sexual violence in warfare. Most likely this means that even though the empires refused to talk about sexual assault in the context of their battles, this would have been a common practice for imperial armies, especially as they fought rebels. This kind of rhetoric is seen in the curses, so it should not surprise us that the experience of the oppressed included sexual violence. The primary sources from the empires are not reliable in the area of sexual violence in the context of warfare because of their apparent desire to threaten such violence but not describe it in historical sources. Israelite texts illustrate that such sexual violence actually happened. While other kinds of humiliation were more common, sexual violence seems to be a particularly brutal kind of humiliation for extreme cases.