The First World War and the Mobilization of Biblical Scholarship is a truly satisfying work. The editors and contributors have found an original, fruitful, and apt theme—and there is not one bad, incompetent, or unwelcome essay in the whole collection. The reader should be warned that there is a great deal of repetition, but as most people will probably just pick those essays that most interest them, even that cannot be put down as a weakness. The overlapping material, however, means that it is best to set out some of the main themes, rather than handling each chapter as a discreet entity. The most basic, underlying theme is the high degree of biblical literacy and the culture prominence of the Bible in Germany, Britain, the United States, and other Protestant nations at this time. (I tried to document what a scripture-saturated society England had become by the nineteenth century in my A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians, [Oxford University Press, 2011].)

The war, however, caused new emphases to emerge. In contrast to prior trends, there was a renewed preoccupation with the Old Testament. This turn is documented in numerous chapters, including Nathan MacDonald's contribution, “Holy War and the Great War in German Protestant Scholarship on the Old Testament” (135–161), which describes how Christians rediscovered their God to be the God of Hosts. Rudolf Kittel, the eminent professor of Old Testament at the University of Leipzig, was so enthralled with this line of thinking that he became convinced that the military tactics presented in the Hebrew scriptures should be taught to German officers. One fascinating byproduct of this emphasis was to check the hitherto prominent kind of anti-Judaism or anti-Semitism that extolled the New Testament as enlightened and civilized by contrasting it with the reputedly barbarous, vengeful god of Israel. (See especially, Lukas Bormann, “Between Prophetic Critique and Raison D’état: Rudolf Kittel on German Jews during the Great War and on Old Testament Hebrews in Biblical Wars,” 49–67.)

Within the Old Testament, people were particularly drawn to the Psalms (see especially, Andrew Mein, “Psalms, Patriotism and Propaganda: A Favourite Book in Wartime Biblical Scholarship.”) The Times declared that the Psalter “might almost have been waiting for such an hour,” and the Expository Times reveled in “The Rediscovery of the Psalms” (163, 170). If anything, this trend was even more pronounced among Germans. Luther's “Ein feste Burg” (based on Psalm 46) was a popular marching song. The Assryiologist Friedrich Delitzsch speculated wishfully that Psalm 110 was a military recruiting song, translating along these lines: “your people is fully ready to volunteer on the day of your muster” (169). A no less curious result was that this emphasis reversed a pronounced liberal trend toward late dating these documents. German scholars no longer leaned toward messianic or metaphorical readings, but now wanted to see the Psalms as about literal kings and battles from Israel's early years as a warring nation extending its borders. To make the canonical focus yet sharper, Germans preferred those Psalms which spoke of struggle and victory, and (to their own loss in terms of spiritual preparedness) neglected ones that expressed sorrow and lament.

Some essays are more ambitious than others but, as already intimated, all are worthy contributions. For this reader, the main irritants were at the minor level of word choice. For instance, James Crossley writes: “it was assumed that Christians faced restriction of religious practice under the Soviet Union” (236). It is hard to know what to make of this oily use of “assumed” when “known” would fit the case far better. Paul Michael Kurtz admits that Ernst Joël was actually Jewish, but I, at any rate, could not figure out what distinction he was trying to make, if any, by describing two different figures with the odd phrase “Jewish-born” (127, 129).

The last thing I want to do is try to relitigate World War I, but this collection does leave one with the impression that there was greater freedom of thought and graciousness among the Allies (although this is perhaps at least in part a byproduct of their being on the winning side). Mark D. Chapman shows that William Sanday, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford, stubbornly refused to let anti-German sentiments taint his judgment: “I am under a debt to Germany that no war can wipe out” (84). G. Buchanan Gray, who taught Old Testament at Mansfield College, Oxford, daringly suggested that, as an imperial power, Britain was more like Assyria than Israel. Hugh S. Pyper shows that Gray's colleague at Mansfield, C. J. Cadoux, was able to be a vocal pacifist without losing his position. Matthew A. Collins reveals that the membership of the England-based Society for the Study of the Old Testament gave substantial sums in 1923 to help Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft to survive. The United States-based Society for Biblical Literature already by 1920 had resumed having its journal printed in Germany, and during the war it ran a sizeable obituary for the Princeton Seminary-trained scholar, Caspar Gregory, who died fighting for Germany. (For his eventful life, see Timothy J. Demy, “For Christ and Kaiser: Caspar René Gregory and the First World War.”) Not that everything was all generosity and judiciousness on the side of the Allies. Jan Willem van Henten, in “Martyr: Title and First World War Context”, reminds us of the bishop of London's overheated pronouncement that fallen British soldiers were “martyrs as really as St. Stephen was a martyr” (208). The popular press in Britain ran a campaign in favor of the use of the imprecatory psalms in public worship.

The First World War and the Mobilization of Biblical Scholarship most reminds me of Mark A. Noll's splendid monograph, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, and one hopes that these are just the first fruits of many more such fine and illuminating studies.