Holy Violence and the English Civil War

In advocating extreme and pitiless violence in dealing with God's enemies in the lead up to, and during, the first Civil War, puritan preachers invoked a number of Old Testament prototypes, but none more so than Phinehas in Numbers 25.7-13 and Psalm 106.28-31. Phinehas's 'extraordinary zeal' in rising up impetuously and pitilessly slaying an Israelite and the idolatress he had led into his tent was the preachers' embodiment of what it meant to be 'for God and his cause'. The cumulative power of phrases and images associated with Phinehas and other figures of exemplary zeal as they echoed from sermon to sermon infiltrated the minds of both the members of the House of Commons and the common soldier as a code which compelled violent outcomes.