Warfare seeped into monastic life through the sacred texts that formed the basis of monks' daily reading, chanted prayers, and private meditation. Those who sought escape from a violent world in the peaceful confines of the cloister were constantly confronted by images of battle. The Bible, above all, was a treasure trove of military history and martial imagery; indeed, its very words could surround the speaker with impenetrable armor, or become potent weapons with the power to curse and even kill. Beginning in the earliest christian centuries, generations of exegetes built up a thick carapace of interpretation around every mention of war, historical and allegorical, in the Old and new testaments. this exegetical project, begun by patristic theologians and subsequently taken up by early medieval monks, tackled the historical wars of the ancient Israelites headon, transforming them through an interpretive sleight of hand into prefigurations of the spiritual struggles of christ and the apostles, and later martyrs and ascetics. The Gospels and Pauline Epistles supplied christian writers with the concept of the ‘soldier of christ,’ or miles Christi, as well as a symbolic vocabulary to describe his entirely spiritual form of warfare. By the central Middle ages, monastic understanding of Pauline spiritual combat had come to be mediated by a rich commentary tradition which encouraged the monk's self-identification with the miles Christi ideal. Along with the interactions between living warriors and monks considered in the next chapter, this body of scriptural and exegetical texts was the most important ingredient in the creation of a distinctly monastic ideal of spiritual combat.