PEACE. In a negative sense religious traditions speak of peace as freedom from war and unrest. Peace can also take a positive meaning of well-being and fulfillment as goals of religious and social life. In ancient Greece the word for peace, eirēnē, meant primarily the opposite of war, and even when personified as a goddess, Eirene had no mythology and little cult. The Roman Pax was also a vague goddess, scarcely heard of before the age of Augustus and then taken as the representation of quiet at home and abroad. The Pax Romana expressed the absence of internal strife, although Seneca remarked that whole tribes and peoples had been forced to change their habitats.

In ancient Hebrew thought, peace (shālōm) was not only the absence of war but well-being if not prosperity. A famous passage that appears twice in the Bible (Is. 2:2–4, Mi. 4:1–3) describes all...