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This book explores God's use of violence as depicted in the Hebrew Bible. Ophir shows how the Bible's varied formations of divine violence anticipate the main outlines of the modern European state. A critique of the modern state, the book argues, must begin in unpacking its mostly repressed theological dimension.
List of contents
Acknowledgments | vii
Introduction | 1
1. Staying with the Violence | 13
Divine Violence-A Trailer, 13 ¿ A Brief Note on Counting and Explaining
Away, 21 ¿ Violence, as It Is Unfolding: A Phenomenological Sketch, 24 ¿
Literal Reading and the Biblical Language of Violence, 36
2. Theocracy: The Persistence of an Ancient Lacuna | 45
Theocracy, with and beyond Flavius Josephus, 45 ¿ The Blind Spot:
Three Contemporary Readings of Biblical Violence, 53 ¿ On the
Attribution of Power and Authority, 74 ¿ Kingship, Anarchy,
Theocracy, 79 ¿ Hypothesis, Method, and Stakes, 86
3. The Rule of Disaster: Extinction, Genocides, and Other Calamities | 96
Becoming Political, 96 ¿ From Extinction to Genocide, 99 ¿
Beyond Destruction, 105 ¿ Separation and Disaster, 113 ¿
Violence and Law, 124 ¿ The Sovereign's Moment, 130 ¿ Scouts
in the Land of the Giants: Three Theocratic Formations, 139
4. Holy Power: States of Exception, Targeted Killings, and the Logic of Substitution | 145
Holiness, 145 ¿ Rebellions in the Wilderness, 160 ¿ Substitution
and Containment, 178
5. The Time of the Covenant and the Temporalization of Violence | 193
The Experimental Setting: Recalling Violence and Regulating It, 196 ¿
The Covenant and the Curses, 204 ¿ The Weight of the Present, 214 ¿
The Subjects' Trap, or the People's Irony, 222 ¿ A Midianite Utopia, 230
Afterword: The Pentateuchal State, and Ours | 241
Notes | 257
Works Cited | 317
Index | 335
About the author
Adi M. Ophir is a Visiting Professor at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University and Professor Emeritus at Tel Aviv University. Among his works are
Goy: Israel's Multiple Others and the Birth of the Gentile, cöauthored with Ishay Rosen-Zvi (Oxford University Press, 2018);
Divine Violence: Two Essays on God and Disaster (The Van Leer Institute, 2013);
The One-State Condition, cöauthored with Ariella Azoulay (Stanford University Press, 2012); and
The Order of Evils: Toward an Ontology of Morals (Zone, 2005).
Summary
This book explores God’s use of violence as depicted in the Hebrew Bible. Ophir shows how the Bible’s varied formations of divine violence anticipate the main outlines of the modern European state. A critique of the modern state, the book argues, must begin in unpacking its mostly repressed theological dimension.
