Chapter 4 addresses the deceitfulness of violent speech. The psalmist reflects deep anxieties about the persistent scheming of the wicked. According to many psalms and proverbs, scheming is the constitutive quality of violent acts. More than the swinging club or shooting arrows of the wicked, it is their speech that occupies many biblical writers. I suggested that in poetic and wisdom texts, scheming is often considered part of the act of violence itself. The preoccupation with scheming reflects how biblical writers thought about the problem of violence (it is deceitful and often begins with speech). I argued that scheming was not simplistically prior to ‘real’ physical violence. Rather, it described a form of violence that afflicted the godly, and was something from which the petitioner sought protection. The concern with scheming enemies also reflects a desire for divine intervention before violence achieves its full effect. Finally, the concern with the enemy’s verbal scheming highlighted the re-expressibility of violent acts. They could be re-enacted in prayer as a provocation for God to act.

How we think about violence has changed throughout time. Consider the category ‘domestic violence’. In Colonial America the horrors of wife-beating were categorized as ‘wife-disciplining’. With the exception of Puritan law, corporal discipline of one’s spouse was, tragically, considered a legitimate means by which a husband exercised his authority and ‘chastised’ his wife.1 The application of the term ‘violence’, with its negatively charged overtones, to the act of ‘wife-disciplining’ would have been considered a confusion of categories for many husbands. Americans considered wife-disciplining to be part of the husband’s legitimate ‘regime of mastery’ that he exercised over his wife. Corporal punishment was his prerogative.2 Heather Duerre Humann points out that even with the eventual criminalization of spousal abuse the conceptual category ‘domestic violence’ hardly received mention in literature on the family and the ‘theorization of the family’ until the 1980s.3 In early America, even after tort reform, beating one’s wife fell into the category of illicit forms of wife-disciplining, and not into a super-category called violence. The category ‘domestic violence’ eventually followed the reduction of the category ‘disciplining’ (and ‘correcting’ or ‘chastising’) and many years later the expansion of violence into a category that included beating one’s wife.4

The impurity of violence constitutes our fourth ‘grammar’ for speaking about the problem of violence across the Hebrew Bible. According to several biblical texts, shed blood defiles. Objects of this defilement include land, humans, and, in some instances, the divine name itself. Examples of bloodshed’s defiling capacities appear variously across Priestly and Priestly inspired texts in Leviticus, Numbers, and Ezekiel, though the conception itself ranges more widely in the Hebrew Bible. According to the author of Lamentations 4, for instance, Israel’s prophets and priests became polluted because they ‘shed [innocent] blood in the midst of [Zion]’ (4:13–14). The psalmist states that the Israelites had ‘poured out innocent blood … and the land was polluted’ (Ps 106:39). Isaiah proclaims that the people had ‘shed blood on [their] hands’ and therefore their sacrificial offerings were rejected (1:15).

Chapter 9 begins Part IV of the book, which analyses violence as a problem of impurity. This chapter focuses on what the grammar of impurity enabled biblical writers to say about the affront of violence. It draws on the ritual insights of Catherine Bell (via William Gilders), the metaphor theory insights of Joseph Lam, and the cognitive research of Thomas Kazen and Richard Beck. Psalm 106 describes the impure consequences of ‘mixing’ with the nations that Israel failed to expel from the land. Practices like child sacrifice polluted the land and people, and led to exile. Bloodshed, in this poetic retelling, disintegrated the sacred order that bound together Yhwh, the people, and the land. Isaiah 1 insists that entrance into Yhwh’s presence demanded social as well as ritual purity, and even suggests social means of ‘purifying’ from bloodshed. Lamentations 4 attributes exile to the bloodshed in the ‘midst’ of Jerusalem, and describes the people as those defiled among the nations. For Ezekiel, bloodshed was an affront to Yhwh’s name and sanctity in the land. Finally, according to Numbers 35, blood from homicides polluted the land. As such, it was a threat to the ongoing presence of Yhwh in the land.

Chapter 6 examines the outcry of the victim of violence. Understanding the formal or informal legal framework and ancient legal discourse around violence also helps us grasp with greater specificity the preoccupation among biblical writers with the ‘outcry’ of violence, the ‘violent witness’, and the receptivity of the responsible party (often Yhwh). These concerns each operate differently, but together highlight a central and driving concern with voicing – or revoicing – the otherwise unnoticed evil of violence, and setting it within a framework of appeal (usually prayer) to one with the capacity or responsibility to intervene and restore order. The preoccupation with verbal appeal via distress signals like the outcry highlight the fact that ancient Israel was not a legislative society. In other words, individuals did not, in the first place, appeal to laws for justice. While the Hebrew Bible does preserve legal codes, they were hardly ever the basis for judicial rulings. Instead, individuals had recourse to individuals who embody legal custom, and who, by community standards, act justly insofar as they fulfil their expected roles. This relational nature of justice meant that cries for justice to a judge or avenger were both morally driven and, to be effective, needed to be rhetorically persuasive.

Having examined ecological and moral discourse about violence, we turn now toward judicial portrayals of the problem of violence. Given the breadth of legal literature in the Hebrew Bible, the wide range of non-legal texts that exhibit such themes, and the voluminous secondary literature on this topic, our study on violence will focus on the relationship between the outcry and the violence it signposts as a window into the justice grammar of violence. We will also look at the way that judicial conceptions of violence relate to the land.

Thus far we have focused on an ecological grammar of violence, but there are other ways we can examine biblical conceptions of the problem of violence. Some are less cosmic in scope, and focus more specifically on the ways that violence stems from flaws in one’s speech, a topic that finds frequent mention in biblical discussions of moral character. ‘Those who seek my life speak destruction’, says the psalmist; ‘They murmur treacheries all day long.’ The Hebrew Bible offers a rich variety of expression about the relationship between one’s moral character and violence. By moral character, I refer to the ‘sum and range of specifically ethical qualities or traits the individual or community possesses’.1 Concerns about moral character vary across biblical literature, and are arranged according to particular cultural priorities. Anne Stewart rightly contends that ‘the concept of character displays certain values that a society privileges and its assumptions about what it means to be human’. It follows that ‘the study of character is inevitably a study of the larger moral culture in which it is rooted’.2 Attending to the varied grammar of moral character will involve analysis of the ways that different authors organize their moral worlds. Particular moral values will step into the foreground in some bodies of literature, and recede in others. Moreover, those values concerning violence will be arranged in relation to other values in specific ways, just as the values of freedom and equality might take centre stage in contemporary American culture, and become intrinsically linked. Those ways of organizing the moral world are widely varied within the Hebrew Bible, and attention to the nuances of each biblical genre is beyond the pale of this study. For our purposes, we will take a selection of texts from several biblical genres, with a focus on the presentation of moral character in Proverbs, and related presentations in Psalms.

Chapter 5 explores the violence of arrogant speech. If scheming was considered a hidden form of verbal violence, gloating and taunting are its public forms. I focus first on ways that enemies join themselves to – and thus become complicit in – acts of violence through gloating. Edom is an example. Edom joined in the Babylonian violence against Judah and was held liable. When describing violent acts, biblical writers also tend to fixate on the taunts that accompany them. They are the verbal dimension of public acts of violence. In taunting, the enemy brings another into a state of reproach and seeks recognition for that act of verbal violence. In turn, that verbal expression of violence plays an important role in characterizing the moral affront of the boastfully violent against the protective prerogatives of Yhwh, and against his rightful claims to power.

The ‘grammars of violence’ detailed in this book each reflect particular patterns of representation by which biblical writers portray and critique violence. These patterns of representation frequently cut across biblical genres, and to that extent can be said to reflect recurrent cultural assumptions about what the problems of violence included and excluded. Of course local variation exists in the Hebrew Bible. Moreover, one might also argue that the Hebrew Bible itself reflects changing conceptions of violence through time and tradition, as each biblical textual ‘layer’ could be analysed on its own. To that extent this study is only one step toward a fuller recovery of changing representations of violence in the Hebrew Bible. Nonetheless, patterns of representing violence recur with enough frequency across the Hebrew Bible’s texts and traditions to sustain my categories of analysis.

William Brown writes that ‘every model of the cosmos [in antiquity] conveys an ethos as well as a mythos’.1 That ethos provides a moral environment within which agents are meant to act rightly, in consonance with the ‘arc’ of the cosmos itself.2 For Brown, the biblical writers insist that ‘the created world reflects certain discernible moral ethoses, or prescriptively sustaining contexts’.3 The sustaining qualities of the physical world work two ways. Human moral activity impacts the physical world, which in turn acts back upon humanity for good or ill. Biblical writers contend variously that the places in which they lived were directly and indirectly moulded by moral and immoral human action. It is not surprising, then, when turning to the question of violence, to observe in the biblical literature a deep and troubled relationship between humans and the land. This mutually destructive relationship between humans and the land because of violence is what I call the ecology of violence. Violence distresses, disrupts, and destroys the land. An ecology of violence refers to the way that violence tears at the moral bonds holding together humans and the land, and in some cases tears the entire fabric holding together God, humans, and the land. More precisely, bloodshed tears the fabric and violence (חמס) is the tearing itself. The ecological grammar is distinguished by its emphasis on the way that violence constitutes the destruction of the life-sustaining capacities of the land and cosmos, whether they be plant and animal life or the entire created order, as we see in Genesis 6–8.