The zeal of Phinehas: The Bible and the legitimation of violence

Journal of Biblical Literature

Volumn 122, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 3-21

  Collins, John J ^a  

^a YALE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 29744456134     PISSN: 00219231     EISSN: 19343876     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3268089     Document Type: Article

References (76)

1. Mieke Bal, Anti-Covenant: Counter-Reading Women's Lives in the Hebrew Bible (Sheffield: Almond, 1989), 14
2. Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Moses in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 1-6
3. See, e.g., Regina M. Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)
4. See Manfred Weippert, "'Heiliger Krieg' in Israel und Assyrien: Kritische Anmerkungen zu Gerhard von Rads Konzept des 'Heiligen Krieges im alten Israel,'" ZAW 84 (1972): 460-93
5. Sa-Moon Kang, Divine War in the Old Testament and in the Ancient Near East (BZAW 177; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1989)
6. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, The Forms of Violence: Narrative in Assyrian Art and Modern Culture (New York: Schocken, 1985)
7. Eckart Otto, Krieg und Frieden in der Hebräischen Bibel und im Alten Orient (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1999), 13-75
8. More broadly, on the mythology of violence in world religions, see James A. Aho, Religious Mythology and the Art of War: Comparative Religious Symbolisms of Military Violence (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1981)
9. Craig L. Nessan, "Sex, Aggression, and Pain: Sociobiological Implications for Theological Anthropology," Zygon 33 (1998): 451
10. David Riches, "The Phenomenon of Violence," in The Anthropology of Violence (ed. David Riches; Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 1-7
11. Gerhard von Rad, Holy War in Ancient Israel (trans M. J. Dawn; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 71
12. Philip D. Stern, The Biblical Hcombining dot belowerem: A Window on Israel's Religious Experience (BJS 211; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991)
13. Susan Niditch, War in the Hebrew Bible: A Study in the Ethics of Violence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 28-89
14. Studies in the Mesha Inscription and Moab (ed. Andrew Dearman; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989)
15. Stern, Biblical Hcombining dot belowerem, 19-87
16. The sacrificial character of the ban is argued especially by Niditch, War in the Hebrew Bible, 28-55
17. Compare Dick Anthony and Thomas Robbins, "Religious Totalism, Violence, and Exemplary Dualism: Beyond the Extrinsic Model," in Millennialism and Violence (ed. Michael Barkun; London: Cass, 1996), 10-50
18. George C. Heider, The Cult of Molek: A Reassessment (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1985)
19. John Day, Molech: A God of Human Sacrifice in the Old Testament (University of Cambridge Oriental Publications 41; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
20. Jon D. Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 3-17
21. Levenson, Death and Resurrection, 13
22. Niditch, War in the Hebrew Bible, 56-77 ("The Ban as God's Justice")
23. Compare Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 143: "There are signs in the text of some anxiety about the conquest commands - a search for reasons, lest God's wrath seem wholly arbitrary."
24. This point is emphasized by Jonathan Boyarin, "Reading Exodus into History," New Literary History 23 (1992): 525
25. Moshe Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1992), 282-97
26. Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 23: "I have already spoken much about the face of the other as being the original locus of the meaningful."
27. On the exodus paradigm, see Walzer, Exodus and Revolution
28. Edward Said, "Michael Walzer's Exodus and Revolution: A Canaanite Reading," Grand Street 5 (winter 1986): 86-106
29. Robert Allen Warrior, "Canaanites, Cowboys, and Indians: Deliverance, Conquest, and Liberation Theology Today," Christianity and Crisis 49 (1989): 261-66
30. Keith W. Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencincombining dot belowg of Palestinian History (London: Routledge, 1996), 71-121
31. William Foxwell Albright, From the Stone Age to Christianity: Monotheism and the Historical Process (New York: Doubleday, 1957), 280-81
32. cited by Whitelam, Invention of Ancient Israel, 83. Albright noted several analogies to the Israelite treatment of the Canaanites, including the treatment of native Americans
33. George Ernest Wright, "The Old Testament," in The Book of the Acts of God: Christian Scholarship Interprets the Bible (ed. G. E. Wright and R. H. Fuller; London: Duckworth, 1960), 109
34. For a more positive view of the Canaanites, see Niels Peter Lemche, The Canaanites and their Land: The Tradition of the Canaanites (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1991)
35. For up-to-date assessments, see Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts (New York: Free Press, 2001), 72-122
36. William G. Dever, "Israel, History of (Archaeology and the 'Conquest')," ABD 3:545-58
37. George E. Mendenhall, "The Hebrew Conquest of Palestine," BA 25 (1962): 66-87
38. Norman Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250-1050 B.C.E (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1979)
39. Barr, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology, 209
40. On sacred sites and ritual objects in ancient Israel, see Philip J. King and Lawrence E. Stager, Life in Biblical Israel (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 319-53
41. Patrick D. Miller, The Religion of Ancient Israel (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2000), 62-79
42. For a balanced evaluation of Girard's theories, see Lefebure, Revelation, the Religions, and Violence, 20-23, 29-31
43. On the circumstances that led to the revolt, see John J. Collins, "Cult and Culture: The Limits of Hellenization in Judea," in Hellenism in the Land of Israel (ed. John J. Collins and Gregory E. Sterling; Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 38-61
44. Waldemar Janzen, Old Testament Ethics: A Paradigmatic Approach (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1994), 108
45. On the ideological continuity with the Maccabees, see William R. Farmer, Maccabees, Zealots, and Josephus: An Inquiry into Jewish Nationalism in the Greco-Roman Period (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956)
46. David C. Rapoport, "Fear and Trembling: Terrorism in Three Religious Traditions," American Political Science Review 78, no. 3 (1984): 658-77
47. Roland H. Bainton, Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace: A Historical Survey and Critical Re-Evaluation (Nashville: Abingdon, 1960) 148-49
48. Bainton, Christian Attitudes, 151
49. God's New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny (ed. Conrad Cherry; Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1971), 11-12
50. T. Dunbar Moodie, The Rise of Afrikanerdom: Power, Apartheid and the Afrikaner Civil Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), chs. 1 and 2
51. On this passage, see Paul D. Hanson, The Dawn of Apocalyptic (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975) 203-8
52. John J. Collins, "Apocalyptic Eschatology as the Transcendence of Death," in idem, Seers, Sibyls and Sages in Hellenistic-Roman Judaism (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 75-97
53. Judas Maccabee is represented as a ram with a large horn. See Patrick A. Tiller, A Commentary on the Animal Apocalypse of 1 Enoch (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993), 62-63
54. John J. Collins, Apocalypticism in the Dead Sea Scrolls (London: Routledge, 1997), 108-9
55. Adela Yarbro Collins, "The Political Perspective of the Revelation to John," in Cosmology and Eschatology in Jewish and Christian Apocalypticism (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 198-217
56. and John J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to the Jewish Matrix of Christianity (2d ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 131
57. H. G. L. Peels (The Vengeance of God [Leiden: Brill, 1995]) provides a thorough study of the motif in the Hebrew Bible, but deals with "the intertestamental literature" and the NT only in an appendix (pp. 306-12)
58. The quotation is derived from Prov 25:21-22
59. Adela Yarbro Collins, "Persecution and Vengeance in the Book of Revelation," in Apocalypticism in the Mediterranean World and the Near East (ed. David Hellholm; Tübingen: MohrSiebeck, 1983), 729-49
60. On the traditional quietism of Orthodox Judaism, in anticipation of eschatological salvation, see Aviezer Ravitzky, Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Radical Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 40-78
61. On the notion of "forcing the end," which traditionally had negative implications in Judaism, see Ravitzky, Messianism, 18
62. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 198-280
63. Barnes, "Images of Hope,"163: "The most famous case of radical expectancy in this period was that of the Fifth Monarchy Men, who saw it as the responsibility of believers to help bring on the final and most perfect historical age through militant action."
64. See also Christopher Hill, Antichrist in Seventeenth Century England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971)
65. eadem, Millennialism, Persecution, and Violence: Historical Cases (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000)
66. Greenberg, "On the Political Use of the Bible," 469
67. Gerd Lüdemann, The Unholy in Holy Scriptures: The Dark Side of the Bible (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1997). Lüdemann provides an extensive discussion of the ban in holy war (pp. 36-54)
68. So, in very different ways, Niditch, War in the Hebrew Bible
69. Peter C. Craigie, The Problem of War in the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978), 97
70. Otto, Krieg und Frieden, 76-156
71. Greenberg, "On the Political Use of the Bible," 466-69
72. So James G. Williams, The Bible, Violence, and the Sacred: Liberation from the Myth of Sanctioned Violence (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 243. Williams bases his approach on that of René Girard
73. Compare Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), 2: "If art imitates life, scripture likewise reflects it in both holiness and horror."
74. Hannah Arendt, "To Save the Jewish Homeland: There is Still Time," in Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age (ed. Ron H. Feldman; New York: Grove Press, 1978), 181-82
75. quoted in Marc H. Ellis, Unholy Alliance: Religion and Atrocity in Our Time (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997), 7
76. Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001), 61