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The Bible is one of the most influential books in human history, and one of the most violent. From genocide and sexual assault, to divine wrath, empire, and exclusion, biblical texts both narrate violence and have been used to justify it. The Bible and Violence, a landmark two-volume major reference work from T&T Clark, confronts this reality directly.
Bringing together over 100 chapters by leading scholars from around the world, these volumes examine violence in biblical texts and in the use of the Bible across history and into the present day. The essays do not excuse, sanitise, or deny violence. Instead, they ask urgent questions: How does violence function in scripture? Who is harmed by particular interpretations? And how can responsible reading interrupt rather than perpetuate harm?
The chapters highlighted below offer a snapshot of the depth, range, and import of this major reference work, showcasing how scholars across disciplines are grappling with the Bible’s violent texts and legacies in ways that are historically grounded, ethically alert, and critically transformative.
A powerful framing essay setting out the aims, methods, and ethical commitments of the two-volume project, explaining why confronting biblical violence remains unavoidable and necessary. Essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how the Bible continues to shape, and be shaped by, violence, power, and resistance today.
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This chapter re examines claims of genocide in the Hebrew Bible by placing biblical warfare texts in dialogue with modern genocide studies. Drawing on comparative models such as the “stages of genocide,” M. I. Rey shows how biblical language constructs genocide as a process, through classification, polarization, and demonization, rather than a single violent event.
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This chapter explores the Book of Judges as a relentlessly violent narrative in which brutality is normalized through irony, humor, and narrative ambiguity. By tracing stories of assassination, sexual violence, sacrifice, and civil war, it reveals how systems of oppression render every body, women and men, insiders and outsiders, vulnerable to dehumanization and harm. The unsettling analysis exposes Judges as a text that not only depicts violence, but strategically uses it to generate fear, obedience, and political consent.
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This chapter traces how New Testament texts, written within intra‑Jewish debates of the first century, came to foster enduring forms of anti‑Jewish and antisemitic violence. Focusing on passages such as Matthew 27:25 and John 8:40–44, Christine Shepardson shows how theological supersessionism, translation choices, and anachronistic portrayals of “the Jews” helped construct narratives of collective guilt, divine rejection, and demonization.
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In this chapter Joachim Kügler offers a critical reading of Revelation as a text saturated with violence yet committed to non‑violent resistance. Kügler examines how graphic images of divine judgment, bloodshed, and destruction function rhetorically to console marginalized communities under imperial oppression, while also interrogating the harm these images can do to readers. By addressing misogynistic symbolism, apocalyptic dualism, and the enduring legacy of Revelation’s violent language in modern political and religious contexts, the chapter challenges readers to grapple with the ethical risks of reading, and using, this biblical book today.
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This chapter exposes how modern Bible translations can perpetrate their own forms of violence by suppressing, softening, or obscuring the sexual brutality and misogynistic rhetoric of prophetic texts. Using Ezekiel 16 as a central case study, L.S Stone demonstrates how English translations routinely censor explicit references to rape, abuse, and divine rage, reshaping the text into something more palatable while leaving its underlying gendered logic intact. Stone argues that such translational choices are not neutral but ethical and political acts that reinforce hegemonic masculinity and rape culture, challenging readers to reconsider what is lost and what harm is done when sacred texts are translated ‘respectably’.
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IThis chapter examines the disturbing continuities between contemporary incel ideologies and misogynistic patterns embedded in biblical texts and their interpretation. Bringing biblical studies into dialogue with terrorism studies, masculinity studies, and feminist theory, Chris Greenough traces how narratives of male entitlement, woman‑blaming, sexual violence, and “womanlessness” function both in online incel subcultures and in ancient scriptural traditions. By analyzing misogynistic language, religious symbolism, and the sacralization of male grievance, the chapter exposes how the Bible can be weaponized to legitimize gendered violence, while also insisting on the ethical urgency of naming, critiquing, and resisting these toxic masculinities today.
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This chapter investigates how biblical and religious language functions within the discourses of extreme right‑wing movements, focusing on blogs and mass‑shooter manifestos. Using corpus‑based discourse analysis, Kathryn Barber and Emily Powell show how scripture and Christian symbolism are mobilized to construct narratives of imperilment, cultural decline, and moral duty, enabling violence to be framed as legitimate self‑defence or divinely sanctioned action. By tracing strategies such as moral disengagement, the diffusion of responsibility, and appeals to higher loyalties, the chapter demonstrates how religious language becomes a metapolitical tool that both masks and amplifies extremist ideologies, revealing the ethical urgency of critically interrogating the Bible’s role in contemporary right‑wing violence.
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This chapter makes an uncompromising claim: sexual violence in the Hebrew Bible is not incidental, aberrant, or merely descriptive, it is structurally necessary to the texts’ logic and politically efficient. Focusing on Judges 21, Grace Smith argues that rape and the trafficking of women function as narrative and political technologies through which masculine identity, ethnic boundaries, and hierarchies of power are produced, repaired, and enforced.
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