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The introduction sketches out the moral, theological, and hermeneutical problems posed by ‘genocidal texts’ in the Old Testament, framing the hermeneutical challenge in terms of the following inconsistent set of propositions: (1) God is good. (2) The Bible is true. (3) Genocide is atrocious. (4) According to the Bible, God commanded and commended genocide. (5) No good being, let alone the supremely good Being, would ever command or commend an atrocity. The most pertinent biblical texts are then briefly presented. In addition, the methodological approach, that is, reception history, is set in its historical context, which includes a discussion of its recent resurgence and contemporary relevance. Finally, recent academic treatments of similar topics are discussed and an overview of the rest of the work is given.

Chapter 3 engages with Giorgio Agamben’s argument that sovereignty is disclosed most directly through the ban, which places someone outside or beyond the law. His chief example is the ancient Latin figure of the homo sacer (literally, the “sacred man”), a condemned criminal who, having lost all rights, may be killed with impunity. Whereas earlier theorists regarded the homo sacer as an example of the ambivalence of the sacred— of the convergence of the pure and the polluted in a single category— Agamben argues that this figure should be interpreted not as a sacrifice, but as proof that the sovereign power to place someone under the ban is more primordial than the sacred. Juxtaposing another case of the ban, the biblical herem by which individual victims and entire cities were consecrated to destruction, this chapter contests Agamben’s interpretation of the ban, and his rejection of the idea of the ambivalence of the sacred, while developing his insights to interpret the Exodus and the Conquest of Canaan as moments of sovereign appropriation, where the “outside” and “inside” of the polity— the law- breaking and law- making functions— become indistinguishable.

Chapter 4 begins to accumulate evidence of the inability of so- called rational- choice theories, which maintain that individuals pursue individual economic interest, to account for such non-utilitarian behaviors as sacrifice. It reinterprets such behaviors as exceptions to the mundane economic order. Drawing on, among other theories, Georges Bataille’s use of sacrifice as an expression of sovereignty, it is argued that such deviations from utility, which may take the alternative forms of either excessive consumption (festivals, potlatches, and the like) or abstention from the same, often signify the independence from need and labor that links the king to the ascetic. The hierarchy and division of labor in which both the ruler and the mendicant find their place is connected with the rise of storage economies, in which surplus goods allow both wastage as a display of symbolic capital or “conspicuous consumption,” and the support of nonproducing members of the community. Expressions of sovereign independence from the mundane economy tacitly acknowledge this economy as a precondition.

Chapter 3 examines how the utter disgrace of a rabbinic ban (herem) affected Benamozegh. In a very rare and harsh measure, his Hebrew biblical commentary was banned and burned in 1865 in Aleppo because it contained too many references to sources outside the Jewish tradition. The herem discouraged Benamozegh from any further major enterprise in Hebrew. However, he kept a presence, as a publisher, in the Mediterranean and his endeavors deserve significant attention: it was the largely Hebrew catalogue of his printing press, with a distribution and network of authors spanning the Maghreb and the Mashriq, that functioned as his commitment to an Oriental modernity.

Drawing upon research from the field of genocide studies, this chapter argues that there is a connection between the genocidal violence described in some biblical texts and the marked population increases that occurred in Iron Age Palestine and the surrounding regions. It uses the Rwandan genocide as a case study for understanding multicausal frameworks for explicating genocide, demonstrating that a combination of factors is necessary for genocidal violence to occur. In both Rwanda and the ancient Levant, population increases, land scarcities, and the particular realities of ethnic identity formation were catalysts for extreme interethnic violence. The chapter examines archaeological evidence for population increases, as well as evidence from such texts as the Mesha Inscription, Deuteronomy, Joshua, and Amos, paying special attention to passages discussing the practice of ḥērem and concludes with a reflection on materialist approaches to ritual violence.

The Moabites play one of the most nuanced roles of any of Israel’s close neighbors: The heroine of the book of Ruth has all of its action centered upon the person and identity of a woman, Ruth, who happens to be identified as “Moabite.” Much of the scholarly attention on the Moabites not filtered through the Bible focuses on the “Mesha Stele,” a long inscription commissioned by a Moabite king in the middle of the ninth century BCE. Since it is the longest text of its type from this time period originating from one of the smaller polities in the Levant, the Mesha Stele offers an invaluable opportunity to look at a native text and the views of the king, Mesha, who produced it. The stele gives us native insight into Moabite religious and royal ideology, and at the same time provides a large percentage of what we know of the Moabite language and dialect.

This chapter briefly considers the reception of the major herem texts in a number of corpora that lie outside the primary focus of the present work: in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament itself (including the Apocrypha), in Second Temple and Jewish Hellenistic literature, in the New Testament, and in Christian authors before Marcion. These readings are ‘pre-critical’ in that they predate Marcion’s seminal criticism and do not address herem in terms of a moral challenge. The reception of herem texts within this corpus is shown to have been largely uncritical; there is some evidence of toning down in the works of Philo, who strategically omits certain herem passages and interprets others allegorically. However, neither the allegoresis by Philo nor that by Barnabas or Justin Martyr appear to have resulted from moral concerns about the texts. There is also no suggestion that these events did not in fact occur.

This chapter presents and discusses criticisms of the Jewish Scriptures by Marcion and the Marcionites, by Ptolemy, Celsus, and other pagan critics of Christianity, and by the authors of the Didascalia Apostolorum and Pseudo-Clementines. The criticisms demonstrate that violent, warlike texts in the Old Testament were seen as problematic by a number of authors in late antiquity. Some of the critics attempted to address the hermeneutical challenge either by positing two different gods (Marcion) or by denying that the Old Testament is true in its entirety (Ptolemy, the Didascalia Apostolorum, the Pseudo-Clementines); others did not attempt to solve the hermeneutical dilemma but rather sought to highlight it, in an attempt to discredit Christianity altogether. Some of these later pagan critics raised pertinent moral concerns; however, as far as we can tell, none of them did so specifically with respect to herem, apart from Celsus.

This chapter sets out the tradition of interpreting the Old Testament wars figuratively, tracing it from Origen’s seminal third-century contributions via Prudentius, John Cassian, Gregory the Great and Isidore of Seville to the Glossa ordinaria and the preaching of Berthold of Regensburg. While the figurative reading of Old Testament warfare and annihilation texts predates the sustained moral criticism made of these texts from the second century onward, Origen makes extensive use of figurative readings in his response to critics such as Marcion, various gnostics, and Celsus. Origen’s identification of the Canaanites with the vices becomes widespread. On this reading, herem stands for a war of extermination against sin. Influential Christian authors repeat this identification so frequently that by the eighth century it is commonly accepted. The pervasiveness of this reading in the Glossa ordinaria suggests that in the Middle Ages it was perhaps the ‘standard’ reading among learned Christians.

This chapter presents what is arguably the most influential and widespread Christian approach to herem texts: the appeal to divine command theory to account for their counterintuitive morality. The structure of the argument is simple and straightforward: since God only commands what is good, and since God commanded the annihilation of the Canaanites, the latter must be good, our moral intuitions to the contrary notwithstanding. The main proponents of this approach whose work is discussed here are Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, and John Calvin. In addition to a detailed treatment of these authors’ relevant contributions, examples from John Chrysostom and Theodoret of Cyr show that this approach was not limited to Latin, western Christianity.

The chapter addresses the question in how far herem texts have inspired and shaped war and violent behaviour in the real world. It briefly reviews passages in Ambrose and Augustine that arguably constitute patristic antecedents to later violent readings. This review is followed by a detailed treatment of the reception of herem texts during the medieval crusades, which draws on crusading chronicles, songs, poems, epics, and sermons; then by briefer sections on the medieval inquisition, the Spanish conquest of the New World, the ‘Christian holy war’ in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors, and colonial wars in North America. The chapter demonstrates that the OT generally and herem texts specifically provided narratives, categories, and labels by which Christians understood themselves and their ‘enemies’. Herem texts were sometimes used to justify massacres ex post facto; at the same time, it cannot be demonstrated that they shaped the planning or execution of mass slaughters.

This chapter reviews more recent examples of the reception of herem texts and demonstrates that many if not all of the ancient and medieval approaches to reading herem as Christian scripture continue to have their adepts in modern times: largely uncritical readings (K. Barth), devotional–allegorical interpretations, and violent uses. Many of the moral criticisms also continue to be restated (M. Tindal). Responses to these criticisms sometimes follow a traditional, divine command ethics structure (R. Swinburne) or attempts are made to combine a divine command ethics with the concepts of accommodation and progressive revelation (E. Stump). Yet other approaches bring to bear the categories of myth, metaphor and hyperbole (D. Earl, W. Moberly, N. MacDonald, K. Lawson Younger, N. Wolterstorff). Perhaps the most significant innovation of the modern period is the combination of historical–critical research with an attempt to read herem as Christian scripture (E. Seibert, P. Jenkins).

This chapter provides a brief analytical summary of the various interpretative options proposed in the book. The reception of herem texts within the OT and the NT, as well as in the earliest Christian period, was largely uncritical. Pagan writers, too, rarely criticized these texts. Beginning with Marcion, readers whose moral compass was shaped by the accounts of Jesus and the writings of Paul began to raise moral concerns about OT warfare texts. The response of ecclesial authors was largely twofold: either to focus on a figurative reading of these texts in light of the NT or to resort to divine command theory to reframe the ethical assessment of the texts. A third, relatively rare reception of herem texts was one that justified massacres and other real-world violence. This chapter analyses the respective strengths and weaknesses of each approach and briefly presents the hermeneutical options available to readers today.

Isserles’s condemnation incensed Giustiniani; following his complaint to the Vatican, a Papal Bull in 1553 ordered the burning of all copies of the Talmud. A new period in Hebrew publishing emerged. The Council of Four Lands and other Jewish community self-governing bodies, composed of both lay authorities and rabbis, began to regulate the Hebrew book trade. Partially engaging in self-censorship to forestall a repetition of the 1553 fiasco, partly to safeguard textual integrity and accuracy, a series of ordinances emerged that required rabbinical permission as a condition to printing any previously unpublished book. Eventually, the practice became widespread of rabbis granting their approbation to books, attesting to the value of its contents. Sometimes the approbation (or haskama) included a ban forbidding any Jew from reprinting the work without the original publisher’s permission, on pain of excommunication. The rabbinic reprinting bans differed in several respects from secular and papal book privileges.