Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

VIOLENCE

The Hebrew concept of violence (from Heb. ḥāmās, “treat or act violently”) concerns ethical, physical wrong; extreme wickedness, malicious witness; institutional injustice; injurious language, violent mechanisms. It designates innocent suffering, with human subjects and objects, resulting from greed or hatred, but not natural catastrophes. Another term, gāzal, means “to take by force; steal; tear away” or “robbery; a thing plundered or spoiled; extorting justice.” Greek words include bíā, “hostile force”; biastḗs, “a violent person”; and biázō, “to enter violently” or “to destroy, murder.”

In the Pentateuch violence impedes creation, curses humanity, and problematizes cosmos. Human violence often requires violent divine response, to affect a new creation (Gen. 3). In milḥāmâ (“battle”), Yahweh — a “warrior” (Exod. 15:3) — uses violence to rescue Israel. God, perceived as Israel’s sovereign patron, is always with them, even in violence. God wages war (lāḥam) on Israel’s behalf and calls Israel to war against the enemy, their mutual opponents. While only God affects the outcome, God may attack Israel for disobedience. God condones domestic violence in Deuteronomy, sanctions violence in the land conquest, and supports the demise of kingship. David’s saga reflects human collective violence, desire for power, rivalry, and scapegoating.

Prophetic literature lauds the day of the Lord and critiques the profane and religious understanding of violence, especially selfish gain that devastates society and the land. Some prophets protest their powerlessness. Others use battering imagery and misogynistic metaphors of marriage against women to deliver divine communication. In Job chaos meets gratuitous violence, and human suffering remains unanswered amid a divine litany on creation.

The practice of ḥāram, “ban, devote, destroy utterly,” requires one to “dedicate” something that resists God’s work. OT war texts contain complex war justifications, human violence, and sacrifice, glorification of warriors, and war-related deception. Humans attempt to make sense of killing amid compassion and malice.

Ancient peoples desired stability, intimately related to Yahweh, which grounded the sacrificial system. The covenants provided divine assurance that life could continue. Disturbances to such order involved evil, suffering, and death. Though God chose Israel, the Deuteronomistic history defends God’s retribution against Israel. Sometimes psalmists deny evil exists. In saving God’s honor, the Hebrew text sacrifices human integrity and dignity.

The OT distinguishes between legitimate force and violence, and talks about the Messiah ending violence and establishing justice (suffering servant). The NT sets out normative nonviolent intervention and resistance. Violence, the abuse of power, spirals from structural revolt, rebellion, repression. Such violence produced institutional vigilantism, which caused Jesus’ death.

The Synoptic Gospels depict divine and human violence: Jesus drives out unclean spirits; a spirit forces Jesus into the wilderness; establishment and mob crowds want to destroy Jesus. Such violence preserves the status quo. The NT exposes violence though is ambiguous regarding whether Jesus is a pacifist or a zealot (cf. Luke 22:35-38, 49-51). Jesus’ attitude toward the state results from his belief that soon God will judge, vindicate, and empower people (cf. Mark 12:14-17; cf. Rom. 13).

Within Jesus’ ministry and 1st-century Jewish Palestine, some social unrest existed. Within this communal cosmology of the religious and secular, Jesus is a catalyst of nonviolent social revolution. Jesus opposed all repressive and oppressive violence — but was probably not a pacifist. Jesus and his disciples sensed an imminent fulfillment of God’s rule, and their vindication by God (Mark 8:35-38; Luke 17:33). Jesus was a dangerous, revolutionary, popular leader, who viewed his work within God’s historical salvific acts, ongoing renewal, and fulfillment. Jesus preached God’s liberation, where “Love your enemies” indirectly caused political change and directly changed socioeconomic realities.

The Bible exposes societal violence in a cosmology that instigates violence. More than 600 passages of human violence and some 1000 passages of divine violence occur in the OT. A violent God emerges as an irrational killer, a vengeance seeker, one who sanctions through human beings, and a retributive consequentialist, toward new communal peace and love.

God uses violence to liberate in the Exodus; God experiences violence at the Cross. Divine violence exists dialectically opposite grace. Biblical texts disclose a Promised Land, an elect, patriarchal society with a gospel that discards these ideas by revealing scapegoat violence. Violence generated within institutionalized religion that orders societal powers is itself sacred violence. Jesus challenges the authority of sacred violence represented by the temple (Mark 11). Violence deflected on the victim is sacrifice; faith and prayer renounce vengeance and replace the sacrificial system. Violence is multifaceted injury and coercion. It destroys, describes, is personal and systemic, and shapes values, symbols, and habits.

Bibliography. R. Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore, 1977); R. G. Hammerton-Kelly, The Gospel and the Sacred: Poetics of Violence in Mark (Minneapolis, 1994); R. Horsley, Jesus and the Spiral of Violence (1987, repr. Minneapolis, 1993); B. J. Malina, “Establishment Violence in the New Testament World,” Scriptura 51 (1994): 51-78; S. Niditch, War in the Hebrew Bible (Oxford, 1993); R. Schwager, Must There Be Scapegoats? Violence and Redemption in the Bible (San Francisco, 1987); A. F. Venter, “Biblical Ethics and Christian Response to Violence,” Theologia Evangelica 24/2 (1991): 25-39; R. J. Weems, Battered Love: Marriage, Sex, and Violence in the Hebrew Prophets. OBT (Minneapolis, 1995); J. G. Williams, The Bible, Violence, and the Sacred (Valley Forge, 1995).

Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

VIOLENCE

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)