In the Beginning Was the State
Divine Violence in the Hebrew Bible
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This book explores God’s use of violence as depicted in the Hebrew Bible. Focusing on the Pentateuch, it reads biblical narratives and codes of law as documenting formations of theopolitical imagination. Ophir deciphers the logic of divine rule that these documents betray, with a special attention to the place of violence within it. The book draws from contemporary biblical scholarship, while also engaging critically with contemporary political theory and political theology, including the work of Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, Jan Assmann, Regina Schwartz, and Michael Walzer.
Ophir focuses on three distinct theocratic formations: the rule of disaster, where catastrophes are used as means of governance; the biopolitical rule of the holy, where divine violence is spatially demarcated and personally targeted; and the rule of law where divine violence is vividly remembered and its return is projected, anticipated, and yet postponed, creating a prolonged lull for the text’s present.
Different as these formations are, Ophir shows how they share an urform that anticipates the main outlines of the modern European state, which has monopolized the entire globe. A critique of the modern state, the book argues, must begin in revisiting the deification of the state, unpacking its mostly repressed theological dimension.
Ophir’s fascinating study of divine violence turns political theology upside down. Where others saw a solution, he sees a problem, identifying three distinct theocracies offered by the Pentateuch, in which the acceptance of God’s rule is combined with extreme violence. Articulating the archaic and the modern in the state as a political form of governmentality, he analyses our subjection to the law in a radically new manner.---Etienne Balibar, author of Violence and Civility
Ophir’s analysis of violence in the Bible goes beyond any I’ve seen. Not everyone will agree with Ophir’s conclusions, but the book must be read, digested, and confronted by anyone interested in political theology.---Daniel Boyarin, University of California, Berkeley
Acknowledgments | vii
Introduction | 1
1. Staying with the Violence | 13
Divine Violence—A Trailer, 13 • A Brief Note on Counting and Explaining
Away, 21 • Violence, as It Is Unfolding: A Phenomenological Sketch, 24 •
Literal Reading and the Biblical Language of Violence, 36
2. Theocracy: The Persistence of an Ancient Lacuna | 45
Theocracy, with and beyond Flavius Josephus, 45 • The Blind Spot:
Three Contemporary Readings of Biblical Violence, 53 • On the
Attribution of Power and Authority, 74 • Kingship, Anarchy,
Theocracy, 79 • Hypothesis, Method, and Stakes, 86
3. The Rule of Disaster: Extinction, Genocides, and Other Calamities | 96
Becoming Political, 96 • From Extinction to Genocide, 99 •
Beyond Destruction, 105 • Separation and Disaster, 113 •
Violence and Law, 124 • The Sovereign’s Moment, 130 • Scouts
in the Land of the Giants: Three Theocratic Formations, 139
4. Holy Power: States of Exception, Targeted Killings, and the Logic of Substitution | 145
Holiness, 145 • Rebellions in the Wilderness, 160 • Substitution
and Containment, 178
5. The Time of the Covenant and the Temporalization of Violence | 193
The Experimental Setting: Recalling Violence and Regulating It, 196 •
The Covenant and the Curses, 204 • The Weight of the Present, 214 •
The Subjects’ Trap, or the People’s Irony, 222 • A Midianite Utopia, 230
Afterword: The Pentateuchal State, and Ours | 241
Notes | 257
Works Cited | 317
Index | 335
