Staying with the Violence

Abstract

A series of scenes where God inflicts massive, extreme violence are introduced, and then juxtaposed with various ways in which the phenomenology of this violence has been avoided and its political nature has been explained away. The chapter argues for a political reading of divine violence and, using a phenomenological analysis, sketches a political concept of violence to guide this reading. The chapter shows that there is no biblical term that can capture this concept of violence or could be used as a translation of ‘divine violence.’ Nevertheless, insisting on a literal reading of the rich biblical lexicon for terms describing multiple aspects and contexts of violence, the chapter argues that this lexicon allows for a non-anachronistic use of the term ‘divine violence’ and for its interpretation along the lines suggested by the concept of violence presented here.