The Aesthetics of Violence in the Prophets, edited by Chris Franke and Julia M. O'Brien

Lately there has been a surge of studies variously construed as focused on "religion and violence," "the Bible and violence" or "God and violence." Most of these studies are not very helpful, for they dismiss the shrill reality of violence in facile ways. Among the strategies of dismissal are an evolutionary hypothesis that religion has outgrown such primitivism, assertions that texts must be taken symbolically rather than literally, and a flat-out Marcionite maneuver that selects the good stuff and rejects the negative—a move that produces what Yvonne Sherwood, in this edited collection, terms "the Liberal Bible":

The Liberal Bible . . . represented a compromise settlement between the Bible and proto-democracy and signalled the transformation of Bible from a complex and variegated text to a cultural symbol or icon—a reduction of Bible to a few axiomatic politico-theological principles that could be liberally applied. . . . The Liberal Bible maintained that true scripture must be ethical and legal; it supported the universal and denounced the arbitrary and capricious; and it supported consensus and consultation and shunned acts of sovereign exceptionality and raw force.

The Aesthetics of Violence in the Prophets is unlike such dismissive trivialization. It takes violent rhetoric seriously as a powerful datum of the Bible that is substantive and intentional and not as simply an embarrassing side issue. The book consists of nine essays by scholars who are skilled in theory and are acute in their interpretive capacity and theological sensibility.