JBL 122/1 (2003) 3–21 THE ZEAL OF PHINEHAS: THE BIBLE AND THE LEGITIMATION OF VIOLENCE JOHN J. COLLINS
[email protected] Yale University, New Haven, CT 06511 “The Bible, of all books, is the most dangerous one, the one that has been endowed with the power to kill,” writes Mieke Bal.1 Like many striking apho- risms, this statement is not quite true. Some other books, notably the Qur<an, are surely as lethal, and in any case, to coin a phrase, books don’t kill people. But Professor Bal has a point nonetheless. When it became clear that the ter- rorists of September 11, 2001, saw or imagined their grievances in religious terms, any reader of the Bible should have had a flash of recognition. The Mus- lim extremists drew their inspiration from the Qur<an rather than the Bible, but both Scriptures draw from the same wellsprings of ancient Near Eastern reli- gion. While it is true that both Bible and Qur<an admit of various readings and emphases, and that terrorist hermeneutics can be seen as a case of the devil cit- ing Scripture for his purpose, it is also true that the devil does not have to work very hard to find biblical precedents for the legitimation of violence. Many peo- ple in the modern world suspect that there is an intrinsic link between violence and what Jan Assmann has called “the Mosaic distinction” between true and false religion,2 or even between violence and monotheism or monolatry.3 Such claims are, no doubt, too simple.