Volume 26 Dulcinea Boesenberg No. 2 Construction of Jewish Identity in Philo’s 2019 Sabbath Explanations Yonatan S. Miller Phinehas’ Priestly Zeal and the Violence of Contested Identities Jonathan Jacobs From France to Provence: The Influence of Ribash on Radak’s Commentary on the Pentateuch Gilad Sharvit History and Eternity: Rosenzweig and Kierkegaard on Repetition Mohr Siebeck Yonatan S. Miller University of Toledo, USA Phinehas’ Priestly Zeal and the Violence of Contested Identities* Abstract: Critics of biblical violence particularly scrutinize the case of Phinehas, the priestly zealot who publicly skewered an Israelite man and his Midianite con- sort in Numbers 25. Such studies are preoccupied with God’s approbation of this extra-judicial killing, and how later Jewish readers, from Philo through the rabbis, grappled with divine approval of vigilantism. I contend that these critiques devolve from a flattened and essentialized reading of Phinehas’ violence that disregards its biblical context and, by extension, its discursive function. Close examination reveals how Phinehas’ violence functions performatively to legitimate priestly identity in the face of contestation by rival groups. This essay recontextualizes Phinehas’ violence and traces how ancient and late antique Jewish writers detected the “world-making” functions of the biblical narrative, and shows how these later writers themselves deploy Phinehas’ violence, which they contemporize and even subvert, in the serv- ice of reinforcing their own group identities. Key words: Phinehas, biblical violence, priesthood, zealotry, world-making, group identity. Introduction: the violence-identity matrix The notion that violence is inextricably bound with the politics of identity has become almost axiomatic in recent writings, both scholarly and popu- lar.1 Thus, Amartya Sen has written, in a representative comment: * Portions of this article were presented at the “Violence and Representations of Vio- lence” section of the Society of Biblical Literature National Meeting in November 2014 and at the Yale Ancient Judaism Workshop in December 2014. I would like to address particular thanks to Ra‘anan Boustan and Christine Hayes for their invaluable com- ments in those venues. I would also like to thank Shaye J. D. Cohen, David Stern and Martha Himmelfarb for their guidance of my larger project on the motif of priestly violence in biblical and Jewish literature. 1 See, e. g., Amin Maalouf, In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Arcade, 2001); Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, eds., Vio- lence, Identity, and Self-Determination (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Nils Zurawski, “Girard Among the Paramilitaries of Ulster: Identity, History, and Violence,” Anthropoetics 8 (Summer 2002) [n. p.]; and see, most recently, Kimberly B. Stratton, “Narrating Violence, Narrating Self: Exodus and Collective Identity in Early Rabbinic Literature,” History of Religions 57 (2017) 68–92. JSQ 26 (2019), 117–145 DOI 10.1628/jsq-2019-0010 ISSN 0944–5706 © 2019 Mohr Siebeck e-offprint of the author with publisher’s permission. 118 Yonatan S. Miller JSQ [V]iolence is promoted by the cultivation of a sense of inevitability about some allegedly unique – often belligerent – identity that we are supposed to have and which apparently makes extensive demands on us (sometimes of a most disagree- able kind).2 Recent anthropological studies of violence have likewise appreciated this performative aspect of conflict. Moving beyond definitions of violence that often focus on kinetic acts of physical harm “deemed legitimate by the per- former and illegitimate by (some) witnesses,”3 Ingo Schröder and Bettina Schmidt rightly highlight violence as “a resource in world making, to assert one group’s claim to truth and history against rival claims.”4 Similar moves are found in the study of religion and violence.5 When it comes to the Hebrew Bible, for example, the notion that “acts of identity formation are themselves acts of violence” is central to Regina Schwartz’s critique of Isra- elite monotheism.6 The same goes for the reception of the Hebrew Bible, as argued by Kimberly Stratton, who has illustrated how “memories of trauma and narratives of violence and suffering constitute integral components in the formulation of collective identities.”7 Given the pronounced general shift towards reading the biblical text as historiography rather than history,8 as well as specific doubts surrounding 2 Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York: Norton, 2006) xii. 3 This is the widely discussed definition of David Riches, “The Phenomenon of Vio- lence,” in The Anthropology of Violence, ed. David Riches (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986) 8. I have borrowed the term “kinetic” violence from Joel Lemon, “Ancient Near Eastern Iconography and the Psalms,” in Oxford Handbook of the Psalms, ed. W. P. Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014) 377–391. 4 Ingo W. Schröder and Bettina E. Schmidt, “Introduction: Violent Imaginaries and Violent Practices,” in Anthropology of Violence and Conflict, ed. Bettina E. Schmidt and Ingo W. Schröder (London: Routledge, 2001) 9; see also Glenn Bowman, “The Violence in Identity,” 25–46. 5 See, e. g., James K. Wellman and Kyoko Tokuno, “Is Religious Violence Inevitable?” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 43 (2004) 291–296; Aziz Esmail, “Religion, Identity, and Violence,” in Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence, ed. Andrew R. Murphy (Malden: Blackwell, 2011) 50–65; Sudhir Kakar, The Colours of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion and Conflict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 6 Regina Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: Uni- versity of Chicago Press, 1997) 5. See also Wellman and Tokuno, “Religious Violence”; and Joel Kaminsky, “Did Election Imply the Mistreatment of Non-Israelites?” Harvard Theological Review 96 (2003) 397–425. 7 Stratton, “Narrating Violence,” 68. 8 The literature on this trend in biblical scholarship is vast; for an overview, see Megan Bishop Moore, Philosophy and Practice in Writing a History of Ancient Israel (New York: T& T Clark, 2006); Marc Z. Brettler, Creation of History in Ancient Israel (New York: Routledge, 1996) esp. 1–7. For a history of scholarship with an eye toward ideological e-offprint of the author with publisher’s permission. 26 (2019) Phinehas’ Priestly Zeal and the Violence of Contested Identities 119 the historicity of the centerpiece of biblical violence (viz., the conquest of Canaan9), these performative and world-making qualities of violence are all the more important to consider – or better yet, all that remain to con- sider. While scholars have recognized that “fictionalized history” is used to “to define motives, relations, and unfolding themes,”10 the discourse of violence adds a further dimension. Indeed, if physical violence is a touch- stone of particular significance for the expression of power, the discourse of violence serves a similar function: “Forms of rhetorical and cultural conflict function to vitalize and mobilize religious identity as well.”11 Narratives of violence offer a stylized and highly charged venue for creating new realities and power structures; they are “a kind of theater, where we collaborate in reinventing ourselves and authorizing notions, both individual and collec- tive, of who we are.”12 This essay explores the world-making functions of the violence of Phine- has, the zealous priestly vigilante, both in the Hebrew Bible (Numbers 25) and in the Jewish interpretive tradition. While there have been numerous studies of Phinehas, these have tended to focus on the implications of the bias, see Lowell K. Handy, “The Reconstruction of Biblical History and Jewish-Chris- tian Relations,” Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 5 (1991) 1–22. Cf. Zecharia Kallai, “Biblical Historiography and Literary History,” Vetus Testamentum 49 (1999) 338–350. 9 See, e. g., J. Maxwell Miller, “The Israelite Occupation of Canaan,” in Israelite and Judean History, ed. J. H. Hayes and J. M. Miller (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1977) 213–284; Lori Rowlett, Joshua and the Rhetoric of Violence: A New Historicist Analysis (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1996). On the relative value of war (albeit not the conquest of Canaan) in reconstructing Israelite history, see Megan Bishop Moore, “Fighting in Writing: Warfare in Histories of Ancient Israel,” in Writing and Reading War: Rhetoric, Gender, and Ethics in Biblical and Modern Contexts, ed. Brad Kelle and Frank Ames (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2008) 57–66. 10 Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 2011) 36–7; also Herbert Schneidau, Sacred Discontent: The Bible and Western Tradition (Berkeley: Uni- versity of California Press, 1976) Ch. 5, “The Bible and Literature: Against Positivism.” 11 Wellman and Tokuno, “Religious Violence,” 292. See also Ari Z. Bryen, Violence in Roman Egypt: A Study in Legal Interpretation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Bryen describes the rhetoric of violence as “a means through which people came to locate themselves within a social world” (205). 12 Michael Jackson, The Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression, and Intersub- jectivity (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2002) 16. See also A. C. G. M. Robben and Carolyn Nordstrom, “The Anthropology and Ethnography of Violence and Socio- political Conflict,” in Fieldwork Under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence