Biblical Views: The Bible and Religious Violence

Home > Magazines > BAR > March/April 2016

Religious violence is a problem in the world today. We have seen too many cases where fundamentalist terrorists kill innocent people in the name of God. Recently in Paris and San Bernardino, radical Islamic terrorists murdered innocent people in the name of Allah. But radical Islam is not alone. We have also seen fundamentalist terrorist attacks in the name of the Christian and Jewish God: Recently a Christian terrorist murdered innocent people at an abortion clinic in Colorado Springs, and Jewish terrorists murdered a Palestinian family in Duma in a revenge attack. The name of God differs—Allah, Christ, Ha-Shem—but […]

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Endnotes

1. See Philip D. Stern, The Biblical Ḥerem: A Window on Israel’s Religious Experience (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991); Susan Niditch, War in the Hebrew Bible: A Study in the Ethics of Violence (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993); John J. Collins, Does the Bible Justify Violence? (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004).

2. Mario Liverani, The Ancient Near East: History, Society and Economy (London: Routledge, 2014), p. 510.