Violence and the Bible

“The violence in the Bible is appalling,” wrote Christopher Hitchens — a provocation that invites not dismissal but investigation. This course takes that challenge seriously. Violence and the Bible explores how the Bible constructs, authorizes, ritualizes, and at times contests violence — physical, social, epistemic, and divine. No body of literature has been more influential for Western and colonial imaginaries of gender, sexuality, race, and peoplehood than the Bible.

What does it mean that the founding texts of Western civilization are saturated with violence? That God commands genocide, that women’s bodies are exchanged and violated as instruments of political power, that law is written in blood and enforced through spectacular punishment? This course does not treat these elements as embarrassments to be explained away, nor as historical curiosities safely distant from our present. Instead, we read them as central to the Bible’s narrative and moral architecture and to the long afterlife of these texts in Western culture.

Through close readings of selected texts from the Hebrew and Greek Bibles, we will examine scenes of conquest and displacement, divine wrath and covenant, ritualized punishment, sexual violence, and the regulation of bodies and boundaries. We will ask how violence is narrated — who speaks, who suffers, whose pain is visible and whose is not. We will attend to the literary and rhetorical strategies by which violent acts are authorized, aestheticized, or quietly normalized, and to the moments where the text itself seems to resist or complicate its own scripts.

We will also trace how these ancient narratives have been received and mobilized across later histories — from imperial conquest and nation-building to contemporary religious and political rhetoric — with particular attention to how biblical violence has shaped, and continues to shape, cultures of gender, race, and power.

No prior knowledge of the Bible required.