A Cry Instead of Justice: The Bible and Cultures of Violence in Psychological Perspective

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Within a book widely touted as the path to peace, violence has incongruously been central to the Bible and how it is used. This collection book examines the manifestations of violence in Scripture, and the ways that Scripture itself - whether violent in content or not - can be used to justify violence and aggression in specific social circumstances today. The book is divided into two parts. The first half explores some incidents of Biblical violence that, rather than appearing at the forefront of the narrative, reflect that ancient Jewish culture (including the early Christian movement recorded in the New Testament) treats violence as an undeniable fact of the social world in which biblical figures live. In these essays, psychological theory and interpretation focus on the effect of this culture of violence in the behavior, expectations, and failures of Biblical figures, in order to re-evaluate the messages of these texts in light of their accepted, but largely unacknowledged,aggression. The second half uses psychological models to understand how Biblical doctrine and ideals shape the world in which we live, and introduce patterns of aggression and acceptance of violence into family, cultural, and political situations. Altogether, this collection of essays seeks to shed light on how the Bible relates to violence - and how many people relate to violence, consciously or not, through the stories and dynamics.

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Mentioned in Hebrew Studies, Volume LII.

Author Bio

Dereck Daschke is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Truman State University and the chair of the Psychology and Biblical Studies Section of the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting. D. Andrew Kille, Ph.D., is director of Interfaith Space in San Jose, California. He is an Associate Editor of The Bible Workbench, and former chair of the Psychology and Biblical Studies Section of the SBL. He has written extensively in psychological biblical criticism; his latest book, edited with Wayne G. Rollins, is Psychological Insight into the Bible: Texts and Readings (Eerdmans, 2007).