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Killing for God:
The anthropology of violence in
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
A five-session mini-course
Instructor:
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Dr. Gerald Murray, Dept. of Anthropology, University of Florida
[email protected]
http://web.clas.ufl.edu/users/murray/bnei.israel
Wednesdays from 7:30 to 9:00, Nov. 1 to Nov. 29, 2006
Congregation Bnei- Israel, Gainesville, Florida
Background and rationale for the course
This will be a series of five lecture / discussion sessions focusing on religiously
motivated violence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
The three major Abrahamic religions are predicated on belief in a Supreme Being who
issues commandments and who rewards and punishes followers. In Judaism of the
Biblical period, the rewards (longevity, prosperity, fertility, abundant rain and abundant
harvests and livestock) and punishments (war, famine, drought, early or violent death)
were worldly rather than in the afterlife. But today traditions in all three religions teach
about a differentiated afterlife where the good will be rewarded and sinners punished
after death, either eternally or temporarily.
At different periods of their history, religious authorities have told practitioners in each of
the three traditions that, as a condition of reward or punishment, God commands or
approves of their killing and / or enslaving of others for his sake. At this period of
history the violent elements in Islam are at the forefront of international attention, with
suicide bombings and televised beheadings in the name of the Islamic deity. Statements
about Christian violence almost inevitably bring up the Crusades and, later, the
Inquisition of the past. Christianity has left that phase behind, with contemporary Popes
and most other Christian leaders now condemning war, including the current war in Iraq.
The Baptist White-House Warriors, in control of powerful weaponry, represent
nonetheless a minority view in the Christian world.
Of the three religions Judaism would seem to be the religion with least “blood on its
hands”. The non-violent character of most contemporary rabbinic Judaism, however, was
heavily shaped by nearly two millennia of experience as a threatened minority religion
with no State or army. But the divinely mandated violence found in several parts of the
Hebrew scriptures, and the genocidal commands to exterminate all living beings, both
human and animal, in certain Canaanite kingdoms, exceeds in intensity any exhortations
to violence found in either the New Testament or the Qur’an.
In short, if divinely mandated massacres are now considered aberrant, then all three
Abrahamic religions have theological skeletons in their historical closets.
Objectives
A major objective of this five-session mini-course is to submit these skeletons to
dispassionate forensic identification and analysis, in hopes that this comparative grasp of
the religiously violent past will help us to contextualize the religious violence of the
present. Participants will receive a comparative anthropological overview of divinely
mandated killing and enslavement in the three Abrahamic traditions. The course will
identify and discuss texts from the Tenach, the New Testament, and the Qur’an which
endow violence with divine legitimization.
But we will avoid attributing exaggerated importance to the written word. One of the
core anthropological premises of the course is that religious violence is less a product of
sacred texts than of evolving access by religious leaders to armies and state-of-the-art
weaponry. Religious texts are cited or manipulated by religious leaders to justify violent
behaviors that may have other wellsprings. Hatred and rage, generated by social,
material, or even intrapsychic factors, may be guided by religious leaders, citing religious
texts, into violent expressions that will presumably win the favor of God.
The course will recognize the power of texts, but emphasize the stronger causal power
of religious leaders to manipulate the minds of large masses. A Mid-East leader is
currently threatening to develop nuclear technology and is simultaneously advocating, in
the name of his deity, that Israel be wiped off the map, even if it means losing most of his
own population. This impending apocalyptic scenario, where killing for God could occur
on an unprecedented scale, endows the subject matter of this mini-course with a certain
contemporary relevance.
Format:
Each session will begin with 45 minutes to an hour of a presentation of some theme by
the instructor. But because the topic is controversial, a half-hour or more of each 90minute session will ideally be dedicated to discussion and debate. Relevant readings will
either be posted on the instructor’s website or handed out in class.
Sequence of Topics:
The following sequence of topics is subject to modification on the basis of topics that
emerge during discussions as worthy of more intensive analysis. The points raised under
each general topic are guidelines for exposition and discussion. Time constraints may
prevent extended coverage of any particular point.
Nov. 1.
Setting the analytic stage: Religion and violence in broad anthropological
perspective. Rapid overview of the Tenach, the New Testament, and the
Qur'an. Human sacrifice and animal sacrifice.
Nov. 8
Judaism and divinely legitimized violence. The warrior God of the Hebrews.
Lethal and direct divine interventions: killing of firstborn, drowning of
Pharaoh’s army. Divine commands to exterminate certain populations.
Mitigating passages in the Tenach, and later regulatory prohibitions against
wanton killing in Philo, Josephus, the Mishna, the Gemara, Maimonides and
later Jewish writers.
Nov. 15 Christianity and religious violence. From liberating Messiah to Prince of
Peace. Turn-the-other-cheek: Pacifist character of early Christian texts.
Constantine, the sword, and the cross. Debunking the Da Vinci code: warrior
monks of the Knights Templar. Demystifying the Crusades and the
Inquisition. The popes and the Jews. The tense alliance: Contemporary
Christian pacifism and militancy. Pacifist popes and Baptist White-House
warriors. Christian Zionists in Israel: keeping Armageddon on schedule.
Nov. 22 Islam and religious violence. Prophet-and-Warrior. The concept of jihad:
what does the Qur’an actually say about “killing infidels”? Internal divisions
in Islam: Sunni and Shi’a. Arab armies and the westward and northward
spread of Islam. Arab merchants and the southward and eastward spread of
Islam. Jews in the Arab world: pre-1948. Suicide belts and the embrace of
celestial virgins. Wahabi and Al Qaeda: rejected extremist minority or
mainstream popular heroes in the Muslim world?
Nov. 29 The State of Israel and religiously motivated violence. Theology and
weaponry reunited after two millennia: the birth of “Uzi Judaism”? The two
major religious streams in Israel: Datiim Leumim who serve in the army and
Charedim who prefer the Gemara to the gun., letting others do the fighting.
Jews in Gaza and the West Bank: Fundamentalist fanatics or defenders of the
outer perimeter? Secular (Al Fatah) and religious (Hamas) Palestinian
movements. Hizbollah: Altar Boys of the Iranian Ayatollahs? Three scenarios
for the Israel of 2050: ethnic Jewish secular State, Torah State, Islamic State.
Background of the Instructor
Prof. Gerald Murray, on the faculty of the Anthropology Department of UF, has his B.A.
from Harvard and Ph.D. from Columbia. Author of three books and over fifty articles
and contract research reports, he has done fieldwork in Haiti and the Dominican
Republic, Central and South America, East and West Africa, the Indian Ocean, and, more
recently, in an Israeli religious moshav in the Gaza Strip before its forced evacuation and
destruction. He has studied fifteen languages, including Hebrew, Aramaic, Koine (New
Testament) Greek, and Latin. He is currently studying Arabic.