Adi Ophir, In the Beginning Was the State: Divine Violence in the Hebrew Bible (Fordham University Press, 2023).
After the divinely-authorized devastation of his land, children, and health, and the unwelcome attempts at comfort and justification by his putative friends, the biblical Job still insists upon his own righteousness, addressing himself to the God “who has deprived me of justice” and “embittered my life” (Job 28:2). “Far be it from me to say you are right,” Job declares; “I persist in my righteousness and will not yield; I shall be free of reproach as long as I live” (v. 6). Of course, Job does indeed finally relent before God’s declaration of His overwhelming power. Still, as Adi Ophir writes in the first chapter of his highly substantive study, “many readers of Job kept the text, and Job’s questions with it, open till this day” (44).
By “Job’s questions,” Ophir means the ones readers tend to ask whenever the God of the Hebrew Bible enacts, authorizes, or declines to intervene in the text’s frequent killings, wars, and genocidal campaigns: why is this God so violent? Where is the justice here? How can we still understand this God as good? How shall we as readers respond?
But while Ophir’s book is also about divine violence, his questions are blessedly less conventional queries. Rather, he writes as a political philosopher observing a governmental system and seeking to understand how it works, for better or worse. When does the sovereign act violently, and in response to what? (The biocidal flood of Genesis 6, for instance, occurs in the absence of any pre-existing law the people could know they were subject to, while the man gathering wood on the Sabbath in Numbers 15 is assumed to be well aware that this is a capital crime). How is God’s authority described in different texts? (In Egypt, God commands the regular Israelites almost not at all; in the desert, they are directly subject to his jealous wrath). What is the significance of different punishments? (Numbers 16, which describes the attempted rebellion of Korah and others, reports some people being swallowed by the earth, while others are killed by fire). When the strict why of God’s violence is broached - for this of course is also a meaningful political question - it is not to defend or justify to some liberal standard, but to identify the underlying political assumptions that might make a given act of divine violence consistent in its own governmental structure.
Ophir calls this approach “staying with the violence,” contrasting himself with other thinkers - Regina Schwartz, Michael Walzer, Jan Assmann, among others - whose analyses he characterizes as largely relegating God’s actions to an undifferentiated background condition for human action. Walzer’s 2012 book In God’s Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible, for instance, suggests that God operates outside of politics by definition. But, Ophir argues, “I see no reason to accept this presupposition and exclude God from the political realm. We should be interested in the shadow itself no less than in what takes place under the shadow, which, after all, is formed by the way God rules over heaven and earth, or his own people” (65). It is the presence of this God that helps to distinguish the Bible from any other account of fraught human community; why should it not get the same concentrated literary-political treatment? “We should always remember,” Ophir argues, “to figure out what God’s role was in the spectacular or slow unfolding of that violence. For without him things could easily become all too familiar” (39).
I am entirely persuaded by this textual orientation, even as I imagine Schwartz, Walzer, and Assmann would all contest Ophir’s characterization of their readings to some degree, arguing that they are largely concerned with the afterlives of prominent biblical themes, not the minute details of the text itself. But Ophir’s critique serves as an important corrective to the “paradigmatic” hermeneutic that animates much contemporary writing on the Bible’s politics and ethics. In works like these, the “local” details of a given passage are often far less important than the formal relationships between biblical actors and ideologies: God’s rejection of Cain’s offering introduces the theme of scarcity, for instance, or Moses represents contested political leadership. Meanwhile, the actual textual twists and turns - the precise geographies, details, and dialogical particularities that make the stories stories, not just word problems with an ancient near eastern flavor - do tend to fall to the side in these analyses.
Ophir is not himself “merely” reading the text, however. He too has overarching literary-political claims to make, as well as a more understated claim about the occluded biblical political significance for the construction of modern states. Focusing chiefly on the Pentateuch, his foundational argument is that divine violence in these texts may be divided into three “formations,” each representing a distinctive approach to theocratic governance, a way of doing theocracy. The Bible does not imagine any non-theocratic approach to Israelite governance, but it also does not display a consistent understanding of what this means. Rather, Ophir argues, each of the three approaches might be understood as an expression of its writer’s “theopolitical imagination,” three unfolding literary experiments in the structure and implications of a given theocratic theory. As he writes, “literary work - and the biblical texts are no exception - is a medium of experimentation…The biblical texts may always be read as doing this as well - experimenting with the figure of God and the imagination of living under his rule” (78; italics original).
Ophir does not construct the contours of each political configuration from scratch. Two of them generally, though not always, correspond to the Priestly and Deuteronomist sources in accordance with the documentary theory of Pentateuchal authorship; the political formation of the P writings he calls “the rule of the holy,” the D source is “the rule of law.” J and E sources, are read as sharing a theopolitical point of view (what Ophir calls a “protopolitical rule of disaster, and a “pre-priestly” formation), though - as he admits - the political elements in these texts are more fragmented, or episodic, than easily recognizable as a narrative unit.
Ophir’s dependence on the distinct narrative strands of the documentary hypothesis to represent different political theories suggests that he intends to make a historical argument, wherein each writer really is self-consciously crafting a theocratic model and exploring its implications through the narrative. In his more cautious moments, he describes his own method as experimental and hypothetical, useful even well beyond historical verification. I myself think the latter account is entirely sufficient for the sort of book that Ophir has written. The distinct documentary strands provide a general structure for more careful parsing, but he need not be constrained by them; they are useful in providing overarching containers within which incidents of divine violence can be more precisely categorized and compared.
But inasmuch as Ophir offers evidentiary justification for the “intentional” nature of biblical political theory, his foundational observation is narratively creative and politically evocative. In Ophir’s reading, all of the literary experiments in theocratic governance share a pivotal point: Egypt, and the Israelites’ wilderness experience that follows. The post-Egypt biblical world, he argues, is not simply a new phase in the Israelites’ political journey. Rather, the wilderness is unique in its marked emptiness - not only of (most) other peoples, but of nearly any conventional institutions. “The Israelites depicted in these texts walk and camp,” he observes, “but they do not work for their living; they get their provisions from God and live in a kind of autarkic system, and they do not make their clothes, build their tents, or even prepare the stuff needed for their cultive practice” (89). From Exodus 3 onward, he argues, “there is hardly any mention of a person, an artifact, an animal or a plate, a particular site, or an environmental or meteorological phenomenon that is not related to God’s words and deeds, his laws, threats, and promises.” The Egypt campaign, and the wilderness decades, therefore are drenched with God - and devoid of nearly anything else.
Ophir’s emphasis on Egypt and its aftermath is of course not original to him. But Ophir’s overarching argument - that episodes of divine violence in the Bible can be divided into multiple literary experiments with ways of enacting theocratic governance - helps to markedly distinguish his reading of the wilderness from others. Here, the emptiness of the wilderness serves as a kind of blank political slate for the biblical narrators to perform their experimentation, where they can most clearly consider the features of God’s political relationship to his people, imagine various way that God might govern, and observe the (frequently violent) expressions of these theocratic formations. No other biblical texts, Ophir argues, “share the setting, the intensity, and the expansion of the Pentateuchal thought experiment. For nowhere else do these unique conditions - a remote time combined with a no-man’s land and a political space devoid of political institutions - hold” (89). The Exodus from Egypt creates what he calls “the Bible’s equivalent of a ‘state of nature’...where the Bible’s clearest thinking on divine power, authority, and violence takes place (89).
Three chapters of Ophir’s book are devoted to identifying and exploring the nature and function of God’s violence in the three theopolitical formations. Chapter 4, for instance, presents the theocratic experiment of the priestly narratives (what Ophir calls the “rule of the holy,” with particular attention to the attempted rebellion of Korah and others in Numbers 16). In Ophir’s terms, the right questions to ask might include: what are the political implications of an absolute distinction between holiness and profanity? How do the priests regulate interactions between God and humans, given the highly reactive nature of this God? (As Ophir notes, a “regime of holiness” is not politically necessary unless this God yearns to connect with humans; without this desire, God could keep a distance from the ever-present possibility of profanation). In this reading, God emerges not as a perfect or static entity but rather a Sovereign seeking to establish a sustainable relationship with humans amidst the dangerous and exacting demands of his own holiness. Moses’ and Aaron’s pleadings with this God to curtail his violence in some situations reflect the dynamic nature of the priestly theocracy; like a fire-breathing dragon trying to make friends with the local peasants, both God and the Israelites must learn how to live together on workable, if precarious, terms.
The virtues of Ophir’s interpretative approach should be evident, but are important to note. First, Ophir is not invested in recuperating God’s violent actions, only in understanding them on internal political terms, so we are spared any apologetics and he is able to read the text more expansively. Nor, however, does he need to critique God or the people on moral or political grounds; their actions, advised or not, are elements in political-literary experiments, not obvious recommendations for readers. Ophir is also frequently attentive to small details in his analysis, the things that give the Bible its lively (if often bizarre) literary qualities. Regarding the application of modern political theory throughout his interpretations - the priestly theocracy described above, for instance, is theorized with the notion of “states of exception” - readers may differ in how persuasive they find these, but they are in any case good conversation-starters for far more specific discussions about intra-biblical politics under the reign of a very violent God.
In his introduction, Ophir promises some closing considerations about the relationship between the proposed three biblical theocratic models and the development of the modern nation-state. These do not really emerge again until the Afterward, which is as it should be; having criticized other thinkers’ too-hasty moves from Bible’s narrative particularities to the general features of modern politics, it would not do to make these connections too quickly. But Ophir’s ultimate characterization of what his three theocratic models share does have extra-textual political implications. Despite their significant differences in the character of the Sovereign and the structure of his rule, all have a “self-constituted formation of power shared by both ruler and ruled, in which the ruler is in constant need of affirmation and recognition and the ruled all too often fail or refuse to grant them” (244). This “urform,” as Ophir calls it, should actually ring a bell: it “highly resembles the basic matrix of the modern European state.” Ophir insists that he is not simply claiming the modern sovereign as a “secularized political concept,” but something deeper: a deification of the state itself, as the one concept that we cannot think without, just as the biblical writers could not imagine not being ruled by God. In this formulation, Ophir writes with some drama, “the state is one. You should not have other states beside your own and only state.” (This God, unlike many modern nation-states, does not permit dual citizenship). And the “contemporary wretched of the earth” are precisely they who are stateless, which is to say, very far from our modern God.
As a description of modern nation-states, this actually seems fairly uncontroversial to me; far more people kill and die on behalf of their state than any other formation, including explicitly theological ideologies, and much of the time that violence is far more legible (even if troubling) to us than other kinds. In the US, it is the state that determines which expressions of religiosity ought to be constitutionally protected and which may be rejected because of a “compelling state interest.” Work like Ophir’s is of course not the only way to bring attention to these realities, but it is certainly one way.
I admit that, in principle, I am suspicious of approaches to the Bible based in the construction of any grand unified theory. I firmly believe that we read the text best when we come to it with as few expectations as possible, and with the assumption that the text - in all its small details, evocative gaps, and narrative oddities - will inevitably overflow any externally imposed theory under which we hope to subsume it. The text’s perennial resistance to our desires for it is, in my view, it’s very best feature. There are any number of places in Ophir’s book where his characterization is entirely plausible - but so are plenty of other readings, which may or may not accord with his overarching political-literary claims. Moreover, and importantly, the clarity of his narrative reconstructions really vacillates. Sometimes he cites liberally from the Bible, grounding his political characterizations in specific quotes, while other times, he describes a setting or situation in much more obstruse terms, even when referring to something specific. In the Deuteronomic theocracy, for instance, he refers to the “futurity of the sanctuary” (199), which sounds right to me, but might certainly be expressed in more concrete terms. It still counts as a close reading, I think, but by a far less accessible method, and likely to lose readers who are less minutely familiar with the Bible or the terms of political theoretical discourse. This latter methodological observation is my biggest critique of the book.
Even so, Ophir’s concerted effort to take accounts of the God’s violence seriously as literature, allowing their details, settings, and differences to emerge, is very deserved of praise. At the very least, his challenge should make it more difficult for future writers to get away with shallower, more general descriptions of divine violence. His willingness to imagine the Pentateuchal writers as working through political questions in the narrative, instead of just laying down conclusions, invites readers to do the same. As a result, his interpretive journey is just as (if not more) important than any theopolitical destination.
Emily Filler is Assistant Professor of Religion at Washington and Lee University.