Fighting Talk – Motivating Violence in Ancient Judaism

This project, entitled Fighting Talk: Motivating Violence in Ancient Judaism, will examine examples of pre-battle speeches recorded in ancient Jewish literature, to determine how such speeches reflect forms of motivation to violence within Judaism, how such speeches draw from and respond to other literary templates, and to further explore the relationship between literary representations of pre-battle exhortations and their oral counterparts. The principal goal of FTMVAJ is to gather and analyse a comprehensive group of ancient Jewish pre-battle exhortations, using appropriate methodological considerations including but not limited to linguistic analysis, role of violence in the speech, actions anticipated following the speech, the identity of the speaker and audience both within the narrative and as a literary work, and intertextuality. Additionally, I will create a suitable framework for understanding these collected speeches and explicate common features. These features will be further compared with Greek and Roman counterparts to examine the relationship between Jewish and non-Jewish examples of ancient pre-battle speech. The project’s goals will be measured by the following deliverables: academic publications, dissemination and communication activities. The research is of significance to several academic fields and has importance for public understanding of differences in core motivations between ethnic and religious groups, and furthermore, any who employ biblical texts to incite collective violence. FTMVAJ also has significant contributions to make for modern contexts, wherein holy texts are used to justify imagined and real violence.