Adi Ophir, In the Beginning Was the State: Divine Violence in the Hebrew Bible (Fordham University Press, 2023).... 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. ...
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