{"id":60270,"date":"2019-07-30T09:33:17","date_gmt":"2019-07-30T06:33:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/?p=60270"},"modified":"2023-02-21T15:21:48","modified_gmt":"2023-02-21T13:21:48","slug":"violence-turned-inward","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/violence-turned-inward\/","title":{"rendered":"Violence Turned Inward"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[281],"tags":[834,423,503,543],"acf":{"old_id":"60270","type":"no","iframe":"","writer":56443,"related_cahpter":"274","type_929":"2","show_author_image":false,"old_create_date":"","old_url":"","post_main_content":{"description":"And feeling no need for discretion, David was confident to the point of recklessness\u00a0","content":"

In the world portrayed by the Book of Samuel, organized political structures — especially the powers to tax and conscript — originate in violence. They arise initially from the need to establish an adequate collective response to hostile outside forces. This originally defensive political project, as the author of the Book of Samuel understood it, is inescapably afflicted by the prospect of a self-defeating turnaround: if the sovereign ruler amasses sufficient power to safeguard his people from outside threats, he will also be in a position to redirect that power to torment and abuse his people with sovereign impunity.<\/span><\/p>\n

The subtlest features of this imperious rechanneling of political violence from foreign threats toward the king\u2019s own subjects go far beyond the potentially unfair but in principle acceptable burdens of taxation and conscription against which the prophet Samuel so heatedly warned. These features are explored through two narratives that recount the king\u2019s indefensible killing of innocents — first, Saul\u2019s massacre of the priests of Nob in 1 Samuel 22 and second, David\u2019s muder of his loyal officer Uriah along with the collateral killing of some of Israel\u2019s best soldiers in 2 Samuel 11. Read closely, the beautifully crafted stories of these morally unjustifiable slayings, set in diverse contexts and authorized by two very different kings, convey the Samuel author\u2019s penetrating grasp of the origins and nature of political crime\u2026.<\/span><\/p>\n

Unlike the paranoid Saul, who feverishly mistrusted his inner circle, David was coolly confident to the point of recklessness. He felt no particular need for discretion. He sent one messenger to inquire about the beautiful woman and he sent others to fetch her and bring her to his palace. But David\u2019s nonchalance conveys more than the careless mind-set of a domestically unchallenged ruler. As other readers of these verses have noted, the verb \u201csend\u201d dominates the narrative. By repeatedly employing this verb, the author wishes to stress a central feature of both the way power is constituted and how it operates.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hierarchically organized power is defined by the power-wielder\u2019s capacity to act from a distance. Delegation involves the capacity to create extended causal chains, embroiling and implicating multiple subordinates whose actions radiate downward from an apex or outward from a center. The longer the chain, the greater the power of the sovereign who acts invisibly though its multiple links. It is as if the arm of the sovereign literally reached its remote objective through a succession of proxies carrying out his commands. So the repetition of the verb \u201csend,\u201d which pervades the entire narrative, emphasizes the centrality of acting from a distance to the exercise of great political power. The ruler\u2019s numerous messengers, surrogates, and agents serve not only as tools of his power but, more significantly in the present context, as decoys obscuring the initiator\u2019s identity and disguising his stage-management of the way the action unfolds.<\/span><\/p>\n

Excerpts from The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 Moshe Halbertal and Stephen Holmes, Princeton University Press, 2017, pp. 81-82.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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