In the Beginning Was the State

Adi M. Ophir is a Visiting Professor at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University and Professor Emeritus at Tel Aviv University. Among his works are Goy: Israel's Multiple Others and the Birth of the Gentile, co‑authored with Ishay Rosen-Zvi (Oxford University Press, 2018); Divine Violence: Two Essays on God and Disaster (The Van Leer Institute, 2013); The One-State Condition, co‑authored with Ariella Azoulay (Stanford University Press, 2012); and The Order of Evils: Toward an Ontology of Morals (Zone, 2005).

• Acknowledgments viiIntroduction 11. Staying with the Violence 13Divine Violence—A Trailer, 13 • A Brief Note on Counting and ExplainingAway, 21 • Violence, as It Is Unfolding: A Phenomenological Sketch, 24 •Literal Reading and the Biblical Language of Violence, 362. Theocracy: The Persistence of an Ancient Lacuna 45Theocracy, with and beyond Flavius Josephus, 45 • The Blind Spot:Three Contemporary Readings of Biblical Violence, 53 • On theAttribution of Power and Authority, 74 • Kingship, Anarchy,Theocracy, 79 • Hypothesis, Method, and Stakes, 863. The Rule of Disaster: Extinction, Genocides, and Other Calamities 96Becoming Political, 96 • From Extinction to Genocide, 99 •Beyond Destruction, 105 • Separation and Disaster, 113 •Violence and Law, 124 • The Sovereign's Moment, 130 • Scoutsin the Land of the Giants: Three Theocratic Formations, 1394. Holy Power: States of Exception, Targeted Killings, and the Logic of Substitution 145Holiness, 145 • Rebellions in the Wilderness, 160 • Substitutionand Containment, 1785. The Time of the Covenant and the Temporalization of Violence 193The Experimental Setting: Recalling Violence and Regulating It, 196 •The Covenant and the Curses, 204 • The Weight of the Present, 214 •The Subjects' Trap, or the People's Irony, 222 • A Midianite Utopia, 230Afterword: The Pentateuchal State, and Ours 241Notes 257Works Cited 317Index 335