And

of course, i'm a huge fan of just that approach, because you're thinking about the conceptual world of the biblical authors, which is something i'm very big into. But i part of my question when yo, i think you initially sent me this manuscript, is i thought, wait, nobody's done this before, which i guess is a sign of a good idea, right? But im why do you think nobody has come it it quite this way before? I mean, certainly people have come it in bits and pieces, but why is yours the first book in 20 20 on this topic? Yes,

i i mean, ther there might be something out there that i'm still not aware of. But, but i think that, i think the subject matter almost propels us too quickly into the apologetic mode, or the in both senses of the term. So apologetics either defending scripture against the idea, okw, against the attack that god is inherently violent or immoral, or on the other side, sort of the kind of apologetics that i guess you ud say sort of defends readers a from the bible itself. And id is is kind of playing that moral angle of we need to protect ourselves as readers against this monstrous god of scripture. And so i think, i think the subject matter of violence just kind of forces us so quickly into that mode of inquiry that maybe we don't stop and ask os prior questions. Yes,

i think of a your book, i've called it in my head. It's called portraying violence, but i think of it as the grammar of violence, which i think is a term or phrase that you use throughout the book. And you actually talk about four grammars um in the hebrew bible, using grammars a kind of metaphor here, a catch all. You talk aobout ecological, moral speech, judicial grammar and purity. I think most people will be caught off gard. Ah, that those are the four grammars of violence in the hebrew bible. I think it a good way that should catch us off guard. Why these four? And why not, you know, conquest, genicide, god's wrath, i think, would be one of the grammars that people would have expected. So how did you narrow down to these four? Yes,

so that my approach to the question of violence, again, was not so much, what do we as readers do to account for this violence in the biblend and still maintain faith, or, again, sort of defend readers against the god of scripture, but rather, how how do biblical writers think about the problem in the first place? Like, to put it simply, what's so wrong with violence? Asking that question forced me to sort of want to put violence in relation to, like, the discourse around violence. And so to do that, you have to look at, like, what are the, what are the values that come into into collocation, into connection with violence throughout scripture? And and what do those kind of value configurations yield for us as readers? And so so i kind of ask myself, like, what are those concerns and patterns of representation that we see consistently throughout scripture? That sort of led me to look carefully at all the texts that explicitly refer to violence in negative terms, like, in other words, like as a problem. And and then to look at, ok, what are the, what are the specific values that it comes into connection with? So with the ecology gramar, the value that that violence frequently comes into connection with is the preservation or the integrity of creation. And so violence is seen as something that tears at thatt that pulls creation apart, and that threatens instability in the created order or death in the created order. So so that that became the sort of grammar lens for thinking about violence as a problem. It destroys creation, it tears it apart. Same with moral speech. I saw, i noticed that consistently in the psalms and proverbs, violence is seen as something that's rooted in and connected to deceitful and arrogant speech. And so that's of particular value configuration that we should pay attention to, because that's how the bible is setting the field when discussing violence.