Is It a Violent Rhetoric? Exactly? Incidental?

i'm teaching class in joshua now, and we're reading from deutoronomy 13. And that's one where the violent rhetoric is so intense to read because it goes through people you should not pity or spare. It uses intentionally intimate language, like your very own son or daughter, or the wife you embrace. So i think you're right that, even if we can't say what that does to us exactly in terms of ethical formation, it is in something.