The theological and political legitimizing element of violence in jewish tradition: Tanakh

In this study, the relationship between Jewish tradition and violence was examined in the context of the Tanakh. Analyzing the messages about violence in the Tanakh literature is important both in terms of clarifying the relationship between Jewish tradition and violence and in determining the basis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Because the Jewish identity, defined as pacifist for about one thousand eight hundred years, had taken on a militaristic character with the emergence of Zionist ideology, and apocalyptic expectations that had been going on for thousands of years had largely been replaced by a restorative/activist messianic understanding. In this process, despite the fact that the founders and supporters of the Zionist ideology had a secular world view, their application to the Tanakh to support their claims on the land brought the instrumental use of the themes of chosen race belief, promised land belief and Messianic thought contained in the Tanakh literature. In this study, it was aimed to examine the Tanakh literature, which forms the basis of the Jewish religious tradition, in terms of violence. While examining the subject, the sacred texts of the Jewish tradition were discussed with their theological and political dimensions; election, belief in the holy land and the idea of messiah in these texts were emphasized, and the role of these themes on today's Israel-Palestine conflict was tried to be explained. The passages about war and violence were not only discussed literally but also interpreted taking into account historical conditions. Although the subject of the research was handled with the phenomenological method based on the Bible, historical, descriptive and comparison methods were also applied, and philology was used in the concept analysis. The scope of the study was limited to the Tanakh literature, and violent acts from the holy book period to the present were included in the context of the Tanakh teachings. The study was arranged in two parts. In the first part, the projection of violence in the Tanakh literature, and in the second part, the theological and political infrastructure of violence in Judaism were emphasized. As a result of the research, it was seen that the sacred texts of the Jewish tradition had a polyphonic structure related to the theme of peace and war, additionally, it was emphasized that violence came to the fore as a dominant theme and guided the Zionist violence.