This volume is one of the fruits of a series of international conferences held at the Centre for the Study of Bible and Violence, Bristol. The thirteen articles included here have been assembled for the specific purpose of offering explicitly religious perspectives on biblical violence from a globally diverse group of Christian scholars.

Each author faces the challenge of how to interpret violent biblical texts in ways that remain situated within a Christian construct of the Bible. These raise major challenges-via ethically confounding texts-to providing a theologically coherent interpretation of biblical violence. Each writer, in turn, offers creative and constructive ways forward in dealing with the most problematic biblical material, based on two criteria: