ABSTRACT
This chapter considers historical, anthropological and hermeneutic approaches to grasping ritualized violence in ancient Near Eastern oath-curses. Given a 3,000-year separation between our sensibilities and those of the ancients who produced these, interpreters are confronted with numerous obstacles to understanding. These concern not only the murky historical context, but also how the violence in the curses was conceived and felt. After exploring some constraints on our ability to grasp this sensational violence, the chapter briefly treats the eerie resonance of ancient oath-spectacles with similar events in our own time, insofar as contemporary events bear on how we perceive ancient events.
