If you are paying attention during the weekly Torah reading in synagogue, you will notice frequent descriptions or commandments involving putting people to death, sometimes individually – e.g., death penalty rulings (for example, Ex. 21:12-17), stories like that of the man stoned to death for collecting sticks on the Shabbat (Num. 15) or  the couple run through by Pinchas for exogamy (Num. 25); and sometimes collectively – e.g., the Egyptian first-born (Ex. 12), Amalekites (Ex. 17), the Canaanites (Deut. 7), the kingdoms of Sihon and Og (Num. 21).  And the historical prophetic books (Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings) up the bloody ante, with political murders, battles, massacres, and even a couple of suicides.

Our Jewish self-image as a peaceful people apparently originated during the rabbinic period, after the Bible was completed.  The rabbis ameliorated much of the biblical violence through textual interpretation, recoiling from the death penalty, from the literal understanding of “an eye for an eye…;” and seeking (sometimes struggling to find) moral justifications for collective acts of violence (e.g. the Amalekites attacked unprovoked and unfairly and deserved their fate).  It seems that there are two ways (at least) to understand this tendency to tone down the Bible’s violence:

Does it........

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