Holy Scripture, Theology and Violence. Terror and the Figure of Samson in Early Modern Europe

According to the Egyptologist Jan Assmann, monotheism has a tendency to generate violence. The commandment "you will have no other God besides me" would imply the obligation to annihilate the enemy as 'idolatrous' and would lead, in extreme cases, to the martyrdom of the faithful. Today, in the public debate, there is much discussion about religious terrorism, in which divine inspiration is invoked by some political groups and individuals to kill unarmed civilians not directly involved in episodes of war or military invasion. So we can ask ourselves if the religious bomber had a scriptural prototype common to all the monotheisms. Can one speak of a biblical model of the suicide terrorist, who suppresses himself to inflict a sudden and punitive death to a multitude of enemies outside the battlefield? And what is the relationship between the Old Testament and the ideological roots of a certain type of violence that involves the sacrifice of the same bomber? The paper addresses the issue of the genealogy of religious terrorism through the fortune and rewriting of the story of Samson (Book of Judges, 13-16) in the early modern age. It starts from the religious wars in Flanders and France to get to the Samson Agonistes by Milton (1671). The sources taken into consideration are prayers and pamphlets, but also engravings and pictorial images. As we shall see, the figure of Samson intrigued not only the most ardent members of the Protestant and the Catholic front, but also some seventeenth-century Marranos writers. Furthermore, John Donne used the figure of Samson and the account of his death to justify the morality of suicide by quoting De civitate Dei (I, 21). Augustine, in fact, was the first to legitimize the sacrificial suicide ordained by God against the idolaters, considering it a rightful exception to the prohibition to kill formulated in the fifth commandment.