Shame and Mutilation of Enemies in the Hebrew Bible‪.‬

Mutilating enemies' bodies was a common wartime practice in the ancient Near East. One finds in Mesopotamian and Egyptian art many examples of the mutilation of enemies by both these powers, and the Hebrew Bible and Apocrypha, too, attest the widespread nature of the practice. (1) According to biblical narratives, the Israelites both experienced said mutilation and practiced it against others, sometimes even against other Israelites when the fighting was not against a foreign group but internal. At first glance, these narratives are striking merely for their brutality, but when one looks further, it becomes apparent that violently altering the bodies of one's enemies was not a random act of sadistic aggression in ancient Israel but was in fact one that functioned in certain striking and important ways. One of these was that mutilation signaled a newly established power dynamic between the victim and the aggressor. Another, as we shall see, was that mutilation served to bring shame upon the victim and their community by associating the victim with a lower-status group and/or by effecting an actual status change in the victim. (2) I. "MUTILATION" AND "SHAME" DEFINED