Joseph Scales

Joseph Scales is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow, funded by Horizon Europe (August 2023 to August 2025).

His research project is entitled "'Fighting Talk – Motivating Violence in Ancient Judaism" [FTMVAJ]. The project description is the following:

People resort to violence for all kinds of reasons. In the interests of peace, it is essential to understand how people may be incited toward organised violence. For example, in warfare, combatants are often incited towards their actions by others. In the ancient world, such incitement often took the form of a pre-battle speech. Greek, Roman and Jewish literature contains many examples of such speeches. Recent research  suggests that the specifics of how such speeches are constructed are a mediation between accepted forms of style within an author’s experience of other literary works (e.g., Thucydides), and the experience they may have had either as a combatant or commander who gave such a speech themselves. Yet ancient Jewish battle speeches, often found in texts which make up the Bible, are not currently understood either as reflective of motivations towards violence, or counterparts to Greek and Roman examples. Therefore, FTMVAJ will examine examples of pre-battle speeches recorded in ancient Jewish literature, to determine how such speeches reflect motivations towards violence within Judaism, how such speeches draw from and respond to other literary templates, and to further explore the relationship between literary representations of pre-battle exhortations and their oral counterparts.

The principal goal of FTMVAJ is to gather and analyse a comprehensive group of ancient Jewish pre-battle exhortations, using appropriate methodological considerations including linguistic analysis, the identity of the speaker and audience both within the narrative and as a literary work, and intertextuality. Additionally, I will create a suitable framework for understanding these collected speeches and explicate common features. These features will be further compared with Greek and Roman counterparts to examine the relationship between Jewish and non-Jewish examples of ancient pre-battle speech.

Joe is further interested in aspect of ancient Jewish history, culture and texts. He is has recently completed a book based on his PhD research, forthcoming with Brill. His work can be found on both Humanities Commons and Academia[dot]edu.He also hosts the podcast Gods & Moviemakers with Dr Katie Turner.