While we may not be aware of it, we are all part of the
blood guilt that stains our societies.
"I can't give too much away, but suffice to say it takes Poirot to the very depths of his own world view and his own sense of right and wrong at a time when he's already suffering from a sense of his own
blood guilt," says David.
A riveting mystery by Lindy Cameron, "
Blood Guilt" follows private investigator Kit O'Malley as she investigates the alleged unfaithfulness of Celia Robinson's husband.
David felt that he was under a sentence of
blood guilt because of the actions of Joab (see my translation of v.
He asks God, "Free me from
blood guilt." He acknowledges that he was responsible for ordering Uriah's death.
This polluteth a kingdom with blood, and this blood crieth loud for vengeance upon those into whose hands God did put the sword of justice to revenge for him and to execute wrath upon such as are murderers and do it not." While various forms of private violence - from the common crimes of the lower orders to dynastic warfare at the top - were still feared as serious sources of instability, blood guilt usually involved acts of specifically political repression.
Blood guilt on the royal houses of England was an emotive theme in both popular literature and official propaganda.
"Some Faulknerian something-or-other,
blood guilt, that made everyone in my story, except Emmett, fair game...?" He goes on to confess: "But even as I acknowledge some culpability, I know that there is an aesthetic issue that supersedes those considerations."
(He claimed to be a Jew and even a pharisee but, as Hyam Maccoby has persuasively argued, was more probably a non-Jew who converted and became disaffected.) It infects the first three gospels, especially the passage in Matthew in which Jews accept
blood guilt in perpetuity, and permeates the fourth gospel, attributed to John, whose author (whoever he was) was obviously not a Jew.