When is violence religious? Or, to put it more accurately, under what conditions can we appropriately characterise violence as religious? This is never an easy question to answer, as the chapters in this volume amply demonstrate. What qualifies as ‘violence’, although a question that is apparently straightforward enough, becomes more difficult to pin down the more closely one considers it, and several contributors to this volume are careful to distinguish physical violence, the sort of violence that probably springs to most people’s minds when they hear the term, from cultural violence and structural violence.1 What qualifies as ‘religious’ is even less obvious, especially in reference to the ancient Mediterranean world, from which several recent scholars have proposed we should exclude the term altogether.2 In this chapter I do not intend to provide an answer to the question posed above. Although broadly framed questions of that sort are invaluable and even unavoidable heuristic devices, they do not lend themselves to precise answers.