◉ Reading Atrocity Responsibly: Descriptive Texts, Prescriptive Claims, and the Discipline of Moral-Hermeneutical Classification

Debates over biblical atrocity passages often go wrong before explicit moral reasoning begins. A critic can treat a narrated atrocity, lament, or judgment oracle as though it instructs an audience to commit violence. A Christian defender can make the mirror error, treating an explicit destruction command as mere narrative scenery, generic war rhetoric, or a morally inert report. Both moves misidentify the object of evaluation. This paper replaces a simple descriptive–prescriptive division with a two-gate audit. The textual-act gate identifies what a passage is doing: reporting, commanding, legislating, cursing, warning, praising, or praying. The normative-attribution gate asks what authority the text portrays as attached to that act: private desire, human policy, narrator approval, legal requirement, prophetic announcement, or authorization attributed to the Christian deity. Four layers—violent content, speech act, portrayed stance, and later appropriation—prevent genre labels from doing work they cannot do. Worked analyses of Psalm 137:9, Isaiah 13:16, Deuteronomy 20:16–18, 1 Samuel 15:3, and Numbers 31 show that reclassification transfers rather than removes the moral burden. A curse is not a statute, but sacred speech may still shape moral imagination. A judgment oracle is not a human order, but it may attribute catastrophe to divine agency. Ancient conquest hyperbole may restrict the extent of a command without changing its prescriptive force. The result is a bounded methodological thesis: classification does not establish whether an atrocity occurred or was justified. It identifies the claim that must be defended and prevents either side from obtaining a moral verdict by changing categories.