My project centers on the topic of willingness to die (for oneself, for the other, and for a belief) in the Hebrew Bible—a topic that has received scant attention in modern scholarship but is of vital importance in contemporary societies in North America and throughout the world. Biblical writers time and again reflected on historical crises and conflicts—often with outside forces like the Philistines and Antiochus IV—through figures who encounter a choice between life and death and, in seeming contradiction to the Mosaic command to "choose life" (Deut 30:19), choose death. In the first book-length study on this topic, I examine such figures as Samson, Job, and the Wise and the interconnections among their chosen forms of voluntary death (e.g., suicidal terrorism, suicide, and martyrdom). And I argue that willingness to die and voluntary death developed as a conceptual pair and came to be understood as able to bring about a vivifying benefit for oneself and others and even to renew life itself, particularly in the context of biblical Israel's continued struggle for survival and self-definition against various forces of historical antagonism. Yes, the Hebrew Bible is not silent about the dark side of willed death, but it also, in certain important instances, presents those willing to die—whether death occurs or not—as role models to be honored and emulated and as bulwarks against exterior and also interior forces of death and chaos. My project will challenge and transform academic discourse about voluntary death in the Hebrew Bible specifically and the biblical tradition more broadly. It will also deepen and nuance the usually binary and absolutist discourse about voluntary death in church and society today: "suicide is a grave sin"; "our martyrs are heroes"; "their suicidal terrorists are evil"; etc.