Religious murder for internal succession differs from killing foreign oppressors

Evidence

There are other stories of assassinations in the Old Testament and Apocrypha, with such notable assassins as Ehud and Judith. But these are different in that they were murdering foreigners, oppressors of Israel. Much more relevant is the case of Jehu, who received, so he believed, a message from God transmitted to him through a great religious leader, instructing him to kill the king and take his place. We have in our modern language an Oedipus Complex, which we draw from ancient Greek drama. We might adopt another psychological term—a Jehu Complex—drawn from the Hebrew Testament. Such a complex surely affected that notorious group of organized assassins known as the Zealots or Sicarii, who were active in the final stages of ancient Jewish statehood, and perhaps contrib­ uted to its ending. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 557

Categorization

• QUESTION: The proposed ‘Jehu Complex’ — sanctioned killing of a rival religious-political superior — deserves chasing: does it appear elsewhere in terrorism scholarship or is it Lewis’s invention?