UNREPENTANT, EVEN EXULTANT, YIgal Amir faced a judge in Tel Aviv three weeks ago and pronounced, "According to Jewish law, you can kill the enemy." The confessed assassin of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin added with supreme assurance, "My whole life, I learned Jewish law." Almost exactly a year earlier, a young West Bank Palestinian named Saleh Abdel Rahim al-Souwi stared into a camera to deliver a videotaped testament to fellow Muslims. "There are many young men who love jihad [holy war] and who would love to die for the sake of God," he said. Souwi then hefted a load of dynamite, boarded a bus in Tel Aviv and blew it up, killing 22 people, virtually all of them Israelis, as well as himself.

"Beware the man of one book," holds an ancient Roman proverb. That teaching seems to grow more urgent by the month when the book is Holy Scripture. Killing in the name of God is hardly unknown in history, but the extent of freelance religious violence committed around the world lately might cause a Borgia Pope to blush. The mayhem is not at all limited to Islamic guerrilla movements, although just last week one of them, yet to be identified, managed to blow up the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan's capital, Islamabad, and kill 17 people, the suicide bomber among them; authorities detained 10 suspects, mostly Middle Eastern Arabs. But such acts carried out under the purported authority of Allah, while widespread, still make up only one face of an evidently spreading impulse to extremism that infects corners of most of the world's major faiths.

Anwar Sadat's assassination by Egyptian Muslim fundamentalists has now been matched in notoriety by Rabin's slaying at the hands of a Jewish religious zealot. That event in turn finds reflections in Hindu attacks on mosques and Muslims in India; in a Japanese cult's poison-gas murders in Tokyo's subways; and in Christian vigilante assaults on abortion clinics in the U.S. In July of last year, as rebel Islamists were burning schools in Algeria and slashing the throats of schoolgirls who did not wear headscarves, a former Presbyterian minister named Paul Hill took shotgun in hand to a Florida abortion center. He killed Dr. John Britton together with the doctor's 74-year-old bodyguard. One week earlier David Trosch, a Roman Catholic priest in Alabama who has since been suspended from religious functions, sent a letter to 1,000 people. The time would soon come, his message predicted, when "we will see the beginning of massive killing of abortionists and their staffs."

Wherever the word of God is cherished, it now seems, some clutch of believers is becoming more certain that faith compels a resort to violent measures. Of course, bloodshed for religion's sake may be as old as the cave paintings of Lascaux and Altamira. Gods of war and semidivine heroes of martial cast figured prominently in Bronze Age pantheons, and conquered peoples bowed down not only to foreign kings but also to foreign gods. Then came the great flowerings of revealed religions: Buddhism, Jainism, Christianity and Islam, along with the more subtle, humanistic readings of older faiths that established what became the mainstreams of Judaism and Hinduism. These traditions put great emphasis on charity, on tolerance, on communion with the divine not simply in awe and propitiation but also in the nourishment of a forgiving soul. Even so, tensions arose between spiritual imperatives and the exigencies of real life.

"Blessed are the peacemakers," said Jesus--but European Christians 1,000 years later carried out the most grotesque brutalities in the Holy Land and elsewhere as part of the Crusades. Islam, meanwhile, from its birth was extended under a wave of conquests that drew authority from the Prophet Muhammad's injunctions to spread the faith.

Yet armies concentrating their blows on other soldiers are one thing; freelance terror waged in God's name against civilians, including co-religionists, is quite another. While the teachings of most faiths recognize that killing is sometimes warranted, either in self-defense or to protect others, moral strictures generally forbid it in all but the most dire and immediate of circumstances. Such hedgings, handed down and elaborated on through the ages by the most respected fathers of the faiths, seemingly carry less weight today. The Arab Muslims convicted of bombing the World Trade Center in New York City appeared convinced that defending Islam in their homelands required the deaths of innocents in a skyscraper a world away.

Was Rabin's assassination justified by Jewish law, as Yigal Amir proudly insisted? A chorus of Jewish scholars denounces the claim as utterly wrong. "I've had 35 years of internship with Moshe Feinstein, the most respected Talmudic scholar, and I know what I'm saying," declares Moshe Tendler, who teaches at the Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary in New York City's Yeshiva University. Tendler explains, "In peacetime there is never, never a time when killing is justified in the name of God. The Talmud, which is our oral tradition, asks, Why did God test Abraham? So the world would know that if anyone tells you, 'I am committing murder in the name of God,' he's a liar. That is a unanimous opinion within the Orthodox tradition." In fact, no Jewish religious court has had the power to levy a death sentence since Jesus' time. Some medieval courts did so in exceptional cases, but a consensus today considers the penalty unthinkable.

Where this consensus frays, perhaps, is on the fringe. Yossi Sarid, Israel's Environment Minister, said several rabbis were to be questioned this week in connection with the inquiry into Rabin's murder. Suspicions that Amir may have performed the assassination with the blessings of one or more religious leaders have surfaced repeatedly in Israel, where the nationalist religious right had loudly condemned Rabin's peace deals with the Palestine Liberation Organization as traitorous. Jewish rabbis and scholars have suggested that Amir, a lifelong Talmud student who took up the cause of militant West Bank settlers, may have been motivated by two precepts of Jewish law that some rabbis had invoked before the Prime Minister was shot.

One of these traditional exemptions for killing is Din Rodef, or Law of the Pursuer. The rule was first set forth in the 12th century by the great Moses Maimonides, a Spanish Jewish scholar who became a towering figure of Talmudic lore. Going beyond the principle of self-defense, it states that even a witness to the act of someone's trying to kill another is allowed to kill the potential assassin. But leading rabbis, including those from non-Zionist Orthodox groups, vehemently reject use of the principle as a defense for killing Rabin.

While many Jews believe handing over large swaths of the West Bank to the P.L.O. will endanger the lives of Jewish settlers, the most respected Talmudic authorities stress that a well-intentioned government policy is too abstract and too debatable to apply to a precept so specific as Din Rodef. Rabbi Emanuel Quint, dean of the Jerusalem Institute of Jewish Law, notes that tradition prescribes leaning over backward to give even a clear-cut "pursuer" the chance to live. Says Quint: "If he can save the pursued by merely maiming the pursuer, the bystander must not kill him. If he does, he's guilty of murder." And what of the other rule that may have motivated Amir--the warrant to kill a moser, or "informer" who aims to turn over a fellow Jew or his property to an oppressor? The possibility of its application to Rabin is "very remote," says Quint. "I believe, if anything, he did his utmost to protect Jews."

Nonetheless, some rabbis of the far right in Israel had circulated opinions describing Rabin outright as a moser and rodef. After the assassination, Rabbi Yoel Bin-Nun, one of the spiritual leaders living in a West Bank settlement, charged that several other rabbis had issued rulings with the unmistakable implication that Rabin deserved death. Now under police guard and wearing a bulletproof vest, Bin-Nun lamented openly to journalists, "People are being given permission to kill."

How could a faith that takes such pride in its teachings of compassion have come to this pass? Strains have long been evident between Israel as a state, the liberal democracy founded largely by secularized Jews, and the "Land of Israel," a vision of the country as a God-given Jewish homeland extending beyond political borders into all the biblical territories. In a country where adherence to Judaism is the very basis of citizenship, even nonobservant Jews are bound by a web of religious rules: no one may marry or divorce, for example, outside Orthodox law.

The two loyalties managed to coexist without undue conflict until the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel seized the West Bank and Gaza and extended its writ throughout Jerusalem right up to Judaism's holy of holies: the site of the Second Temple, destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 70 and evidenced now by the ruin known as the Western Wall. Some religious leaders proclaimed the event as the fulfillment of prophecy--a sign that Israel should recover the full biblical extent of Jewish lands. At that point, some strands of Orthodox nationalism joined Christianity and Islam in the conviction that the faith had a historical, even political purpose. Another millenarian school of thought says "redeeming" the land--settling it with Jews--will speed the eventual coming of the Messiah.

In this light, of course, any compromise of the divine mission is unthinkable. For the state of Israel, the crowning irony now is that both Palestinian bus bombers and Jewish extremists have unwittingly found common cause in trying to destroy any workable peace. The Islamists, among Palestinians and Muslim guerrillas elsewhere, face even fewer restraints than militants of other religions. As a number of Islamic scholars point out, the downfall of the Caliphate in 1922, when Ottoman Turkey's last Sultan was deposed, has deprived seven decades of Muslims the world over of a central authority like the Vatican for interpretation of religious law. The result is that almost any band of Muslim malcontents who resent the way the world has treated them can read in the Koran a moral warrant for the most nuance-blind carnage.

When a member of the extremist Lebanese movement Hizballah, or Party of God, dies fighting Israelis in occupied southern Lebanon, the group posts along highways larger-than-life portraits of the "martyr" amid the flowers and waterfalls of paradise, the blood dripping from his hands becoming dark red tulips. Mainstream Islamic scholars, though, reject the notion that Koranic injunctions to defend the faith and punish apostates are any license to blow up Manhattan and kill Algerian schoolgirls.

At bottom, what the desperadoes who kill in God's name seem to share is an uneasy sense that secularism and the principles of tolerance in democracy--which often require a shade less certainty in one's own beliefs--have left religion a weak brew. The types who gravitate to the margins of faith, including the Japanese who are charged with following cult leader Shoko Asahara in allegedly poison-gassing subway riders, find that conventional culture has left them without a moral compass. The blood and thunder of a historic destiny for religion seems to fill a void in their souls.

Rather than the ecstasy of absolutism, what is truly needed is more rigor in spiritual education to spell out real challenges for the devout, says Rabbi Chaim Stauber, editor of the U.S. Jewish newspaper Der Yid. He argues, "Religion today, except for the fundamentalists, is almost a joke. It gives people nothing to work them up, unless we energize and utilize our God-given temperament for good causes." So pallid are standards for claiming devotion now, Stauber says, that "suddenly it's almost sexy to be a religious fundamentalist." In the name of God, the world can only wonder at the extent to which tolerance and forgiveness have become the unthinkable.

--Reported by Johanna McGeary and Eric Silver/Jerusalem and John Moody/New York with other bureaus