The first act of violence in our world’s history was done to Adam by God. God placed Adam into a deep coma-like sleep, opened up his side, and removed a rib, from which He fashioned Eve (Gen. 2:21-22). This happened before the Fall, and the bloodshed involved was therefore not a consequence of sin.
Having said this, let me rush to offer all the necessary qualifications. Everything in creation mirrors the triune God in some fashion. After the Fall, many of the mirrors have been cracked and distorted, and therefore reflect the nature of God poorly or, in the case of evil, slanderously. But the fact of the slander does not mean there was no holy material there to be twisted in the first place. Perhaps the clearest example of this is the example of death. Throughout Scripture, death is treated as an adversary, an enemy (1 Cor. 15:55). Death is clearly bad, and God opposes it, and will overcome it when Christ comes again (1 Cor. 15:26).
But at the same time, death (of a sort) was clearly a reality before the Fall. Paul describes human death and resurrection in terms of a comparison to the fruitfulness of seed going into the ground (1 Cor. 15:36-37) — and that kind of thing was occurring before the Fall (Gen. 1:11). And to return to the earlier example, Adam clearly underwent a type of death when he was put to sleep in order to bring about the creation of Eve. John offers us a parallel is made between Christ in His death, which led to the creation of His bride the Church, and Adam’s “death” in this case (John 19:34), which led to the creation of his bride.
But what we are talking about is a holy and unfallen thing — and our enemy, death, is the caricature and distortion of that. Now I do understand that not all Christians will want to follow this reasoning — but for those who do follow it, the same kind of thing must be acknowledged about violence and bloodshed. Death as we know it is an enemy to be overcome, and so is the study of violence (Is. 2:4; Micah 4:3). But none of these things came from nowhere.
Adam did not go to sleep gently for a month, so that Eve could grow on his side. God placed Adam into a deep sleep, sliced or tore him open, took out a bloody rib, and fashioned it into a bride for him. This, like everything else in the unfallen world, mirrored something important about God.
When Jesus died and rose in this fallen world, He was revealing something about the character of His Father (John 5:19-21). Now the triune God is constant, and in Him is no evil at all. He is holy, holy, holy. There is in Him no variation or shadow due to change. So if we say that there are “death and resurrection” patterns within the Trinity, we do not mean anything so silly as that one of the Persons of the Trinity got sick, and the other two visited Him in the hospital before He died. And in the same way, if we say that the self-sacrifice involved in Adam’s bloody sleep mirrored some aspect of God’s character, like everything else does, we do not mean anything so silly as saying that the members of the Trinity have their quarrels, fights, or wars.
God reveals Himself as a warrior throughout all Scripture. This characteristic of His is of course holy and appropriate in a fallen world, a world containing so much evil and sin. And of course God was not a warrior in the same sense before the worlds were created — He was not at war with Himself. But before the creation, God’s attributes and character did in fact exhibit something that gave rise to certain surprising turns after the worlds were made, with those surprising turns being manifested both before and after the Fall.