As you may have noticed, I've been blogging quite a bit about the Amalekites in 1 Samuel 15. That's because I've been doing a bit of work on them because I'm in a debate on the radio tomorrow - on Justin Brierley's show Unbelievable. It's at 2:30pm, on Premier Christian Radio.
For those who are interested in reading a bit more about the Amalekites and where I'm at with understanding them at the moment, I've created a dedicated page to pull together stuff I've written on the issue.
We've already seen that there were lots of ways out for individual Amalekites who wanted to run away. We have seen that the primary intention of God's command in 1 Samuel 15:3 is to stop the Israelites profiting from the destruction of the Amalekites. But given that command what about children who remained? Would they have been killed?
Probably, yes. And that's hard to say.
But think about the situation. We've seen that the Israelite army was huge and slow-moving - that there was plenty of time for people to get away. Whose fault is it if children stay behind for a battle? Whose fault is it if a parent takes their children to war and the children get killed?
It's the parents' fault, isn't it? Let's take an example from WW2. Just before the D-Day invasion, the Allies parachuted troops into France to secure vital bridges and so on. The normal orders for such troops is to take no prisoners, just like for the Israelite army. Now suppose they are faced by a column of German infantry, and the column includes women and children, who are also fighting. Whose fault is it if those children die? Is it Churchill's, for ordering that the troops take no prisoners? Or is it their parents' for making them fight when they should be keeping them safe?
Same here.
If God's command to Saul in 1 Samuel 15 was exhaustive - if God was commanding a genocide, then we would expect the Amalekites to be wiped out. After all, Saul is only criticised for taking plunder, not for sparing them. He thinks he obeys Samuel's command (1 Sam 15:20).
But that's not what we see. In 1 Samuel 27:8, there are still Amalekites around for David to raid. In Esther, Haman seems to be descended from the kings of the Amalekites. They weren't wiped out, therefore God didn't command a genocide.
In 1 Samuel 15, God tells Saul to kill the Amalekites because of something their ancestors had done. Just after the Exodus (if I had to guess a date, I'd guess 1280BC, but it could be as early as 1450BC), the Amalekites attacked Israel in the desert. But in about 1040BC, God says they will be punished for it. How can that be fair?
In Ezekiel 18, God says that he doesn't punish anyone for their ancestors' sins - people are punished for their own sins. But even then, there's the assumption that people normally follow their parents. Most people do what they saw their parents do. So if the parents are alcoholic or abusive, the children are more likely to grow up to be alcoholic or abusive. The parents' behaviour helps to explain why the child is like that, but it doesn't excuse it. People are still responsible for their own actions, and they can be judged for their parents' sins only when they themselves continue to walk in the way their parents walked, when they make their parents' sin their own.
The Amalekites were like that with attacking God's people. They had kept on doing it generation after generation - at least 5 times in the 250-odd years between the Exodus and Saul. The Amalekites as a nation are being judged because they keep attacking God's people, but individual Amalekites are judged based on their own actions.
You see, individual Amalekites have the chance to distance themselves from their nation (see Is there a way out for the Amalekites?). If they stay and fight, it shows they agree with the way their nation has acted.
There is evidence in the passage as well that individuals are judged for their own sin rather than the sin of their ancestors. In v18 they are described as "wicked people", and in v33 Agag is killed because his sword has made women childless.
God calls time on the Amalekites as a nation because of the actions of their ancestors, which they have continued in. But inidivdual Amalekites are judged for their own actions. If they distance themselves from their nation, they are spared.
At first sight, God's command to Saul looks clear and unambiguous.
Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.
1 Samuel 15:3, NIV
But if we are going to understand it correctly, we need to see how Saul would have understood it. We can see a lot of that from reading the passage closely, and from reading other similar and related passages.
Saul wouldn't have understood the command exhaustively to mean that he must kill all the Amalekites. We see this from 1 Kings 11, for example.
Hadad was from the royal family of Edom, and here is how the LORD made him Solomon's enemy: Some time earlier, when David conquered the nation of Edom, Joab his army commander went there to bury those who had died in battle. Joab and his soldiers stayed in Edom six months, and during that time they killed every man and boy who lived there. Hadad was a boy at the time, but he escaped to Midian with some of his father's officials...
1 Kings 11:14-17, CEV
The writer doesn't see a problem with both saying that the soldiers killed everyone there, and also that there were some survivors who escaped. It doesn't mean "hunt down and exterminate the Amalekites"; it means "kill everyone who stays and fights".
I don't think Saul would have understood the command vindictively either, when we understand how war worked back then. The purpose of war was generally to take plunder - slaves, valuables or flocks. The rules governing war in Deuteronomy 20 specifically allowed Israelites to take plunder when fighting outside their own land. But here the Israelites are specifically forbidden from taking any plunder - whether cattle or livestock or wives or slaves. That's why children are included - it's not telling the Israelites to be especially vicious - it's telling them not to profit from the battle.
That also makes most sense of why Saul is condemned later in the passage. Saul allows the Amalekite king to live, and also allows his soldiers to take some plunder. And Samuel says:
Why did you not obey the Lord? Why did you pounce on the plunder and do evil in the eyes of the Lord?
1 Samuel 15:19
Saul's sin in this passage is not showing mercy to the Amalekites; his sin is trying to profit from their destruction, because that is what God specifically forbids in v3.
I suppose a modern equivalent of v3 would be "Attack them. Take no prisoners. Take no plunder." That's what God commanded Saul to do to the Amalekites.
So was there a way out for the Amalekites?
When the Israelites attacked them, the Amalekites had four options.
The Israelite army didn't have cars or aeroplanes. They would have moved at the speed of the slowest unit, which was probably a heavy wagon with supplies. We're told the army consisted of 210,000 men. They were a huge army, and moved slowly. That means it was very easy to spot them coming, and very easy to run away. In the ancient world, the number of civilian casualties in war was tiny. This is mainly because it was very easy to run away. Only the people who stay to fight get killed.
The Kenites lived in the same area as the Amalekites, but they were friendly towards the Israelites. When Saul's army arrived at the Amalekite city, the first thing they do is send a message to the Kenites.
Then Saul said to the Kenites, "Go, depart; go down from among the Amalekites, lest I destroy you with them. For you showed kindness to all the people of Israel when they came up out of Egypt." So the Kenites departed from among the Amalekites.
1 Samuel 15:6
Now, that makes it look very much as if the Kenites are mingling with the Amalekites fairly freely. Suppose an Amalekite decided that they didn't want to fight against Israel. There doesn't seem to have been anything stopping them from deciding to be a Kenite – dressing themselves up as a Kenite and just slipping off. The Amalekites had a way out, if only they were willing to deny their identity as Amalekites.
There's a set of rules for how Israel was meant to conduct their wars outside their own borders. We don't know if Israel followed them or not on this occasion, but they should have done.
When you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it. And if it responds to you peaceably and it opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall do forced labor for you and shall serve you. But if it makes no peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it. And when the LORD your God gives it into your hand, you shall put all its males to the sword...
Deuteronomy 20:10-13, ESV
God's specific command to Saul in 1 Samuel 15 overrides the rest of those orders (about prisoners and plunder), but not the first bit. Saul should have offered the Amalekites the chance to surrender and join in with the Israelites and God's plan to bless the world.
The fourth choice the Amalekites had was to hold onto their identity as the people who always fight the Israelites, and stay and fight. This option is the only one which leads to the Amalekites being killed.
When we are trying to understand a difficult passage like 1 Samuel 15, it is really important to get a good idea of where the passage fits into the big picture. And that's particularly true with this one. In particular, we need to understand why Israel was important.
At this point in the story, Israel are God's chosen people. But they weren't chosen so God could bless them and curse everyone else. They were chosen to be God's conduit of blessing to the whole world. As God's original promise to Abraham says:
all peoples on earth
will be blessed through you.
Genesis 12:3b, NIV
Israel was God's chosen conduit of blessing to the whole world. Amalek had actually had a chance to be there as well, being descended from Esau. But Esau had renounced his blessing, trading it in for a bowl of soup, and Amalek continued in that. They had decided that they would oppose the very means that God had chosen to bless them and every other nation, and by the time we reach 1 Samuel 15, they have been consistently opposing it for hundreds of years and show no sign of letting up.
In his book Violence, Hospitality and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition, theologian Hans Boersma points out that hospitality requires the potential for violence. Suppose that Britain welcomes a refugee from Burma. In Burma, they are being hunted by the authorities because of their statements about human rights violations, or something like that. If Britain really welcomes them, part of that is being willing to resist the Burmese government sending agents over here to kill them, and resisting in a violent way if necessary. Part of hospitality is willingness to protect the people you are being hospitable towards.
In the same way, God is determined to bless the world, and at the stage of 1 Samuel 15, the way he has decided to bless the world is through Israel shining as a light for him among the nations. As it turns out, they're rubbish at that, but that's a different story. Even so, we still get people like Ruth and like the Gibeonites coming in from outside Israel to experience some of God's blessing to the world through Israel. And so part of what it means for God to bless the world is for God to protect Israel, his pipeline for blessing to the world.
Who were the Amalekites? What made them so bad?
The Amalekites were the descendents and followers of Amalek, grandson of Esau (Genesis 36:12,16), brother of Jacob also known as Israel. As such, the Amalekites weren't total foreigners to God. Esau was the one who had sold his birthright and his part in God's promise. He had been part of God's covenant people, but he valued his own apetites more. So the Edomites (Esau's descendents, including the Amalekites) were people who had opted out en masse of the covenant which defined God's people.
They weren't Canaanites. Israel was not a threat to them; Israel was not going to take their land. Their relationship to the Amalekites was like their relationship to the other Edomites when they said "Please let us pass through your country. We will not go through any field or vineyard, or drink water from any well. We will travel along the king's highway and not turn to the right or to the left until we have passed through your territory." (Numbers 20:17)
But the Amalekites really really didn't like Israel. At the very birth of the nation of Israel, when they came out of Egypt and were at their most vulnerable, before they even got to Sinai and when they didn't even have any water, the Amalekites came and attacked them (Exodus 17:8). Israel were forced to fight their very first battle, fighting for their lives against the Amalekites, under the leadership of Moses. After God gave Moses an amazing victory, Exodus says this:
Then the LORD said to Moses, "Write this on a scroll as something to be remembered and make sure that Joshua hears it, because I will completely blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven."
Moses built an altar and called it The LORD is my Banner. He said, "For hands were lifted up to the throne of the LORD. The LORD will be at war against the Amalekites from generation to generation."
Exodus 17:14-16, NIV
The Amalekites were the people who hated Israel, right from the start. And though Moses said that God would be at war it looks very much as if it's the Amalekites who are at war with him. Israel have a lot of wars between Moses and Saul, but they never once attack the Amalekites.
The Amalekites attack Israel though. In Numbers 14:45, they attack Israel again while they are still in the desert. In Judges 3:13 they join in with the Moabites in attacking Israel. In Judges 6:3, they invade Israel "whenever the Israelites planted their crops", and together with the Midianites "did not spare a living thing for Israel, neither sheep nor cattle nor donkeys." Later in Judges 6 and 7 they invade again and are fought off by Gideon. The Amalekites show that generation after generation, they are at war with Israel and with God. They had attacked Israel at least five times over a period of about 250 years.
Even long after Saul (and Saul's successor David) have fought against and mostly eradicated the Amalekites, we get one more Amalekite coming up. 600 years after them, the Persians are ruling the whole area, and a man called Haman, an Agagite gets a lot of power. "Agagite" probably means that he was descended from the Amalekite kings, known as Agag.
After these events, King Xerxes (of Persia) honored Haman son of Hammedatha, the Agagite, elevating him and giving him a seat of honor higher than that of all the other nobles. All the royal officials at the king's gate knelt down and paid honor to Haman, for the king had commanded this concerning him. But Mordecai would not kneel down or pay him honor.
Then the royal officials at the king's gate asked Mordecai, "Why do you disobey the king's command?" Day after day they spoke to him but he refused to comply. Therefore they told Haman about it to see whether Mordecai's behavior would be tolerated, for he had told them he was a Jew.
When Haman saw that Mordecai would not kneel down or pay him honor, he was enraged. Yet having learned who Mordecai's people were, he scorned the idea of killing only Mordecai. Instead Haman looked for a way to destroy all Mordecai's people, the Jews, throughout the whole kingdom of Xerxes.
Esther 3:1-6, NIV
The Amalekites weren't just any old people. They were the nation who more than any other tried to destroy Israel. They had been trying to eradicate and plunder Israel from the very birth of Israel, 200-400 years before the command in 1 Samuel 15, and they would continue for another 600 years.
The Amalekites were vicious as well, and were noted for killing children (1 Sam 15:33).
That explains some of the background to the conflict in 1 Samuel 15. It shows that what is being commanded is an act of war in a conflict which the Israelites didn't start, and which was never going to be resolved by negotiation.
I know I don't usually post prayer requests on here, but tomorrow I'm due to be doing a radio debate with an atheist called Justin Schieber on the Amalekite Genocide of 1 Samuel 15. Please pray for me.
I'll post some more stuff for discussion up here over the next few days, and a link to the recording of the debate when it's available. For the meantime, here's a link to some of my past stuff on the Amalekites. I've moved on a bit since then though...
I've been doing a bit more thinking about the whole question of passages like 1 Samuel 15, and what seems to be going on here is a fundamental clash of worldviews – a clash between two gods (or two sets of ideas about God).
On one hand, there is what I'll call the Liberal God. This is God as conceptualised by most of society today. He/she is in many ways similar to the Deist idea of God – she/he doesn't actually do much in terms of acting in objective ways in space-time history. But the idea actually relies more on the ideas of the early liberal theologians – this is still a god who cares about us and whom we can experiences of (though I've argued elsewhere that that probably requires a god who can and does act in an objective way in space-time history – though I guess that might not hold if it's also the god of Process Theology who isn't really a god at all). The Liberal God embodies the Spirit of the Age rather than the Holy Spirit – there isn't much conception of transcendent holiness, but rather a loving tolerance that covers everyone who doesn't deliberately cause harm or offence to others, regardless of their race, colour, creed, gender, sexual orientation, fetishes, etc. The Liberal God's first commandment is to be true to yourself and to love yourself with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. The Liberal God would never command a genocide, and would certainly let good people (like most of us) into heaven.
On the other hand, there is the God of the Bible – i.e. God as the Bible depicts him. He is actually quite discomforting, and doesn't really seem to fit in comfortably to any human culture – he is far more accepting and loving than most human cultures have been, but at the same time he is holy and cannot stand sin. And he has a strange loyalty at times to some groups of people.
A fair few people think that actually these two “God”s are the same. So the Bible is seen as the story of the human encounter with the Liberal God, who gradually draws them from their original understanding of him as petty and rather like them, into the truer understanding of him/her as loving, generous, liberal and rather like Desmond Tutu. For these people, passages such as 1 Samuel 15 are relics of an earlier understanding of God.
[It's probably worth pointing out at this stage that actually that idea doesn't work. Revelation was probably one of the last books of the Bible to be written, and is pretty much like their idea of early stuff. And Ruth is pretty early, and is much more like their idea of later stuff. I don't think that way of thinking about how the Bible develops really works – the more conventional evangelical one fits the data much better.]
The question that passages such as 1 Samuel 15 make us face is which of these conceptions of God is the true one. And the way this is generally decided is which conception of God is morally better. And that's what I was trying to think about in my series of posts on 1 Samuel 15.
So which is better? A God who chooses to bless everyone in some vague nebulous way without ever using violence, or a God who chooses to bless the world in a concrete, real and self-sacrificial way through a specific group of people, and then acts to protect them when they are threatened? That's what I've been seeking to address in my posts on the Amalekites...
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
We've been thinking about God's command in 1 Samuel 15 to kill the Amalekites. We've seen that the Amalekites were people who had set themselves in opposition to God's plan to bless the world; we've seen that the command gave plenty of scope for individual Amalekites to change their minds and escape from the attack. Now I want to look at the Amalekite genocide in the light of the cross.
The first thing I want to note is that the theme of Israel as God's means of blessing the whole earth finds its fulfilment in Jesus. Jesus is where God reveals himself perfectly; Jesus is the one the nations stream to; he is the one who obeys God perfectly. Again and again, the gospels present Jesus as the True Israel. As Jesus says in Matthew 5:17
Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.
And as such, Jesus is the one whom God defends, and the one whom he appoints as judge over the nations.
As the Bible goes on, it becomes clear that the enmity to God and his plans which was so clear in the Amalekites is found in each individual person. We all try to resist God's plan, to reject our part in it and oppose Jesus' lordship. And the Bible calls that sin. But in one of the most shocking verses of the Bible, we read this.
God made him who had no sin [i.e. Jesus] to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
2 Corinthians 5:21, NIV
Jesus became the personification of all opposition to God. He was made the true Amalek as well as the true Israel. He became the one who had to be killed so that God could bless the whole world. And he did that for us, for those who reject him and oppose him, so that we can know what it means to be part of God's true people.
That is the true and lasting significance of the sentence to destruction in 1 Samuel 15. It is the sentence that God himself in the person of Jesus chose to take on himself for us. Jesus becomes the person whom God destroys so that we can become the people whom God defends.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
So far, we have seen that the Amalekites were the nation that always opposed God's plan to bless the world. But even given that, it can still be difficult to see how the same God that loved his enemies so much that he died for them could command that the Amalekites could be wiped out in the way that he does in 1 Samuel 15.
The first place to start looking for an answer is in the passage itself...
In verse 5, Saul reaches the city of the Amalekites. But he doesn't attack immediately. Instead he sends a message to another tribe – the Kenites. According to Judges 4:11, the Kenites were the descendants of Moses' father-in-law, variously called Jethro and Hobab. Now here's an interesting contrast.
The first two groups of people that the Israelites meet after coming out of Egypt are the Amalekites in Exodus 17 and the Kenites (Jethro and his family) in Exodus 18. The Amalekites try to destroy Israel. Jethro and his family help Israel. They want in on God's blessing which is coming to the whole world, and they help Israel and worship the God of Israel.
So when Saul comes to fight against the Amalekites, the first thing he does is that he sends a message to the Kenites.
Then Saul said to the Kenites, "Go, depart; go down from among the Amalekites, lest I destroy you with them. For you showed kindness to all the people of Israel when they came up out of Egypt." So the Kenites departed from among the Amalekites.
1 Samuel 15:6
Now, that makes it look very much as if the Kenites are mingling with the Amalekites fairly freely. Suppose an Amalekite decided that they didn't want to fight against Israel. There doesn't seem to have been anything stopping them from deciding to be a Kenite – dressing themselves up as a Kenite and just slipping off. The Amalekites had a way out, if only they were willing to deny their identity as Amalekites.
You see, the Amalekites' national identity is set up against Israel and against God's plan to bless the world. But there is a way out – they just have to renounce that identity and join in with the people who worshipped and served God. They have to get rid of the thing that means they will be going against God. Maybe some of them did. But many of them didn't.
The second way out is the one given in Deuteronomy 20, which is where the laws for how Israel was meant to fight its battles are set out.
When you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it. And if it responds to you peaceably and it opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall do forced labor for you and shall serve you. But if it makes no peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it. And when the LORD your God gives it into your hand, you shall put all its males to the sword...
Deuteronomy 20:10-13, ESV
I don't know if Saul followed this rule or not when he attacked the Amalekites, but he should have done. If the Amalekites had surrendered, they would have been spared. But once again, they would have had to renounce their identity as Amalekites and become vassals of Israel. The only way they would have been destroyed is if they refused to surrender to God's plan.
So the Amalekites as a group had the opportunity to surrender to God's plan to bless the world, and the Amalekites as individuals had the opportunity to renounce their group and join in with the people who had sought to be a part of God's plan. It's not exactly genocide, is it?
Paul Copan, in his recent paper Yahweh Wars and the Canaanites points out that the command is to kill whoever is there, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they kill women and children. As Goldingay writes: “When a city is in danger of falling, people do not simply wait there to be killed; they get out... Only people who do not get out, such as the city's defenders, get killed.” So the command in 1 Samuel 15:3 looks a lot less like genocide, and a lot more like “If anyone - man, woman, child, whoever - doesn't take the chance to give up their struggle permanently, then kill them. And make sure that you don't profit from doing it.”
This is backed up by the way that Hebrew writers seem to use language when talking about war. Here's an example.
Hadad was from the royal family of Edom, and here is how the LORD made him Solomon's enemy: Some time earlier, when David conquered the nation of Edom, Joab his army commander went there to bury those who had died in battle. Joab and his soldiers stayed in Edom six months, and during that time they killed every man and boy who lived there. Hadad was a boy at the time, but he escaped to Midian with some of his father's officials...
1 Kings 11:14-17, CEV
Killing every man and boy who lives in Edom doesn't mean “killing every man and boy who lived in Edom and making sure that none escape”. It seems that it means “making sure there aren't any men or boys living there any more.” In the same way, killing all the Amalekites seems to mean killing everyone who keep on identifying themselves as Amalekites and who keep setting themselves against God's plan.
This is about breaking and destroying the identity of Amalek as a nation, so that they as a nation cannot continue to oppose God's plan to bless the world. It isn't about hatred of individuals, or about killing those individuals, unless they want to keep on being Amalekites and to keep on fighting against God's plan.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
I've been discussing 1 Samuel 15, and God's command to Saul to exterminate the Amalekites. So far, I've established that the Amalekites were the nation who, more than any other, attacked and tried to destroy the Israelites. They had been attacking the Israelites right from when Israel came out of Egypt, and they would keep on doing so for another 600 years.
But so far, what I've written could be seen as just God taking sides in an old argument between two nations. Or as someone put it "A toddler-God here, kicking over his blue toy soldiers, because today he likes the green ones better."
To understand why that isn't the case, we need to think about the place of this all in the big picture of the Bible.
Israel was God's chosen people. But they weren't chosen so God could bless them and curse everyone else. They were chosen to be God's conduit of blessing to the whole world (as Chris Wright keeps pointing out). As God's original promise to Abraham says:
all peoples on earth
will be blessed through you.
Genesis 12:3b, NIV
Israel was God's chosen conduit of blessing to the whole world. Amalek had actually had a chance to be there as well, being descended from Esau. But Esau had renounced his blessing, trading it in for a bowl of soup, and Amalek continued in that. They had decided that they would oppose the very means that God had chosen to bless them and every other nation, and by the time we reach 1 Samuel 15, they have been consistently opposing it for hundreds of years and show no sign of letting up.
In his book Violence, Hospitality and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition, theologian Hans Boersma points out that hospitality requires the potential for violence. Suppose that Britain welcomes a refugee from Burma. In Burma, they are being hunted by the authorities because of their statements about human rights violations, or something like that. If Britain really welcomes them, part of that is being willing to resist the Burmese government sending agents over here to kill them, and resisting in a violent way if necessary. Part of hospitality is willingness to protect the people you are being hospitable towards.
In the same way, God is determined to bless the world, and at the stage of 1 Samuel 15, the way he has decided to bless the world is through Israel shining as a light for him among the nations. As it turns out, they're rubbish at that, but that's a different story. Even so, we still get people like Ruth and like the Gibeonites coming in from outside Israel to experience some of God's blessing to the world through Israel. And so part of what it means for God to bless the world is for God to protect Israel, his pipeline for blessing to the world.
The Amalekites had chosen not to be part of the means by which God blessed the world, and now they chose to oppose the means God was using to bring blessing to the world. If God was going to keep on blessing the world, he needed to stop the Amalekites.
So far, I think I've established a decent reason for why God should want people to fight against the Amalekites. But we still haven't really dealt with the issue – why does God command a genocide here?
I think there are several reasons. Minor ones include that the Amalekites seem to have been notorious for killing children when they attacked (1 Sam 15:33), so it is repayment in kind. But while there's a kind of grisly poetic justice about that, I don't think it's the main reason, and I don't think it's an adequate answer either.
A better reason is the one given in Exodus 17.
The LORD will have war with Amalek from generation to generation.
Exodus 17:16b, ESV
God knew that the Amalekites would always oppose Israel – that the children of the Amalekites would do it when they grew up, and their descendants too – as we see with Haman in the book of Esther.
Time for an analogy. Suppose that you met Stalin, or Harold Shipman, or some notorious evil person, when they were a child. Suppose you somehow knew all the evil they would do, all the lives they would destroy, and that the only way you could stop it was by killing them, and that was within your power. Could it be right to kill them in such a situation?
It isn't an easy question. I think it's probably similar to the one that Bonhoeffer wrestled with. He was a pacifist church leader in Nazi Germany, and was eventually executed for his part in a plot to kill Hitler. He wrestled with it for a long time, and eventually concluded that he had to, not because of what Hitler had done – that's a matter for God's judgement – but because of what Hitler would continue to do if he was not stopped.
My point is this. I think that in a situation like that, God could command the killing of a young Joseph Stalin because he knows the future and knows for certain what would happen if we didn't do it. If we were absolutely 100% certain that we were hearing God correctly, it wouldn't be wrong to obey God on something like that.
And the situation in 1 Samuel 15 is that God knew the Amalekites. He knew they were a nation that had rejected a part in God's plan to bless the world. He knew that their actions for hundreds of years had been set on destroying and stopping God's plan to bless the world. He knew that if they weren't destroyed, they would continue to try to stop his plan. And in fact, they weren't destroyed and they did continue to try to thwart God's plan, so he was proved right by that.
It's an issue of protection. If the Amalekite army had been defeated once in battle and left to retreat, they would have come back eventually. It would have been limited protection for a limited time. But what God wants is total protection for his plan to bless the world, forever. Without total destruction of the Amalekites, they were going to keep on coming back, and God's plan would not be safe.
But this still sounds, well, merciless. We'll see why it wasn't as merciless as it looks in part 3...
Over at Ship of Fools, there's a discussion going on entitled "Chapter and Worse - because the Good Book could be Better". I'm pretty sure that's not true, so I've been wading in on some of the discussions and trying to show the value of the verses. It seems to me that if all the passages people didn't like were omitted, the Bible would have nothing to say to us except that God loves us because we are wonderful people or something.
Anyway, one of the passages which came up (as I thought it probably would) was the so-called Amalekite genocide in 1 Samuel 15.
And Samuel said to Saul, "The LORD sent me to anoint you king over his people Israel; now therefore listen to the words of the LORD. Thus says the LORD of hosts, 'I have noted what Amalek did to Israel in opposing them on the way when they came up out of Egypt. Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.'"
1 Samuel 15:1-3, ESV
People argue, with a fair bit of justification, that this looks like God is commanding genocide, and that genocide is a Very Bad Thing, so that creates some problems for our understanding of God's goodness.
I honestly think that's all true. There are various ways people have tried getting out of it, and they don't really work.
It also gets worse for people who try to avoid the force of these verses. Saul doesn't obey Samuel's command - he spares the life of King Agag (probably a title for the king of the Amalekites, like Pharaoh is of the king of the Egyptians), and also of some of the animals and so on, as a result of which God gets annoyed with Saul, and rejects him as king (v10-25).
I think we have to take the full force of these verses. God commands a genocide, and yet somehow he is good and loving. What on earth (or in heaven) is going on?
Before we can get to an answer to that, we need to think about several key issues.
First up, who were the Amalekites? What made them so bad?
The Amalekites were the descendents and followers of Amalek, grandson of Esau (Genesis 36:12,16), brother of Jacob also known as Israel. As such, the Amalekites weren't total foreigners to God. Esau was the one who had sold his birthright and his part in God's promise. He had been part of God's covenant people, but he valued his own apetites more. So the Edomites (Esau's descendents, including the Amalekites) were people who had opted out en masse of the covenant which defined God's people.
They weren't Canaanites. Israel was not a threat to them; Israel was not going to take their land. Their relationship to the Amalekites was like their relationship to the other Edomites when they said "Please let us pass through your country. We will not go through any field or vineyard, or drink water from any well. We will travel along the king's highway and not turn to the right or to the left until we have passed through your territory." (Numbers 20:17)
But the Amalekites really really didn't like Israel. At the very birth of the nation of Israel, when they came out of Egypt and were at their most vulnerable, before they even got to Sinai and when they didn't even have any water, the Amalekites came and attacked them (Exodus 17:8). Israel were forced to fight their very first battle, fighting for their lives against the Amalekites, under the leadership of Moses. After God gave Moses an amazing victory, Exodus says this:
Then the LORD said to Moses, "Write this on a scroll as something to be remembered and make sure that Joshua hears it, because I will completely blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven."
Moses built an altar and called it The LORD is my Banner. He said, "For hands were lifted up to the throne of the LORD. The LORD will be at war against the Amalekites from generation to generation."
Exodus 17:14-16, NIV
The Amalekites were the people who hated Israel, right from the start. And though Moses said that God would be at war it looks very much as if it's the Amalekites who are at war with him. Israel have a lot of wars between Moses and Saul, but they never once attack the Amalekites.
The Amalekites attack Israel though. In Numbers 14:45, they attack Israel again while they are still in the desert. In Judges 3:13 they join in with the Moabites in attacking Israel. In Judges 6:3, they invade Israel "whenever the Israelites planted their crops", and together with the Midianites "did not spare a living thing for Israel, neither sheep nor cattle nor donkeys." Later in Judges 6 and 7 they invade again and are fought off by Gideon. The Amalekites show that generation after generation, they are at war with Israel and with God.
Even long after Saul (and Saul's successor David) have fought against and mostly eradicated the Amalekites, we get one more Amalekite coming up. 600 years after them, the Persians are ruling the whole area, and a man called Haman, an Agagite gets a lot of power. "Agagite" probably means that he was descended from the Amalekite kings, known as Agag.
After these events, King Xerxes (of Persia) honored Haman son of Hammedatha, the Agagite, elevating him and giving him a seat of honor higher than that of all the other nobles. All the royal officials at the king's gate knelt down and paid honor to Haman, for the king had commanded this concerning him. But Mordecai would not kneel down or pay him honor.
Then the royal officials at the king's gate asked Mordecai, "Why do you disobey the king's command?" Day after day they spoke to him but he refused to comply. Therefore they told Haman about it to see whether Mordecai's behavior would be tolerated, for he had told them he was a Jew.
When Haman saw that Mordecai would not kneel down or pay him honor, he was enraged. Yet having learned who Mordecai's people were, he scorned the idea of killing only Mordecai. Instead Haman looked for a way to destroy all Mordecai's people, the Jews, throughout the whole kingdom of Xerxes.
Esther 3:1-6, NIV
The Amalekites weren't just any old people. They were the nation who more than any other tried to destroy Israel. They had been trying to eradicate and plunder Israel from the very birth of Israel, 200-400 years before the command in 1 Samuel 15, and they would continue for another 600 years.
The Amalekites were vicious as well, and were noted for killing children (1 Sam 15:33).
That explains some of the background to the conflict in 1 Samuel 15. It shows that what is being commanded is an act of war in a conflict which the Israelites didn't start, and which was never going to be resolved by negotiation. But I don't think it fully explains or justifies the command - that needs us to think about the theological context as well, which can wait for another post.
