Difficult Passages

A Pastoral Reference
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45 Old Testament / Theology

The Command to Destroy Amalek

1 Sam 15:1–3; Deut 25:17–19; Exod 17:14–16

The Difficulty

Through Samuel, God commands Saul to “attack Amalek… do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant” (1 Sam 15:3). When Saul spares King Agag and the best livestock, he is rejected as king. The text frames near-total slaughter, including infants, as obedience and the sparing of life as sin. This is the sharpest form of the OT’s herem (devotion-to-destruction) problem: it appears to be a divinely commanded genocide.

Responses

Hyperbolic War Rhetoric

Tradition: Academic / Evangelical Summary: ANE conquest accounts routinely use sweeping “total destruction” language that was conventional exaggeration, not a literal body count.

Comparable inscriptions (e.g., the Moabite Mesha Stele) claim utter annihilation while the populations demonstrably survived. Amalekites reappear after this account (1 Sam 27; 30; Esther). The command may target combatants and a hostile political entity using the genre’s stock totalizing phrases, which ancient hearers would not have read with modern literalism.

Strengths

  • Fits documented ANE military rhetoric and the genre’s conventions
  • Coheres with Amalekites surviving in later texts

Weaknesses

  • “Child and infant” is hard to dissolve entirely into rhetoric
  • Risks a convenient softening of a genuinely brutal command

Further Reading

  • Paul Copan, Is God a Moral Monster? (Baker, 2011)
  • K. Lawson Younger, Ancient Conquest Accounts (Sheffield, 1990)
  • Nicholas Wolterstorff, in Divine Evil? (Oxford, 2011)

Unique, Non-Repeatable Judgment

Tradition: Traditional / Reformed Summary: This was a specific, time-bound act of divine justice on a particular people for generations of aggression, not a standing template.

Amalek had attacked the weak and stragglers at the exodus (Deut 25:17–19) and embodied implacable enmity toward God’s people. The herem is God’s prerogative as judge over nations, executed once through Israel, never authorized as a general human policy. It belongs to redemptive history, not to ethics for the church, which is given no sword of this kind.

Strengths

  • Locates the command in a singular juridical moment
  • Blocks any use of the text to license violence today

Weaknesses

  • Does not resolve the moral status of killing infants for ancestral guilt
  • Appeals to divine prerogative many find unsatisfying

Further Reading

  • Christopher Wright, The God I Don’t Understand (Zondervan, 2008)
  • John Calvin, Commentary on 1 Samuel, on ch. 15

Honest Lament and a Christ-Centered Trajectory

Tradition: Pastoral / Cruciform Summary: Some readers refuse to justify the command, reading the canon as moving toward the enemy-loving God revealed in Christ.

On this view the texts witness to Israel’s real but partial grasp of God amid the violence of its age, and the full disclosure of God’s character comes in Jesus, who refuses the sword and dies for enemies. Faithfulness means neither denying the text nor defending the slaughter, but reading Scripture’s whole arc toward the crucified Lord.

Strengths

  • Refuses to call infant-killing good
  • Reads consistently toward the nonviolence of the cross

Weaknesses

  • Risks setting the OT against the NT and a “two Gods” impression
  • Raises hard questions about inspiration and the command’s origin

Further Reading

  • Greg Boyd, The Crucifixion of the Warrior God (Fortress, 2017)
  • Eric Seibert, The Violence of Scripture (Fortress, 2012)
  • Douglas Earl, The Joshua Delusion? (Cascade, 2010)