One of the controversial parts of the Old Testament is the
Lord’s commandment to wipe out the Amalekites so that their memory is erased.
The impetus for this command is after an occasion when a
group of Canaanites called Amalekites attack the part of the Israelite camp
with the sick, weary, and slow.
The strictness and severity of the command to wipe out the memory of the
Amalekites is often questioned because of our distance from the offense they
committed, when it was essentially an atrocity against noncombatants and
civilians who could not defend themselves, about on par with attacking a
hospital and slaughtering all inside.
One of the puzzling things is that even though various
successive generations of Israelites destroy what they claim is “all of the
Amalekites,” somehow enough Amalekites manage to survive for later generations
to have to wipe them out too.
Saul is commanded to destroy the Amalekites, and he does,
except for their king Agag, and Samuel has to finish the job. Yet in the Book of Esther, we run into
Haman, who is labeled an Agagite, which makes us thing Agag’s posterity still
survived.
David returns home from the battlefront to find the
Amalekites have attacked his hometown and carried away captive everyone, and he
has to go rescue them. Earlier
than that, he goes on a raid against Amalekites and wipes them all out,
presumably following that ancient command of Moses.
Even more interesting, occasionally editors of papers in
Israel call for people to take up arms against the Amalekites around them who
threaten their families.
How can Amalekites be wiped out generation after generation
and still spring up again?
Another interesting part of that story of Saul killing the
Amalekites is that before he attacks, he finds Kenites living among the
Amalekites, and he warns them to get out from among them so they aren’t
destroyed too. So the Kenites
leave. How did Saul know who was
Kenite and who was Amalekite then?
For that matter, how did any Israelite know an Amalekite
from any other people? Did they
inquire after their genealogy and then attack? Or was there a characteristic that instantly
identified a group as Amalekite?
Another question that troubles us is: Why did successive
generations of Amalekites deserve to die?
If they deserved it, why weren’t their crimes recorded so that future
generations could be sure their deaths were merited? We place much importance on justice being done and in
order to mentally exonerate the ancient Israelites of the charge of genocide,
we feel we have to put the Amalekites on trial and hear the evidence that they
were worthy of death. But since
there is very little evidence in the Bible, we conclude that no such evidence
existed and that the executions were unfair.
I finally came up with a theory that explains why Amalekites
continued to exist and continued to require destruction. It also explains why their crimes were
not recorded after the first inciting atrocity.
My theory is that the classification of “Amalekite” may have
begun as a particular culture, but
didn’t have to stay that way.
Instead, it lived on as a behavior profile and the characteristic that
identified someone as an Amalekite were the same actions that got the
Amalekites under holy death sentence from God in the first place—attacking the
weak, the sick, and those unable to defend themselves. This is extremely predatory behavior. Thus, anyone who did such a thing was to
be considered an Amalekite and worthy of being wiped out.
This is why Samuel commanded Saul to kill the
Amalekites. It meant that some
group of people was being called Amalekites because of the atrocities they had
just committed, and their acts required a
response. For Saul to leave
Agag alive was to fail to punish the instigator of those atrocities.
This is why David went on raids against the Amalekites. We are merely told of those raids and
are meant to understand and take for granted that they happened because some
group of people (labeled Amalekites) had committed atrocities against the
weakest citizens who were unable to defend themselves. This is also why David,
when he comes back to find the city Ziklag looted and his women and children
kidnapped, has to go chasing down more Amalekites to rescue his people.
The man who claims he killed King Saul is identified as an
Amalekite. Coincidence? No. If you read the account, you start to see that the man was predatory
and taking advantage of the weak.
Haman, by plotting the death of the entire Jewish people in
such a way that they were not allowed to defend themselves, is easily identified
as a predatory type. You don’t
have to look at his genealogy to see that he fits the Amalekite profile.
So what do we learn from this? In the commandment to wipe the Amalekites from the earth, we
start to see not irrational cruelty and genocide as many often suppose, but an
ancient measure to moderate war before there was ever thought of such a thing
as the Geneva Convention. It
also bit both ways. It was a
command to put an end to any other people who commit such atrocities as the
Amalekites had once committed, and implicitly a strict command to confine
military aggression to those who can actually fight back (lest one become an
Amalekite oneself).
Now.. you make
the call.
Can Hitler be called an Amalekite?
How about suicide bombers?
What about terrorists?
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