The Slaughter of the Amalekites

One of the things I love about God is that he never seems to sugar coat the truth. If the Old Testament histories and narratives have one striking feature, it is how 'warts and all' they are in their revelations. In fact, this is one of the most interesting aspects historically of the Old Testament narratives. Those who write history usually omit their defeats, and yet the Old Testament is full of mess-ups, muck-ups and mistakes. The bible doesn't just tell us what we want to hear. Which I love. But at times it's a little tricky.

One of the most troubling passages of Old Testament history occurs in 1 Samuel 15, where God commands the destruction of an entire nation - specifically to include women and children. The story is part of Saul's downfall because he becomes conceited and obsessed with his own power and begins to flippantly disobey God. But when you pause and look from another angle, it's pretty hard to ignore what God asks him to do in this passage.

If we are honest, our immediate reaction to God's command in this passage is moral disgust. And yet, as Christians, we hold this passage alongside the rest of the bible as the word of God, the primary source of all of our knowledge and understanding of God, and arguably our sole source of understanding of his intervention in the story of Israel. So how do we get our heads round passages such as this one?

I am not a theologian or a biblical scholar (other than in the sense of every Christian being a scholar of God's word to some degree). I am just a Christian. That is by way of disclaimer should anything that follows offend or disgruntle the reader! But as someone who knows God, passages like this strike me as out of kilter with the character of the God who I have come to know. And so the following has been my thought process as I have tried to work this one through. If it helps you, great - if it doesn't, I refer you to my disclaimer above and accept no liability for your disagreeing with me...

First, a preliminary thought.

The very concept of morality is dependant on God. That doesn't, of course, mean that people who know God are more moral than those who don't - it is a statement of objective fact that there is no basis for the existence of moral thought without an external standard to which we are accountable - see an interesting debate here:  http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=61XaBy8JYHA. Without a god-given moral conscience, we are eventually left with the answer 'it just is' when we are continually asked 'why' a certain thing is wrong.

What that means, logically, is that judging the morality of God is a nonsensical endeavour. It is like using a calculator to prove that the calculator itself is wrong. Every basis we have for judging morality comes from God. And so when we tell God he was wrong, we are telling him that he has contravened a moral code which is itself defined by what God does. We chase our tails. We are telling him he is acting in an ungodly manner, but if God acts, the act is godly. This sounds like semantical gymnastics, but the point I am making is that God is God. He does as he pleases, and we are simply unable to assess or judge the basis of his activity. It is beyond our capacity.

That said, the reason this story causes such concern is that the command by God to destroy the Amalekites appears inconsistent with what we know from the rest of scripture of the revealed character of God. In other words, we don't understand. We don't understand why a God who reveals himself as a God of love, slow to anger, and patient, would require the destruction of an entire people. And it has to be OK to not understand. We have to be comfortable, to an extent, with not understanding, because God is beyond our understanding. It's a tension we have to live with.

But irritating people like me need something more to chew on.  What follows will by no means provide a full and satisfactory answer to that question. It is, after all, one of those things which we simply cannot fully grasp - his ways are higher than ours. But there are some factors which, for me, assist in scratching the surface just a little.

So here goes.

I'd suggest that the slaughter of the Amalekites was not what God wanted. Stay with me. I'm suggesting that from the fact that God required this awful thing to be done, it does not flow as a consequence that this act was the perfect will, desire and intention of god. All of this is post-fall, and has to be seen in that context. We always say 'well, in a perfect world, (X) wouldn't happen...' and the same applies here. In a perfect world, the Amalekites would not die. God created a perfect world. And we ruined it. From that point on, the story has been one of God redeeming, correcting, and changing things to bring us back into perfect relationship with him. And when things have gone wrong, it can take things that otherwise we would never do, to bring them right again. We would never send men running into a fire. But when something has gone wrong, and a house full of people is about to burn down,  we do. Think of the cross. Would a father ever want to have his own son nailed to a cross? No. But God did, because the conditions of the perfect world no longer applied, and for a reason beyond our understanding that act was necessary.

So we know that there was some reason by which this act - which is not something God would ever want - became necessary. To stay with the example of the cross, we are given insight into why God sacrificed his son. We see the consequences of it. We rejoice in the mercy, grace and incredible sacrifice demonstrated by God to win our freedom, to defeat our sin and to bring us back into relationship with him. God has revealed to us, at least in part, why the cross had to happen. And so we can see this as an aspect of what god does: he turns evil into good. Things that can seem when looked at in a vacuum to be terrible things, when considered in the light of god's greater plan are seen to be as much a reflection of god's righteousness and love as anything else God has done.

We understand the cross in this way because we know the other side of the story. We know that Jesus was God and so the cross was in fact an act of self-sacrifice. We know that Jesus rose to life again, having been obedient to death, and so the cross was not the final word over the life of Christ. We know that the cross won for us eternal salvation, reconciliation to God, and the opportunity of living a life of genuine joy, purpose and fulfillment. We know these things, and so we worship God for the cross.

The problem with understanding the slaughter of the Amalekites is that we aren't told all of the other sides to the story. It isn't immediately clear what this act achieved or was intended to achieve. It isn't immediately clear to us what provision God made for his mercy and love to be made known to the Amalekites. We aren't told what eternal fate met the Amalekites. We don't know.

There are a number of potential aims or explanations for the slaughter of the Amalekites, and I make no comment on the persuasive power of any of them in justifying what happened in our minds. This is all, of course, in the context of having to come to a point of being OK with not fully understanding it. The list of explanations I've heard or read fall into two broad categories.

1. God commanded their destruction to save Israel (and by extension, his plan to show his light and love to the whole earth) from the people the Amalekites would become. The Amalekites, so say biblical historians, became an oppressive people who included an individual by the name of Haman.  Haman would become an ancient Hitler figure, who came close to having the entire Jewish race eradicated. In the book of Esther his story is told. Had Saul obeyed God and destroyed the Amalekites, Haman would never have come to be. Into this category would also fall the argument that the slaughter of the Amalekites was intended to prevent the world at large being dragged further into sin and depravity by their example, given that they are thought to have been one of the most brutal societies around at that time.

2. This was simply divine judgement on the Amalekites. They had become an evil people, engaged in depravity rarely or never seen, including child sacrifice. They had been given 400 years to repent and change their ways as a people, but they had continued in a downward spiral. God simply called time on their disobedience. There is also an argument, supported by the passage itself, that this was divine judgement for a specific act of oppression in the recent past. The Amalekites had oppressed and opposed Israel as they settled into their land, because they were weak and an easy target. Years later, when God has prospered and strengthened Israel, they are repaid for their aggression. This was a demonstration, so the argument goes, of the fact that you cannot oppose God and win in the end.

All, or some combination of the above may be part of the answer to the question 'why would God do this?', or these factors may simply be human ideas which fall way short of what it was God had in mind. We just don't know.

Where does that leave us? How do we respond to this passage?

I would argue, the same way we are to respond to every calamitous thing that happens, every mass loss of life that we see. Our God is sovereign and could end suffering with a cosmic snap of his divine fingers if he so wished. He hasn't, so far. And, whilst there are some reasons suggested by well meaning humanity for why god might decide to allow these things, and there are some theological frameworks (usually going back to the fall as the game changer) which are put forward as a way of dealing with these problems, they still leave us with something short of an emotionally satisfying answer.

So what would God have us do? He would have us trust. Trust that he is good - all the time. Trust that his will is perfect. Know that he takes pleasure in no-ones destruction, that he wills no-ones demise. Trust that he brings goodness from badness, light from darkness. To know that he is in control - and when the world seems out of control, it will only go so far as he allows.

And if you are wrestling with the question of God's goodness, either when you read passages like 1 Samuel 15, or when you face awful tragedy in life, it is OK to ask. If Job and the Psalms teach us anything it is that it is OK to ask. To complain. To plead. It is OK to not understand. But what we can do is ask God to help us to trust that he knows what he is doing. We can ask God to show us what light he is bringing from the darkness.

And as I've walked that path with Jesus, I've found myself convinced that even though so many things in the world seem so wrong, and there are so many things I just don't - and may never - understand... He is very very good. He is faithful. He is just. He is kind. He is so patient. And he loves each and every one of us with a furious love.