I would say God commanding the Israelites to kill the Amalakite infants seems a tad cruel.
So I researched it and it seems Jewish scholars don’t see the tale as metaphorical at all. I chose Jewish scholars as they would be the best positioned to understand the Hebrew language and the alleged language that denotes metaphorical content.
I’d be interested in anyone citing Jewish scholars supporting the idea of it bring metaphorical and not historical.
While I cannot speak for every Jew, I have heard a group speak of this.
Jews believe that punishment of a multitude is to be left to God–which leads us straight to Amalekites. Why, in this case, would God ask men to punish and get rid of the Amalekites? Or, why would men punish the Amalekites when it was clearly God’s providence?
So, yes, they do have a metaphor, but it is not the same as what we saw in Bishop Barron’s video where we wipe away all sin, all evil–we don’t save a bit to play with.
Borgia_dude, keep in mind this is my weak grasp of Jewish teaching, further weakened, no doubt, by trying to summarize it. Jews connect the Amalekite with doubt, with a separation of the head from the body (emotions).
At the time of the Amalekites, no one was attacking the Jews because of God’s protection. Amalekites doubted God’s protection could be that great, so they began attacking the Israelites–not head on, but from the rear where the women, children, sick, and elderly were. Some point out that if God did give the command, it was because of how the Amalekites attacked the Israelites.
Jews have three commands when entering their land: Anoint a King; destroy the Amalekites; rebuild the Holy Temple. The metaphors:
I don’t know about scholars on the topic, but I think the group that was explaining the Amalekites were Chabad.
Thanks for this response. Yes, in my research I learned how the Jews viewed Amalakites. Early on, they were the ones attacking the stragglers during the Exodus and God’s enmity towards them. Interesting stuff. I didn’t find anything hinting at it being metaphorical in the instruction to destroy them and the ensuing actions to destroy them. Jews still today consider it a commandment to destroy Amalakites, although recognize there is no way of knowing and perhaps it is more about behavior now.
I’ll look into your Chabad source.
Yes, that is another interpretation.
Of course there are passages from the Old Testament that literally command enslavement and slaughter of defeated cities. Here is one example:
When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you. If they refuse to make peace and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that city. When the Lord your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. And you may use the plunder the Lord your God gives you from your enemies. This is how you are to treat all the cities that are at a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby.
However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you. Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the Lord your God.
Deuteronomy 20:10-18
Deuteronomy 20 NIV - Going to War - When you go to war - Bible Gateway
I find it hard to believe that this was just a metaphor for war. God told Abraham that 400 years would pass before the sin of the Amorites would reach such a measure that they would be judged. 400 years to repent and stop sacrificing their children by passing them through fire. None of it was a metaphor.
I am curious, if wiping out such people is cruel, what should happen to people that were given 400 years to stop brutally murdering children by heating metal altars and placing children on them to offer them up as a sacrifice?
https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/850235/jewish/Does-Torah-Promote-Genocide.htm
Checked out the Chabad source. They aren’t questioning the historicity of the destruction of the Amalakites, they even attempt to justify it. They do talk about how times have changed and the same command today should not be interpreted as a command to find and slay Amalakites today.
So Jewish scholars, interpreting their own language, aren’t seeing it as metaphor.
Been away!
The Amalakites is a fascinating study. In years past different elements of the story have been presented in different. ways. For example, it can be studied from a political perspective. There seems to have been a division among the Jews, two parties we might say today. One was the priestly party, led by Samuel. The other party (more secular it seems) backed Saul.
As ever, the winner (in this case the ‘Priestly Party’) writes the history. After the fact. When the Israelites were crossing the desert, word went out that they had God’s protection and none could stop them. The Amaekites doubted these intruders had God’s protection and showed how the tribe could be stopped. The warrior leaders, the strong, led the people. At the rear were the women and children, the old and infirm, the weak and sickly. Contrary to standard practice to meet the warriors head on, the Amalekites struck from behind, in that day a cowardly thing to do for anyone waging war.
(Try to imagine the chortling among the Amalekites…In that tribe, God could not protect even those most in need of His help.) They left the Israelites to starve.
The Israelites were also to be a people set apart, not to adopt the ways of other cultures, but to keep to their own ways.
The memories of all their own women, children, old, and infirm who were killed by the Amalekites were strong and bitter. There was a battle. This time the Israelites had the upper hand and there was a slaughter of animals (kind of a siege), Amalekite women and children. Why?
You are writing history and the Commandment was that slaughter of this magnitude could only be commanded by God. No problem. Send out word God commanded it.
Saul was overthrown. The word was he disobeyed that command from God. To me it looks more like a political coup staged by the ‘Priestly Party’.
Whatever the actual history, the central themes of the Jewish accounts is that evil is ever ready to pounce, and to the Israelites, the Amalekites were evil incarnate. The second theme is the perils of doubt.
At least some Jews today are careful of the Amalek within as well as the Amalek without. They also grapple with overcoming doubt.
To some atheists the story is only about God commanding slaughter. The end. There is so much more to what happened and what is being taught than that. Especially by Judaism.
I agree that the lessons certainly go beyond what atheists say. But don’t you find it odd that God needs to act similar to that which he commands to destroy in order to teach those lessons? That’s an ineffective teacher if you become as bad as what you command to destroy.
It also questions the morals of God that he is comfortable commanding the death of children and infants - which had nothing to do with the abhorrent behavior of the adults. And strange again that he commands this while in other parts of the Bible he talks about the sins of the father shall not be counted against the son.
Love. Consequences. Justice. Mercy.
My experience of God is a tremendous, marveling love. God loves all. That is my witness, my testimony.
So why did God give the command to massacre men, women, and children? Or did He? Love does not change the rules. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Actions have consequences. That God is pure love does not change the fact that if I jump off a tower, gravity will pull me down and I will die. Pure love cannot save me from the rules of physics.
I commit a crime. Should the pure love of another save me from either consequences, punishment, retaliation? If pure love is not meant to save me from gravity, why should it save me from the equal and opposite reaction to my action?
I gather my army to fight invaders. Instead of fighting warrior to warrior, I tell my warriors not to fight the opposing warriors, but instead to attack and kill the women and children, the elderly and the infirm. Warriors with no women and children have no future. We will stop the the invaders by insuring they have no future.
What action can I expect from the opposing forces? Want to bet they come after the future of my tribe by killing the women and children? An eye for an eye. (Woman for woman). A tooth for a tooth (Child for child).
Do I accept the consequences? Or do I cry unfair, that if my opponent truly believed in loving one’s fellow man, my women and children would be safe. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Justice. Punishment?
Mercy. By relenting, was Saul showing mercy to the king, or was he disobeying the command Samuel said was from God? Did God give that specific command, or did Samuel think that was the command God would give because of the equal and opposite reaction of justice?
Or, as I mentioned before, was the event whitewashed after-the-fact?
You keep talking from the point of view of the warriors. Perhaps you should consider the point of view of the child. You have reduced the child to a cost, a price to pay for misbehavior as you talk about what is fair to the warrior. That doesn’t seem fair to the child.
Irrespective of what the parents or warriors did, God commanded the slaughter of children. To those children, who hadn’t done anything wrong, their death is rather unjust. Unless you see them solely as poker chips, to be won or lost.
I have been encompassing the event in its entirety. Some atheists tend to focus only on “God commanded…”
Let’s try this. God commanded you or me to kill a child. I don’t know about you, but I could not kill a child even should God command it. Just couldn’t. Could you? What percentage of people do you know could kill a child even if God commanded it? My point is weakened, of course, by the millions who have had abortions along with the millions who think it is okay for someone else to have an abortion if they wanted one. God never gave the command to abort…that was the government. As far as me as an individual: I would not abort, nor favor abortion even though the government tells me it is perfectly all right. What about you?
I’m willing to bet the command to kill the Amalek children was made by a government who assured the people this is what God wanted. It appears that then, like now, whether it was the Amaleks or the Israelites, human beings are perfectly okay with slaughtering their children, or standing by while others slaughter even their own.
Don’t put that on God. It’s on us.
Bet all you like but that isn’t what the Bible says at all. It is very explicit in saying God commanded it. Further, Jewish rabbis and scholars, being in the best position to interpret their language, are quite upfront about God commanding this, not any government. Look it up in the Chabad, as you suggested earlier.
Sigh. So you think I spun everything I have laid out from thin air? I’m not that knowledgeable. For the past decade I have been reading rabbis, scholars, commentaries. I don’t need to look it all up again. I think all their different perspectives enlightening. I am not stuck on God commanded it. Neither are some rabbis, but they can lay out the reasoning of why it might have been commanded.
Those who use the Old Testament to portray God as cruel probably haven’t read it in its entirety, or at all.
How about those verses which forbid the placing of obstacles before the blind?
Or deception in weights and measures?
Or the requirement that slaves be treated by a set of minimum standards and given a day of rest?
That the beast of burden also be given the day of reat?
I’d pay no attention to those who probably provide plenty of pot meet kettle cruelty of their own.
Yes: Also–
Wisdom 1:13 - Because God did not make death, nor does He rejoice in the destruction of the living.
Repeated in Ezekiel 18:32 - For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone who dies, says the Lord God.
I can only go by what you provided me. You mentioned chabad and it did not say what you claimed it did. I’d be interested in a Jewish source that takes the position that it was govt and not God that commanded the Israelites.
Regardless, it is a good thing to take the good learnings from the Bible and leave the bad.
Deuteronomy 28:63
Just as it pleased the Lord to make you prosper and increase in number, so it will please him to ruin and destroy you.
You’re aware that verse pertains to those who disobeyed the Lord’s word, no? You’ve at least perused, if not read, all of Deuteronomy 28?
Here it is for the context of 28:36:
Ok, thanks. So God does rejoice in the destruction of the living if they disobeyed him. Understood.
