I do not see it that way. I believe that God’s law is written in the hearts of all people. That may be why we, today, cannot imagine killing all the women and children in a tribe. Our hearts tell us, No.
Second, we know justice was equally important to ancient man. …a tooth for a tooth…In other words, if someone knocks out your tooth, you cannot pluck out his eye and call it justice. Therefore I can see where the ancient Israelites thought they were administering justice for the killing of their own. As Rabbis point out, evil is not to be tolerated, and this may be why wiping out the Amalekites was considered synonymous with wiping out evil.
In studying the Bible I:
Investigate historical facts
Investigate scientific facts
Note literature devices present
Note the theme
Note the lesson(s) being presented to the original audience
One way to take any account is literally. Truth also plays a part, which is where science and historical fact enter in. If truth wars with taking the King James English literally, then look for literary devices. Are they present?
Taking every word in the Bible literally is the lazy way out. My opinion.
No need to get snippy. You had mentioned talking to others and I was just asking if your theory was based on conversations with them or your own thoughts independent of them.
Ok. We agree that killing a child of s mass murderer would be a heinous act.
So do we agree that commanding someone to kill a child, no matter the sins of the parent, would similarly be heinous? Killing the Amalakite children is heinous no matter what the transgressions of the parents, right?
My focus is on what the warriors did. I noted earlier that the Amalekites had been preying on the Israelite women, children, and infirm. The Amaleks did not meet the Israelite warriors head on. Imagine losing your wife and children. Perhaps your parents were back in the protected area as well. Your entire family wiped out and no United Nations, Geneva Convention, NATO, police, etc. to call for sanctions.
Yes, you can say that no matter if your entire family was wiped out–and you were a warrior–you still would not have killed a child. Undoubtedly you would have set up and funded homes for the widows and fatherless children. You would have worked the rest of your life to provide for them.
Perhaps you would not have even killed another warrior because after all he was someone’s daddy or husband. When someone commits an evil deed, wave them on and go about your own life. If the evil returns to destroy your second family, or your grandchildren…oh, well.
A God worthy of being worshipped would not command the slaughter of infants. The infant didn’t do any evil. It is immaterial what the warriors want to do. Are you advocating the infant child of a mass murderer should also be put to death?
“We” would not, because we are living under a different covenant from the one the Mosaic Law old testamenters were under. God introduced the Law to restrain the worst excesses of evil until the covenant of grace was brought in by the promised Messiah. For 2666 years, before the law, God was not imputing men’s sins against them.
God did not treat people according to their sins until the law came 2666 or so years after creation. God let men keep on sinning, and even graciously overlooked murders by people such as Cain and Moses and Abraham pimping his own wife. People had their faith in God imputed as righteousness for 2666 years. In all that time God was longsuffering and only stepped in with punishment once a populations sins had escalated to a cancerous level that existentially threatened the human race, in the case of the flood; and was in danger of heading the same way again, in the case of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Unfortunately, men took God’s forebearance as approval, that sin can’t be that bad, and assumed they were good enough as they were. So God gave the Law to show the actual standard of goodness He would require if righteousness were based on keeping laws. And He set penalties closer to what justice would truly require, if sins were weighed according to God’s standards. Cain was not killed for murdering his brother under the grace of the lawless 2666 years, but a man was killed for the rebellion of gathering sticks on the sabbath day under the law. People were still declared righteous by faith under the law, such as in the case of the murdering adulterer, King David. But the law was given to restrain the worst excesses of selfishness through fear of retribution, and to disabuse self-righteous people of their assumed worthiness.
The Amalekites were destroyed under the dispensation of the Law. Their almost total decadence threatened to bring the world to the same state that brought the flood, so God made an example of them to give other nations pause about going the same way - kind of like nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved a lot of lives and has dissuaded the same kind of brutal imperialism from taking root elsewhere.
Does God rejoice in the destruction of the wicked? In the sense that a person who puts up with injustice and evildoing for a long time experiences a cathartic relief once the oppressors are finally held to account and their reign of terror over others ends, yes. But the fact that God holds off punishing for so long indicates that it is not something He actually enjoys doing, otherwise He would jump in sooner.
Of the 6000 years since creation, God has offered righteousness by grace through faith during all of them, and has imposed law for only 1500 of them.
Yes, that is the pivotal question. If God made this command to slaughter babies, it certainly puts His morals in a questionable area to say the least. If He didn’t make the command despite the Bible saying He did, then the ability to interpret the Bible becomes strained.
And the evidence seems to support God making the command. Jewish rabbis and scholars seem to interpret the passage as literal, historical fact.
Of course. I’m just trying to get a direct answer from you. If you ask me a question I’ll be happy to give you a direct answer to your question.
I asked you if commanding the slaughter of infants was moral. You went through a long discussion about the warriors and justifications for them killing infants. Because you were justifying, I had to go back to the previous question on whether the act was moral or not.
I’ll assume you agree the act is immoral. If the act of killing infants is immoral, is commanding others to do it similarly immoral?
No, it does not become strained as the Bible is meant to be studied. For example, say that someone wrote, “Borgia_dude’s parents slaughtered the children next door.” As their child, would you believe this statement, or at the very least would you want to find out what was behind it.
I know God’s infinite love, and so in my limited experience it is impossible that God gave this command. HOWEVER, other’s may know of God’s infinite justice and disinclination to let something evil grow and flourish. Rabbis/Jewish scholars outlined the necessity of this for justice and to demolish evil.
All I have done, based on my own experiences, is to point out how the command may well have come from a human being, that the command aligns more with human thinking than godly thinking. I’ve covered a lot of political meetings, and to me this smacks more of human politics than Godly guidance.
As we can see from the differing opinions on just this passage, if there’s no objective ways to tell whether slaughtering the Amalekites was the actual God’s command or the Samuel/Levite intepretatiin of what God wanted, then yes the ability to interpret the Bible becomes strained.
It smacks to YOU of “human politics” rather than “Godly Guidance”.
It doesn’t smack to others who have studied the Bible just as much or more than you have the same way…to them, it strikes them as the actual God’s command.
Yes, that is what I said. I already noted (several times) that others see it as God’s justice and/or removing evil. There is nothing wrong with that and everything right. It very well could have happened that way.
My grievance is with those who just see the event as proof of God’s heinous acts, cruelty, and immorality, not with those who see justice in it and/or God removing evil.
My own approach with the Bible is to first search out the natural cause before turning to the supernatural. As we see here, some prefer to go straight to the supernatural, and there is nothing wrong with that method either–it is just not one
