The Amalekite Genocide and Evangelical “Misinterpretation”

Some years ago, Child Evangelism Fellowship got in trouble for teaching children I Samuel 15:3 in their Good News Clubs.

I Samuel 15:3—“Now go and strike Amalek and utterly destroy all that he has, and do not spare him; but put to death both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.”

The Guardian described the lesson as follows:

The CEF has been teaching the story of the Amalekites at least since 1973. In its earlier curriculum materials, CEF was euphemistic about the bloodshed, saying simply that “the Amalekites were completely defeated.” In the most recent version of the curriculum, however, the group is quite eager to drive the message home to its elementary school students. The first thing the curriculum makes clear is that if God gives instructions to kill a group of people, you must kill every last one:

“You are to go and completely destroy the Amalekites (AM-uh-leck-ites) – people, animals, every living thing. Nothing shall be left.”

“That was pretty clear, wasn’t it?” the manual tells the teachers to say to the kids.

Even more important, the Good News Club wants the children to know, the Amalakites were targeted for destruction on account of their religion, or lack of it. The instruction manual reads:

“The Amalekites had heard about Israel’s true and living God many years before, but they refused to believe in him. The Amalekites refused to believe in God and God had promised punishment.”

The instruction manual goes on to champion obedience in all things. In fact, pretty much every lesson that the Good News Club gives involves reminding children that they must, at all costs, obey. If God tells you to kill nonbelievers, he really wants you to kill them all. No questions asked, no exceptions allowed.

Asking if Saul would “pass the test” of obedience, the text points to Saul’s failure to annihilate every last Amalekite, posing the rhetorical question:

“If you are asked to do something, how much of it do you need to do before you can say, ‘I did it!’?”

“If only Saul had been willing to seek God for strength to obey!” the lesson concludes.

I never attended a Good News Club—I was homeschooled, and these clubs take place in public schools—but I grew up in an evangelical home and I remember this lesson. My mother would read the Bible aloud to us children each morning after breakfast, asking questions like the ones posed here to draw meaning out of the text.

Child Evangelism Fellowship was not pleased with the heat it received.

The story of Saul and the Amalekites (1 Samuel 15:3) is found in any version or edition of the Bibles of the Jewish, Catholic and Protestant faiths since the first manuscripts were inscribed. Only a misinterpretation of the cited passage could be used to buttress genocide (How Christian fundamentalists plan to teach genocide to schoolchildren, 30 May).

The goal of Child Evangelism Fellowship is the proper teaching of this passage, which is not an instruction in genocide. Though truly many brutal acts appear in both the Old and New Testaments, including the torture and crucifixion of Jesus by the Romans, nothing could be more un-Christian than the promotion of genocide of any group of human beings under the New Covenant introduced to the world by Jesus Christ.

CEF and the Good News Clubs would never teach children that God would instruct them, or anyone today, to commit genocide.

There is so much going on here.

While it is true that Jews, Catholics, and mainline Protestants all have this passage in their holy books, they do not all approach their holy books (or this passage) in the same way. Second and relatedly, it does not take a “misinterpretation” of the cited passage to conclude that God commanded and endorsed genocide. All it takes is the sort of straightforward reading evangelicals champion.

The Jewish Virtual Library notes that Saul is commanded to exterminate the Amalekites in the context of the Amalekites having attacked the Israelites on their way out of Egypt—in stark contrast to Child Evangelism Fellowship stating that the Amalekites were killed because they refused to believe in God. In addition, the entry concludes that “Despite the ‘pre-deuteronomic’ literary framework of [Samuel] chapter 15 and its prophetic-ideological aim, embedded in it is an ancient historical tradition about a war of extermination that reflects Saul’s war against Amalek.”

Very brief googling makes it clear, too, that there’s a lot more going on regarding the role the Amalekites play—and have long played—in the Jewish origin story. I’m extremely tired of evangelicals assuming that Jews share the same view of the events described in the books in the Old Testament that evangelicals do. They don’t. The Jewish Torah might as well be a completely separate book, so great is the difference between Jewish and evangelical approaches and interpretations.

As for the others, I wasn’t able to find an official Catholic position online. However, I looked in my Catholic Study Bible and found this footnote:

Under the ban: in such wars of extermination, all things (men, cities, beasts, etc.) were to be blotted out; nothing could be reserved for private use. The interpretation of God’s will here attributed to Samuel is in keeping with the abhorrent practices of blood revenge prevalent among pastoral, semi nomadic peoples such as the Hebrews had recently been. The slaughter of the innocent has never been in conformity with the will of God.

This interpretation is common among both Catholics and mainline Protestants, who often look at the Old Testament as a combination of God’s attempts to reveal himself to a tribal people far different from our society today, and those peoples’ interpretations of God’s commands (which were not always accurate).

But evangelicals of the Child Evangelism Fellowship mold are not comfortable with any of this. They argue that the Bible should be taken at face value. Yes, you have to understand the context and culture of the time, but if the Bible says God commanded something, no matter how horrific, God did indeed command it.

Growing up in an evangelical home, I was taught that good and bad is defined by God, and that if he commands something it is de facto moral and right. At some point, though, I concluded that we cannot both have absolute moral standards (i.e. willfully taking innocent life is always wrong) and a moral system based on the idea that whatever God commands is automatically right or wrong.

Today my moral system has more nuance—try squaring the belief that willfully taking innocent life is always wrong with the trolly problem—and it can be strange, sometimes, to remember my mother reading aloud the story of the Amalekites.

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