God’s commands to the Israelites to wage “holy war” are difficult for us to understand today. How could a holy and loving God desire the deaths of women and children, and even animals? Why would texts like this one be included in God’s Word? How can Christians still trust the Bible as God’s Word when things like this are in it?

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1 SAMUEL #13. 1 SAMUEL 15:1-23

There is one big and totally natural question when we read 1 Samuel chapter 15: Why did God want the Israelites to destroy every living Amalekite? Why the women and children and babies too? How can we accept that God wanted this, and yet still believe that he is merciful, forgiving and loving? There are a handful of passages like this in the Old Testament, and for the modern Western mind, it seems inexplicable and even repulsive. We will dive into this topic in detail. Many people who aren’t Christian or Jewish use these sorts of bible passages to criticize and even mock the Bible, so it’s worth spending some time on the issue.

Before we get into detail however, I want to point out that every single religion and worldview has a similar problem. Even now, in the 21^st century, Buddhists in Myanmar are brutally persecuting Muslims and Christians in the name of Buddhism. The Japanese used their Shinto Buddhism to justify the Second World War, and many of the atrocities they committed during it. The history of Hinduism includes wars to spread it, and to suppress rival religions. Even today, Hindus severely persecute Christians in India. We all know that Islam has a history and culture of war and terrorism in the name of Allah.

Some atheists tend to get smug at this point, and claim that religion in general is the big problem. However, when it comes to the genocidal extermination of enemies, history shows that no one is more relentless and vicious than atheists. Hitler and the core Nazis were atheists who were deeply influenced by Darwinism and by the atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. That’s right: it was atheists that tried to exterminate the Jews, Roma, Slavs, etc.. Joseph Stalin, who ordered the killing of tens of millions directly and indirectly, was a committed communist atheist. So was Mao Tse Tung, the communist leader of China who was responsible for more than 100 million deaths, and likewise Pol Pot, and Ho Chi Minh in South East Asia. In the 20^th century alone, atheism inspired the brutal deaths of almost 200 million people, many of them women and children.

So don’t let anyone get smug. If someone doesn’t like this part of the Bible, they must reckon with the same issues – usually at a much worse level – in every other major worldview, including their own, no matter what it happens to be. In other words, if this invalidates the Bible, it also invalidates every single worldview held by humans.

Even so, let’s be honest: knowing the fact that every world view has a similar problem does not really answer any questions about the issue as it pertains to Christianity. So we’ll dig into it.

I’ll talk more about this next time, but I want to note first that Jesus makes it very clear that from his time onwards, the people of God are not to engage in physical warfare in his name. After Jesus, the focus is on the spiritual war, and nothing in the New Testament supports the idea of fighting a literal war in the name of God.In other words, the Christian reading of the Bible does not teach or endorse wars in the name of God. In fact, the main reason we have issues with texts like this in the present day is because of the teachings of Jesus Christ.

Just to be perfectly clear, the Bible does not prohibit people from being soldiers. What I’m saying is, we are not commanded to fight in the name of Jesus. There may be other legitimate reasons to participate in a war, but eliminating non-Christians, or converting people by force, are not legitimate reasons for Christians to fight. I know that to some extent Christians did those very things in the wars and persecutions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Europe, but they did them in contradiction to the teachings of Jesus. In other words, though they claimed to be fighting in the name of Jesus, those wars were clearly against his own teachings.

Now, let’s get to it. Throughout the history of both Judaism and Christianity, God’s commands to destroy the Canaanites (and Amalekites, as in our text today) have been understood to be severely limited. These wars were to be against only certain specific peoples at specific times and specific places. The texts make it clear that this is not a general endorsement of war in the name of God, and the overwhelming majority of Jewish and Christian theologians throughout the past 3,000 years have seen these commands to war as historically and geographically limited to those specific instances. In other words, even in Old Testament times, this was not an endorsement of “holy war” as a general thing.

Second, it is also important to understand that the language of killing every single man, woman and child is a figure of speech. This kind of hyperbolic exaggeration was quite typical of the ancient Middle East. For instance, Tuthmosis III, Pharoah of Egypt about five hundred years before king Saul, boasted that when he fought the army of Mitanni, they were “annihilated totally, like those (now) not existent.” But historians know that actually, at least some of Mitanni’s soldiers survived. In fact, they even survived as an effective fighting force, and went on to engage in later battles. Ramses II, about two hundred years later, announced that he killed the “entire force” of the Hittites, however, the truth was that he merely defeated them. In about 835 BC, the king of Moab declared that the Northern Kingdom of Israel had “utterly perished for always,” but once more, we know that actually, that kingdom survived for another century before the Assyrians devastated it. Other ancient middle eastern leaders used similar language in the same way. So, this language of killing every man, woman and child is not meant to be understood at face value. It’s a bit like how we in modern times sometimes speak about sporting events. A sports announcer might say: “The Seahawks obliterated the Rams, 42 to 3.” When we hear that, we know that the Seahawks won an impressive victory, but we also know it was not literal obliteration for the Rams. After the game, there was still a normally functioning team called “the Rams.”

In the same way, “kill every man, woman and child, do not spare them,” is just typical language for the situation, and it is an exaggeration for illustration. The people at the time would have understood that God’s command didn’t mean to literally kill every single human, including women and babies. (I do want to say that the command to kill the animals was different, and was literal. We’ll come back to this point in a moment.)

It’s not that the writers of the Bible were trying to be deceptive. They were using words and idioms that the people at the time knew were not meant to be taken literally. Actually, even people reading today should be able to realize that this kind of language was not meant literally. All we have to do is keep reading the book of 1 Samuel. Look at chapter 15, verses 7-8:

7 Then Saul struck down the Amalekites from Havilah all the way to Shur, which is next to Egypt. 8 He captured Agag king of Amalek alive, but he completely destroyed all the rest of the people with the sword. (1 Samuel 15:7-8, HCSB, italic formatting added for emphasis)

So it says Saul completely destroyed all the rest of the Amalekites with the sword. Now fast forward to chapter 30, where the same writer in the same book, says this:

1 David and his men arrived in Ziklag on the third day. The Amalekites had raided the Negev and attacked and burned down Ziklag. (1 Samuel 30:1, HCSB)

Wait, what? The same writer who told us that all the Amalekites were completely destroyed now tells that they still had an army big enough to mount an effective raid. Is he an idiot, who can’t even keep track of what he’s already written? No. He is simply using typical Middle Eastern exaggeration to describe decisive military conquests. So we can see clearly for ourselves that the language of killing all human beings is just a figure of speech.

By the way, included with the command completely wipe out these peoples is another command forbidding the Israelites from marrying any of them (Deuteronomy 7:1-6, quoted below). This makes no sense if they are supposed to all be dead. Therefore, the command against intermarriage is another clue that they didn’t need to kill literally every single human of these tribes.

Now, if we don’t take the killing of every human being literally, how should we understand this sort of language? Actually, it isn’t too difficult. It’s a lot like asking, “How should we understand it when we say the Seahawks obliterated the Rams?” It means “a very decisive victory.” When the Bible records God commanding this type of Holy War, it means that the Israelites were to utterly defeat the enemies in question. Specifically, there should be no peace treaties, nor intermarriage, and the Israelites were to continue the warfare until the Canaanite tribes no longer functioned as distinct societies.

One analogy might be the way Germany and Japan were defeated at the end of the Second World War. Many Germans and Japanese survived the war – many millions, in fact. But the allies utterly defeated them, and destroyed not only their armies, but also their economies, institutions, and all ability they had to sustain themselves as independent nations. The allies dismantled the cultures of pride and conquest that led those nations to start the war. Both countries were essentially rebuilt from the ground up, with an entirely different cultural ethos. This is the sort of thing God is commanding the Israelites to do.

Again, I want to emphasize that the Bible does not command the Israelites to do this with all of their enemies. In fact, this kind of holy warfare is only ever commanded concerning the people groups who were living in the promised land, plus the Amalekites, who were nomadic, but roamed within the promised land. The reason is to protect the true worship of the Lord, so that God’s people would remain his people.

1 “When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess, and He drives out many nations before you — the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and powerful than you — 2 and when the LORD your God delivers them over to you and you defeat them, you must completely destroy them. Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy. 3 Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, 4 because they will turn your sons away from Me to worship other gods. Then the LORD’S anger will burn against you, and He will swiftly destroy you. 5 Instead, this is what you are to do to them: tear down their altars, smash their sacred pillars, cut down their Asherah poles, and burn up their carved images. 6 For you are a holy people belonging to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you to be His own possession out of all the peoples on the face of the earth. (Deuteronomy 7:1-6, HCSB, bold format added for emphasis)

Out of all the people in the world at the time, only the people of Israel, as a nation, worshipped the one true God. Sometimes, it might be hard for us to realize how different the world was back then. The idea that there was only one God was considered ludicrous. The morality of the Israelites – not murdering, not committing adultery, not stealing, being honest, and so on – was considered weak and pointless. The big danger to God’s people was that they would turn away from God because of the influence of the pagans living around them. If the Israelites did not resoundingly defeat their neighbors, they were in danger of being led astray into the worship of false gods, and leaving no one in the world who worshipped the one true God. So the command was given for them to defeat the people of Canaan so completely that they no longer functioned as separate, ungodly societies in the holy land. This didn’t actually require that every single Canaanite human being be killed, but rather that they were so thoroughly defeated that they ceased to function as separate cultures within the land of Israel, and instead became assimilated into the nation of Israel and the worship of the one true God. The commands for this to happen were written in typical ancient middle eastern exaggerated language.

Just to be clear: if a Canaanite wanted to convert to the worship of the Lord and join the Israelites, they were welcome to do so. Many did, including famous individuals like Rahab of Jericho, and Uriah the Hittite, who was one of David’s mighty men. The problem wasn’t their existence as individuals, but rather the cultures that led the Israelites astray. It was those cultures that had to be utterly defeated. This was one reason it was so bad for Saul to keep the Amalekite king alive. A king is a unifying figure for a group of people. The people needed to stop seeing themselves as “Amalekites” but by keeping their king alive, Saul preserved some of their sense of cultural identity.

Also, the Bible is radically different from other middle eastern sources in that when God commands this war to be waged, he commands that all the animals and goods belonging to the defeated foe must be destroyed. This is wildly different from other ancient middle eastern wars, and I do think this part was meant literally, as 1 Samuel 15 confirms.

The killing of animals seems strange to modern people. But in those days, animals were wealth. Everyone lived by farming. The more animals you had, the wealthier you were. Typically in warfare, the animals of the defeated were seized by the victorious army, and this enriched them immensely.

By commanding that all the animals be killed, and all the loot destroyed, it meant that these wars did not make the Israelites wealthier. In fact, it would cost them in material goods and lives lost, without them gaining anything. This was to keep the Israelites from making war simply in order to enrich themselves. In other words, no one would fight this way to benefit themselves. The only reason to do it was because God commanded it. God’s command to kill the animals kept the Israelites from becoming habitual warriors in order to get rich.

Secondly, killing all the animals and destroying all goods makes much more sense if, as I have been saying, they did not kill literally all of the human beings. The people who were left would have no animals, no wealth or economic base from which to build a separate culture, or to influence the Israelites. Destroying the economic base of a people group means that they have to assimilate into the more powerful society.

Saul did not trust that God knew what he was doing. He wanted to enrich himself with the animals. (His claim that he kept them for sacrifice is almost certainly a face-saving lie). I think he kept the king alive because he was afraid that if he let his men kill the king, they might start to think that kings were no different from anyone else, and then they might consider killing him. In short, Saul was not willing to trust the Lord, and therefore he did not obey him. That is the real point of this text. That is what we should meditate on. Obviously we should think about how we can be different from Saul when the Lord asks us to do something we don’t fully understand.

Now, I don’t want to pretend that we have solved all the problems raised by these kinds of texts. In fact, we’ll have another message on this topic, and even after that, it won’t be all wrapped up in a tidy bow. We can see Saul’s issues of trust and obedience, but still, the holy war thing seems difficult to wrap our heads around. I think we are dealing with things here that human beings may never fully understand.

However, though we may not understand God when he commands Holy War, (even though it is in a very constrained and limited way), we cannot deny that God is gracious, loving and forgiving. Jesus commanded his followers to love their enemies, and forgive them. He told his followers not to fight back when he was arrested. In fact, he allowed his enemies to kill him. He suffered in ways we cannot even comprehend to save anyone (including the Amalekites) who is willing to put their trust in the Lord. Paul Copan writes:

Since God was willing to go through all of this for our salvation, the Christian can reply to the critic, “While I can’t tidily solve the problem of the Canaanites, I can trust a God who has proven his willingness to go to such excruciating lengths—and depths—to offer rebellious humans reconciliation and friendship.” However we’re to interpret and respond to some of the baffling questions raised by the Old Testament, we shouldn’t stop with the Old Testament if we want a clearer revelation of the heart and character of God.

… Though a Canaanite-punishing God strikes us as incompatible with graciousness and compassion, we cannot escape a redeeming God who loves his enemies, not simply his friends (Matt. 5:43–48). Indeed, he allows himself to be crucified by his enemies in hopes of redeeming them.

(Copan, Paul. Is God a Moral Monster? (p. 197). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.)

Let’s be different than Saul today. Let’s entrust ourselves to a God who has proved his trustworthiness and love by dying for us. As a part of that trust, let’s obey him, even when we don’t fully understand his ways.