On the Amalekites

So this link, How Christian fundamentalists plan to teach genocide to schoolchildren

...brings back a few memories.

I first remember hearing about Saul's destruction of the Amalekites in second grade. My second grade teacher (at my private Christian school) told us Bible stories every day.

It was in retrospect, a surprisingly thorough retelling of the Old Testament considering we were only in second grade.

To give her her due, my second grade teacher was very good at her job. We were too young to read the real Bible at that age, so she would just retell the Bible stories to us in language that we could understand.
It was one of those under-appreciated skills that looks deceptively easy, but very few people actually pull it off.

(I used to ask my mom to tell Bible stories just like our teacher did, but without success. Also once the student teacher took over Bible story time for a few days, and couldn't do it at all. She completely confused the whole class trying to re-tell the story about how Jeroboam and Rehoboam split the Kingdom of Israel into two parts. Then, a couple days later our regular teacher came back and started telling us the stories again, and suddenly it was back in a language we understood.)

Perhaps because she was such a good story teller, several of these stories stick out in my mind years later.

I remember well the story of Saul's extermination of the Amalekites. I remember it partly because it referenced back an earlier story. The teacher reminded us of how the Amalekites had attacked the Israelites in the desert, and in my child mind I immediately thought: "Oh no, was I supposed to have remembered that? I vaguely remember when they got attacked in the desert, but I didn't remember the tribe's name." (I was a typical first born and prone to panic easily in school when I thought I wasn't remembering everything I should of.)

Oddly enough, the brutal extermination of the Amalekites itself didn't particularly horrify me at the time. But as I said, we had already worked our way through several gruesome Old Testament stories by this point, and one more massacre more or less didn't seem to make a difference.

Plus we were children, and we accepted whatever the adults told us. If the adults told us it was morally right for the Israelites to kill all the Amalekites, we tended to accept it and just shove our own doubts into the back of our mind. (Or at least I did.)

It's only now in retrospect that I wonder why these kind of stories were taught to children. And why people think that children should get their morality from the Bible.

Also, it wasn't until later years (and the invention of the Internet) that I would discover that the destruction of the Amalekites is a thread that re-occurs several times throughout the Old Testament.
It's true that God orders plenty of other races are exterminated in books like Numbers and Joshua, but these appear to have been done in the hot blood of conquest. The extermination of the Amalekites is done in cold blood over the centuries. Even during the time of Saul, even during the time of Hezekiah, God still can not stand the fact that there are some people of Amalekite blood living, and he still orders the Israelites to systematically wipe them out.

It is in response to this that Chomsky gives his famous comments about the Bible. The link is here, but the relevant section probably deserves to be quoted here in full as well.

In response to a question from the interview that many people look to religion to provide moral codes, Chomsky replies:
Moral codes...You can find things in the traditional religions which are very benign and decent and wonderful and so on, but I mean the Bible is probably the most genocidal book in the literary canon. The God of the Bible--not only did He order His chosen people to carry out literal genocide--I mean wipe out every Amalekite down to the last man, woman, child, and, you know, donkey and so on because hundreds of years ago they got in your way when you were trying to cross the desert--not only did He do things like that, but, after all the God of the Bible was willing to destroy every living creature on earth because some humans irritated Him. That's the story of Noah. I mean, that's beyond genocide--you don't know how to describe this creature. Somebody offended him, and He was going to destroy every living being on earth? And then He was talked into allowing two of every species to stay alive--that's supposed to be gentle and wonderful.

(A couple disclaimers should probably be made at this point. First according to the Biblical account the Amalekites did ambush the Israelites in the desert, not just simply get in their way. But I'll make allowances for Chomsky because he's talking from memory in an interview situation.
Secondly it's probably also important to note thatChomsky's views on religion are more complex than this one quote would indicate. In other talks and interviews he does say that most of the progress movements of the last century have come out of the church, so he is no Christopher Hitchens, believing religious groups are always the root of all evil.)

There are of course numerous Christian apologetics for the Amalekite genocide, and you can find several of them on-line. This one seems to be the most thorough.
Good question...shouldn't the butchering of the Amalekite children be considered war crimes? By Glenn Miller.

I'm not going to try to refute this on a point by point basis. For me, I think you begin to lose your humanity by even entering into the debate. Once you even start entertaining the idea that these massacres are morally ok, then you've lost something. If that makes me close minded, then so be it I guess.

Link of the Day
Academic Freedom and the Corporatization of Universities