There are many attempts coming from Christians to explain one of the toughest Bible verses, located in 1 Samuel 15,3:
"Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all
that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant,
ox and sheep, camel and donkey."
Some of those attempts can be
described with a no better word than „lame“. For example, there is an
explanation that this command from God is only meant to follow a failure of
„peaceful religious and political conquest“ - truly an imaginary addition to
the text.
Most common explanations are
connected to the evilness of Amalek tribe and God's plan to stop their twisted
ways of spreading to other tribes and nations. Amalek were described as people
which sacrificed their children to gods and God did them good when He stopped
this madness.
I get angry when I hear this sort
of explanations. They are common for a great number of dark and cruel Bible
verses. If this tribe was so malignant, can you blame their children too? Free
the children, raise them in better circumstances, but for heaven's sake don't
kill them! If there is a problem, that doesn't mean you can do anything to
solve it. And picture the way this children were killed - slaughtered by
bloodthirsty warriors! If you support the death penalty, would you support
chasing criminals down the hills and through the forests, stabbing them with
knives and swords and spears by vicious men that have no regard for their pain?
Would you support the death penalty applied to children? Killing babies in
their mother's arms? When you look at what the nation of Israel did in other
wars mentioned in the Bible, you can imagine in what manner was Amalek
slaughtered.
Christians believe that the Bible
is inspired by God itself. I'm going to write a lot about this collection of
books, but sometimes I feel that I don't need to look further than this verse.
How can God do something like that? How can He order the most vile executions
of babies for their parents sins? We hear about a loving God, the one that
treasures all life and would die in the cross for a single person. What kind of
God was He for a child slayed because of His command? What kind of God was He
for a mother witnessing the most painful scene you could ever imagine? Do I
need to be afraid of when will He come for my family because of my
inequities?
If God exists, I don't see how He
can inspire this verse. Maybe He exists but He inspired only „good“ parts of
the Bible, or maybe He exists but has nothing to do with the Bible. Or maybe
there's nothing above, no pair of eyes watching us from the skies.
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