Is God a Genocidal Maniac?

No. In 1 Samuel 15 God did not order the Amalekites destroyed for who they were (ethnicity or “race”) but for what they had done: centuries of unprovoked war on Israel, beginning with an ambush on the weakest stragglers of the exodus (Deut. 25:17–19). The ḥērem was a judicial sentence, not ethnic cleansing. Even the Kenites living among Amalek were spared (1 Sam. 15:6). And the God who judged Amalek bore that same judgment himself, in Jesus Christ, for all who trust him.

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In one of his debates, the late Christopher Hitchens said that if God existed, the God of the Old Testament was unworthy of the name (see Christopher Hitchens vs. Douglas Wilson at Westminster, October 30, 2008). Why? Because, according to Hitchens the God depicted in the Old Testament gives warrant to ethnic cleansing (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Twelve, 2007), 102). Other critics and skeptics, such as Richard Dawkins, call the God of the Old Testament an “ethnic cleanser” and “infanticidal, genocidal” (The God Delusion (Bantam Press, 2006, 31). In other words, they say, God is a genocidal maniac. I assume you’ve heard something like this too. 

One classic biblical example cited in this objection is 1 Samuel 15, where the Lord commanded Israel’s King Saul to “devote to destruction” the people known as the Amalekites. We can readily agree with even the most strident atheist that these are difficult and severe words. Of course, the Christian looks at these words through a different worldview than does the non-Christian. The non-Christian uses words like these as a reason to blaspheme the God who spoke them—the very God who gave the atheist the oxygen and the vocal cords to do so! 

How are you to understand such words as 1 Samuel 15? How could God speak so harshly? To the point, is God a genocidal maniac?I’ll answer by opening up this passage as an example of others like it.

A Word About Defending God

My first word to Christians is that you don’t need to defend God. We say, “This is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God!” So, God doesn’t need you or me to defend him.

When Hitchens or your best friend says what they so often say about God, it reminds us that those outside of Jesus Christ are going to “suppress the truth” (Rom. 1:18) by any and all means necessary to justify their unbelief and rebellion against the God who gave them life (Rom. 1:18–32). Don’t be surprised that “those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh” (Rom. 8:5). This is “death” (Rom. 8:6) and evidences hostility and unsubmissiveness to God (Rom. 8:7). In fact, “the natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14). You can’t defend spiritual realities to unregenerate minds and hearts.

God is able and willing to open minds and hearts to grasp the worldview of a passage like 1 Samuel 15. 

Did Israel Misunderstand God?

No. The command in 1 Samuel 15 came from God himself, not from Israel’s misreading of him (15:2–3). Many Christians, though, either don’t believe what Scripture says about unbelief or think that they need to apologize for God and try to domesticate God by making him seem more reasonable and palatable to unbelieving people. For example, some might say this story is just part of the provisional ethics of the Old Testament that would come to an end with Jesus Christ. What does that really mean? “Well, that was the Old Testament God of wrath, but we live in the New Testament with a God of love.” Others may say that those Israelites who participated in such atrocities needed to understand the character of God better. What does that really mean? Either the Old Testament is not the Word of God, or the God of the Old Testament allowed things to happen that were contrary to his character. The problem with all this is that it was precisely God himself who issued the command in 1 Samuel 15!

We as Christians need to stop trying to defend God, start proclaiming the God of the Word to the world, and leave the results of convincing and converting to him.

A Witness to God’s Justice

Getting to the heart of the matter, the story in 1 Samuel 15 is a witness to God’s justice. It’s like all the other stories of its kind in both the Old and New Testaments. The world’s wisdom may tempt you to read stories like these as a skeptic: “How could my God command genocide and ethnic cleansing?”

What Did God Command in 1 Samuel 15?

God commanded Saul to put the Amalekites under the ban: “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” (1 Sam. 15:3). “Devote to destruction” is ḥērem. Its root (ḥrm) is used eight times in this chapter (vv. 3, 8, 9 [2x], 15, 18, 20, 21). This meant that certain people, places, and property were off limits for Israel’s use and were to be devoted to the Lord alone.

Why did God command ḥērem? Not only is God the Creator of all things in heaven and earth (Gen. 1:1) and the Lord of all, who does “all that he pleases” (Ps. 115:3); he is also a God of absolute and perfect justice.

Who Were the Amalekites, and What Had They Done?

The Amalekites were the descendants of Amalek, Esau’s grandson (Gen. 36:12). These were the same Amalekites who once attacked Israel unprovoked as they made their way out of Egypt toward Sinai (Ex. 17:8–16). Because of this, the Lord said to Moses: “I will utterly blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven,” to which Moses responded with an altar, saying, “The Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation” (Ex. 17:14–16). They also defeated Israel at Hormah (Num. 14:45). Later, Moses reminded Israel how Amalek had struck them “when you were faint and weary,” cutting off “those who were lagging behind you”; “he did not fear God” (Deut. 25:17–19). During the days of the judges, the Amalekites joined with the Moabites in attacking Israel (Judg. 3:13). In the days of Gideon they joined the Midianites in invading Israel year after year, destroying the crops to starve the people out (Judg. 6:3–5, 33; 7:12). Even in Saul’s own reign they were plundering Israel (1 Sam. 14:48). That’s why we read in 1 Samuel: “Thus says the Lord of hosts, ‘I have noted what Amalek did to Israel in opposing them on the way when they came up out of Egypt. Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have’” (1 Sam. 15:2–3). By this time, the Amalekites had still not repented of their hostility. This means the Lord had shown patience with them for hundreds of years. Scripture is clear that when a nation under God’s sentence turns from its evil, he relents (Jer. 18:7–8), as he did with Nineveh (Jonah 3:10).

In short, the Amalekites were not innocent bystanders the Lord unjustly or sadistically wanted dead. The Amalekites are called “sinners” (1 Sam. 15:18) like all humanity who “have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). Their king, Agag, was known for his war crimes, as Samuel’s sentence on him makes plain: “As your sword has made women childless, so shall your mother be childless among women” (1 Sam. 15:33). Thus we read at the end of our passage that old Samuel the prophet did what Saul refused to do and “hacked Agag to pieces before the Lord” (1 Sam. 15:33). Everything God commanded in 1 Samuel 15 is consistent with what Scripture says about God being just (Gen. 18:25) and having no injustice in him (Rom. 9:14). 

If Saul Destroyed Them, Why Do Amalekites Appear Later?

Because Saul didn’t finish what God commanded. He spared Agag and “all that was good” to him (15:9). The Lord’s verdict was blunt: “Why then did you not obey the voice of the Lord?” (15:19). The rest of the narrative shows that Saul’s campaign “from Havilah as far as Shur” (15:7) didn’t end Amalek. Amalekites later burned David’s town of Ziklag and carried off its women and children, and when David struck back, “four hundred young men” escaped on camels (1 Sam. 30:1–2, 17). The bitterest irony comes at Saul’s death. At Endor, Samuel told him the kingdom was torn from him “because you did not obey the voice of the Lord and did not carry out his fierce wrath against Amalek” (1 Sam. 28:18). The man who brought Saul’s crown to David was an Amalekite who claimed to have finished Saul off (2 Sam. 1:8–10). Later still, men of Simeon struck down the last remnant of Amalek that had escaped (1 Chron. 4:42–43).

Nearly six hundred years after Saul, when the Persians ruled the Jews, a man called Haman the Agagite rose to power and sought “to destroy all the Jews” throughout the empire (Esth. 3:1–6). The storyteller wants us to notice who stood against him: Mordecai, a Benjaminite whose line ran back to a man named Kish (Esth. 2:5), the name of Saul’s father (1 Sam. 9:1). And where Saul had pounced on the spoil, the Jews of Esther’s day “laid no hand on the plunder” (Esth. 9:10; cf. 9:15–16), even though the king’s edict allowed it (8:11). Generation after generation this nation that was once close to the Lord’s people was continually at war with the Lord’s people and with their God.

Was It Genocide or Ethnic Cleansing?

No. God sentenced Amalek for what it had done, not for who its people were. “But how could God command ethnic cleansing?” He didn’t. In his law there were two types of wars: those outside the Promised Land, which allowed for mercy (Deut. 20:10–15), and those inside the Promised Land, which did not allow for mercy (Deut. 20:16–18). Amalek, which is not among the nations listed there, fell under a sentence of its own (Ex. 17:14; Deut. 25:19). In both cases the reason for total destruction was not ethnicity or bigotry but rebellion against God.

Genocide has a precise meaning. The 1948 Genocide Convention defines it as acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such” (Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, art. 2). The decisive words are “as such”: genocide destroys people for being who they are. It’s a crime that human beings commit against their neighbors. First Samuel 15 records something else: a sentence the Judge of all the earth passed on a people for what they had done. God named Amalek’s deeds, not Amalek’s blood: “I have noted what Amalek did to Israel” (15:2).

The chapter itself proves the point. Before Saul attacked, he sent word to the Kenites, who lived among the Amalekites: “Go, depart; go down from among the Amalekites, lest I destroy you with them. For you showed kindness to all the people of Israel when they came up out of Egypt” (1 Sam. 15:6). Notice the symmetry. Amalek was judged for what it did to Israel on the road out of Egypt; the Kenites were spared for what they did on that same road. They were not Israelites—they were the clan of Moses’ father-in-law (Judg. 1:16)—yet the sword passed them by. The line ran through conduct, not blood. It’s the same line that spared Rahab the Canaanite and her household at Jericho (Josh. 6:25) and wrote her into the genealogy of the Messiah (Matt. 1:5).

Nor was ḥērem reserved for foreigners. The same law that devoted Canaan’s cities to destruction prescribed the same sentence for Israelite towns that turned to other gods (Deut. 13:15). Moses warned Israel that if they practiced the sins of the nations, the land would vomit them out too (Lev. 18:24–28), and in the end it did in the Exile. First Samuel 15 doesn’t end with Amalek; it ends with Israel’s own king. When Saul pleaded that the best of the spoil had been spared to sacrifice to the Lord (15:15, 21), Samuel answered, “Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice” (15:22). Then came the sentence: “Because you have rejected the word of the Lord, he has also rejected you from being king” (15:23). God’s justice shows no partiality (Rom. 2:11).

Why Were Children Included?

Because every child’s life belongs to God, who gives it and has the right to take it, and because Scripture treats a household as one under both judgment and mercy. We shouldn’t soften the text: the command names “child and infant” (1 Sam. 15:3). This is hard, and it deserves an honest answer rather than an evasion. We may humbly ask how God is just in this; we may not sit in judgment over whether he is. 

First, life is God’s to give and God’s to take. “See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god beside me; I kill and I make alive” (Deut. 32:39). The Lord took the children of Noah’s generation in the flood, the families of Sodom and Gomorrah in fire (Gen. 19:25), and the firstborn of Egypt on Passover night (Ex. 12:29). Children still die every day by disease, famine, and disaster, and not one dies apart from the God in whose book all our days are written (Ps. 139:16). Pressed to its end, the objection to 1 Samuel 15 is an objection to God’s taking life at all. What made the ḥērem different was not that children died under God’s hand but that God made his people the visible instruments of the sentence of death that has rested on Adam’s race since the fall (Gen. 2:17; 3:19).

Second, Scripture doesn’t call these children innocent in the way we mean it. They had no part in Amalek’s ambush at Rephidim, but they weren’t outside of Adam: “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me” (Ps. 51:5); “death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam” (Rom. 5:14). That’s why infants die at all. As the Canons of Dort confess, “Since all people have sinned in Adam and have come under the sentence of the curse and eternal death, God would have done no one an injustice if it had been his will to leave the entire human race in sin and under the curse, and to condemn them on account of their sin” (1.1).

Third, Scripture treats a household as one, under judgment and mercy alike. When Achan stole what was devoted to destruction, his sons and daughters went down with him (Josh. 7:24–25). The principle also runs the other way. When Rahab trusted the God of Israel, her father, mother, brothers, and “all who belonged to her” were brought out of Jericho alive (Josh. 6:23). We who baptize our children because God’s promise is “for you and for your children” (Acts 2:39) shouldn’t find that principle strange when it appears under judgment. God deals with families, not merely with individuals.

Finally, Scripture doesn’t tell us what became of these children eternally, and we can’t say more than it does. The Canons of Dort comfort believing parents about their own children whom God calls out of this life in infancy (1.17), but they say nothing about the children of Amalek. But we do know the Judge is just. Abraham pleaded for Sodom: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” (Gen. 18:25). That question isn’t a doubt but a confession. The God who says, “I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked” (Ezek. 33:11), took no pleasure in the death of Amalek’s little ones, and he’ll do what’s right with every one of them.

Is the God of the Old Testament Different from the God of the New?

No. Scripture knows only one God. He’s as holy in the Gospels as in 1 Samuel; as merciful in 1 Samuel as in the Gospels. This one God who commanded judgment on Amalek is the same God who sent his Son; he is holy and loving in both Testaments.

This is not a new question. Preaching the gospel in Pisidian Antioch, Paul credited God himself with “destroying seven nations in the land of Canaan,” with giving Israel “Saul the son of Kish,” and with having “removed him” (Acts 13:19–22).

This all sounds so severe to us today, doesn’t it? One of the reasons is that we as Christian people are guilty of portraying God to the world merely as an all-loving God. We as preachers are guilty of proclaiming the Word merely as an offer of grace—take it or leave it. And how many of us have turned the stories of Scripture into merely a collection of nice fairy tales and good moral lessons like Aesop’s Fables or, worse, VeggieTales? The other side of the good news proclaimed in the Word of God, though, is often missing. Is God love? Absolutely! But he is also “holy, holy, holy” (Isa. 6:3). And if he’s not holy and just, how can we say he’s merciful? The God of Scripture is both.

Again, because God is holy and just, every violation of his holy and just law deserves a holy and just punishment. And this justice is not discriminatory anger or bitterness. God isn’t like you when you “lose it.” God’s justice is pure justice executed on the truly guilty. This justice was illustrated not only in the sinful Amalekites and their unjust king, Agag, but also in the Israelites’ being commanded to slay everything equally and not benefiting from their possessions. This wasn’t a raid but an execution of justice.

This is the God of the Bible. What’s described here in prose was later inscribed in poetry in the songs of worship of the people of God in the Psalms. There are certain psalms we call “imprecatory psalms.” The word imprecatory comes from the Latin, imprecatio, which is an invoking of a curse. In the Psalms are included prayers of the godly for the destruction of the ungodly. The most famous example is Psalm 137:8–9:

O daughter of Babyon, doomed to be destroyed,

Blessed shall he be who repays you

with what you have done to us!

Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones

and dashes them against the rock!

How could a holy God inspire his holy people to sing such “unholy” words, as they seem to us? What our forefathers sang of was in recognition of the holy justice of the true God. And his holy justice was true not only in their time, but also ultimately in eternity. Therefore, the justice that God executed in the Old Testament upon his enemies was a small picture of his eternal justice that will be unleashed upon sin at the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, the Judge of the living and the dead (Acts 10:42; 2 Tim. 4:1; 1 Pet. 4:5).

Does This Give Christians License for Violence Today?

No. The command to devote Amalek to destruction was given once, by God’s own word through his prophet, to Israel as a holy nation in the land of promise. No one today can claim it. Three things set 1 Samuel 15 apart. 

First, it was direct revelation. Saul didn’t decide that Amalek deserved to die; Samuel came with “the words of the Lord” (15:1). God has now spoken his final word in his Son (Heb. 1:1–2), and anyone who claims a fresh command to kill doesn’t speak for him.

Second, Israel was a theocracy, its worship and its government bound together under God’s direct rule in a holy land. The church has no such land. We are “sojourners and exiles” (1 Pet. 2:11), and our King says, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting” (John 18:36). 

Third, the ḥērem was a preview, not a pattern. In it the justice of the last day broke into the middle of history—what Meredith Kline called an “intrusion” of the final judgment into the present age (Meredith G. Kline, “The Intrusion and the Decalogue,” Westminster Theological Journal 16:1 (1953): 1–22).

When James and John wanted to call down fire from heaven on a Samaritan village that had refused Jesus, he “turned and rebuked them” (Luke 9:54–55). When Peter drew his sword in the garden (John 18:10), Jesus said, “Put your sword back into its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword” (Matt. 26:52). The weapons of the church’s warfare “are not of the flesh” (2 Cor. 10:4), and vengeance belongs to the Lord (Rom. 12:19). The civil magistrate—not the church—“bear[s] the sword” (Rom. 13:4), and only for ordinary justice, not ḥērem. 

The sword now waits for Christ’s return. When he comes, he will wield it himself (Rev. 19:15).

A Warning to the World

What Does 1 Samuel 15 Have to Do with Jesus?

First Samuel 15 points to Jesus in two ways: he’s the coming Judge, foreshadowed in this story, who will execute justice on the impenitent, and he’s the Savior who bore that justice for all who trust him.

Jesus himself showed us how to read stories of sudden death. When people told him about Galileans whom Pilate had slaughtered, he added the eighteen killed when the tower in Siloam fell. He didn’t speculate about why they died. He turned the question on his hearers: “Do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish” (Luke 13:1–5).

This story is therefore a warning to the world. If you’re reading this and trying to hide out among your parents or friends who believe in Jesus Christ, while you really don’t; or if you’ve never given your life to Jesus Christ by turning away from your sins (repentance) and trusting in him (faith), hear God’s warning in this biblical story. God isn’t some unjust judge whom you can easily bribe; he’s not a God who looks the other way. God is a perfect judge. He must punish those who violate his laws.

And if you think this story sounds harsh, he warns you of an even greater judgment not upon one nation but upon all peoples. When Jesus Christ returns from heaven, he will judge both the living and the dead. Paul wrote to comfort Christians who were being persecuted, mocked, and ostracized from society:

This is evidence of the righteous judgment of God, that you may be considered worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you are also suffering—since indeed God considers it just to repay with affliction those who afflict you, and to grant relief to you who are afflicted as well as to us, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might. (2 Thess. 1:5–9)

There is only one way to escape this warning: Jesus Christ. Cry out to him now with all your sins. Tell him you’re sorry for your sins. Tell him you don’t want to be judged for them. Tell him that you believe that he alone can forgive your sins because he alone suffered your judgment in your place on the cross.

A Way to Respond

How Should Christians Respond to 1 Samuel 15?

Christians should respond with awe that Christ bore our judgment, with godly fear, with prayer and witness toward unbelieving neighbors, with spiritual warfare, and with patient hope.

To respond to a passage such as 1 Samuel 15, I’ll adapt William Ames’s (1576–1633) helpful words on how we as Christians can sing the aforementioned imprecatory psalms (Conscience with the Power and Cases Thereof, 4.19.8–10).

First, respond in sheer awe and wonder that this judgment of God upon the Amalekites that you also justly deserve has fallen not on you but on Jesus Christ on the cross!

Second, respond in godly fear and trembling at the reality of the just judgment of God against the sins of impenitent persons: “Great and amazing are your deeds, O Lord God the Almighty! Just and true are your ways, O King of the nations! Who will not fear, O Lord, and glorify your name? For you alone are holy. All nations will come and worship you, for your righteous acts have been revealed” (Rev. 15:3–4).

Third, respond in prayer, in deeds, and in words toward your unbelieving neighbors. Since we don’t desire their eternal death, we need to call the world to repentance in light of Jesus Christ’s soon coming in judgment.

Fourth, engage in biblical spiritual warfare (Eph. 6:10–18). Don’t do so against your private and personal enemies but against the spiritual forces of wickedness, which are enemies of Christ’s Church.

Fifth, and finally, respond in hopeful confidence. This story teaches us that God will ultimately throw down all our enemies. This is the prayer of heaven: “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” (Rev. 6:10). God’s answer was to “rest a little longer” (Rev. 6:11). God did not immediately answer the slain martyrs’ prayer for justice, and he may not immediately answer ours. Yet we wait in hope for our full vindication.

Conclusion: God Is Supremely Merciful and Just

So, is God a genocidal maniac? No. God is a supremely merciful and supremely just God, and those aspects of God’s character are supremely revealed in Jesus Christ. We who are Amalekites by nature and deserve his justice are offered the mercy of God because Jesus became an Amalekite for us, undergoing our judgment (2 Cor. 5:21; Gal. 3:13).

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