Lesson 2: “Saul’s Disobedience”
The Incomplete Genocide of the Wicked Amalekites
Katherine Hershey, David: A Man After God’s Heart (2011)
The Amalekites were to be destroyed for their unbelief: “That was pretty clear,
wasn’t it? The Amalekites had heard about Israel’s true and living God many years
before, but they refused to believe in Him....
Their sinful unbelief caused them to do wicked
things.... Because God is pure and
holy—separate from sin—He must punish sin.”
You disobey your parents and your teachers and you deserve to be punished in
Hell: “You were also born with a sinful heart that causes you to do sinful things like
getting angry and pouting when you can’t have your
own way or disobeying your parents and teachers.
You deserve to be punished for your sins and that
punishment is to be separated from God forever.”
God had His people kill the Amalekites because the Amalekites “refused to believe
God”: “God is pure and holy so He must punish sin. The Amalekites refused to believe in
God and God has promised punishment. Now was God’s
time for punishment....”
But by sparing King Agag, Saul only “partly obeyed”: “By only partly obeying, Saul had actually
disobeyed. Could Saul have decided he would obey God completely? (Allow response.) Yes.... But
Saul was more interested in doing things his way. If only Saul had been
willing to seek God for strength to obey.”
God’s genocidal imperative was good; seek God’s strength to obey completely:
“When God gives a command, He expects His children to obey completely. Our memory
verse says “’To him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it
not, to him it is sin’ (James 4:17).... It’s not always easy
to obey completely. You need to seek God’s
strength when you’re tempted to disobey.”
Doing good means obeying God completely, even if it involves genocide:
“Remember what our memory verse says, ’To him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it
not, to him it is sin’ (James 4:17). If you are to be a
person after God’s heart, He expects your complete
obedience.... Be careful to listen to God’s commands,
then count on His strength to help you obey Him....”
Always obey God completely: “Being a person after
God’s heart means obeying God completely...
[r]emember what our memory verse says, ’To him that
knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin’
(James 4:17).... Stop and ask God for the strength and
‘want to’ to obey completely.”
© Intrinsic Dignity
Reuben A. Torrey on the Amalekite Genocide
In his apologetic work Difficulties in the Bible: Alleged Errors and Contradictions,
fundamentalist leader Dr. Reuben A. Torrey justified the slaughter of children and
infants for reasons very familiar to scholars of genocides:
•
The Amalekites had become utterly morally debased, “even down to babies just
born, as to make such treatment absolutely necessary in the interests of
humanity.”
•
The Amalekites “had become a moral cancer threatening the very life of the
whole human race. That cancer must be cut out in every fiber if the body [is] to
be saved.”
•
“Anyone who has had experience with the children of the depraved knows how
persistently the vices bred for generations in the ancestors reappear in the
children even when they are taken away from their evil surroundings and brought
up in the most favorable environment.”
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“The extermination of the Canaanite children was … an act of love and mercy to
the children themselves…. Even today I could almost wish that all the babies
born into families of wicked influence might be slain in infancy, were it not for
the hope that some concerned Christian will carry to them the saving gospel of
the Son of God.”
R. A. Torrey, Difficulties in the Bible: Alleged Errors and Contradictions (1907). Ruth
Overholtzer, wife of founder Jesse Overholtzer, credited Dr. Torrey, her professor at
the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (now Biola Univ.) with inspiring her writing of the
original Good News Club curriculum. See “Fundamentalist Roots” page.
“Can you imagine a sizeable portion of a population succumbing to
the belief that an entire ethnic group, including its children and
babies, were morally tainted from birth by virtue of their race?
Hatred annuls common sense in even the most intelligent minds.
[Genocide] is an unforgettable example of the dire results of cold and
punitive upbringing; it stamps in our collective consciousness that
violence towards children, and neglect of their emotional needs,
creates a violent society.”
Robin Grille, Parenting for a Peaceful World, pp. 127-128 (2005).
CONTRAST
A Sacred Oath of Unconditional Obedience
“I swear by almighty God this
sacred oath: I will render
unconditional obedience to the
Fuehrer of the German Reich
and people....”
The Fuehrer Oath of Allegiance
Obedience is Not Always Easy
It Takes Strength to Obey Genocidal Commands
In 1940, Heinrich Himmler, leader of Hitler’s Schutzstaffel (SS), instructed
Rudolf Höss, the first commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, to
carry out the final solution:
“I have now decided to entrust this task to you. It is difficult and onerous and
calls for complete devotion notwithstanding the difficulties that may arise.”
Otto Friedrich, The Kingdom of Auschwitz: 1940-1945, p. 14 (1994)
Disclaimers:
Good News Club® is a registered trademark of Child Evangelism Fellowship, Inc. (CEF), headquartered in
Warrenton, Missouri. This site is not affiliated or associated with CEF, which can reached at www.cefonline.com.
This site is also not affiliated or associated with the book “The Good News Club: the Christian Right’s Stealth
Assault on America’s Children” (2012), its author, Katherine Stewart, or its publisher (PublicAffairs).
The materials available at this web site are for informational purposes. While it includes some legal
commentary, these materials should not be regarded as legal advice.
The Bloody Legacy of I Samuel 15’s Genocidal Imperative
Biblical apologists are divided on whether the Amalekite slaughter actually occurred.
Regardless, the divine genocidal imperatives in I Samuel 15 and other Old Testament
texts have been invoked to justify countless genocides — women, children and infants
included — in the Crusades, in bloody post-Reformation religious wars between Catholics
and Protestants, the colonial conquest of indiginous peoples in the New World, the United
States’ 19th century wars against Native Americans, 19th century conflicts between
Mormons and Protestants, and the mid-1990s Hutu genocide of some 800,000 Tutsis in
Rwanda.
The Puritan colonists who came to America to form a “New Israel” frequently appealed to I
Samuel 15 and other genocidal texts to justify campaigns of dispossession and genocide
against native Americans. “New England Puritans ... condemned Indians as Amalekites
[and] wrote and preached excitedly about blotting them out.” John Corrigan, “Amalek and
the Rhetoric of Extermination,” The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in
Early America, p70. (ed. Chris Beneke et al.) (2011).
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“City Upon A Hill” Speech
In 1630, John Winthrop, while on board the Arbella, gave his famous “City Upon A Hill”
speech, exhorting fellow Puritans establishing the Massachusetts Bay Colony that they
had a “special commission” from God comparable to the commission Samuel gave to
Saul to destroy the Amalekites, and exhorted them to “strictly obvserve” that commission
in every article.
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The “Mystic Massacre” of the 1636-1638 Pequot War
In 1637, a colonial force set fire to a fortified Pequot village, consisting mostly of women
and children, in Connecticut near the Mystic River. Everyone who tried to escape was
shot. Most burned to death. The brutality of the massacre shocked the Narragansett,
allied with the colonists against the Pequot, and they left in disgust. But William Bradford,
governor of Plymouth Colony, reflected on the massacre as a sweet human sacrifice to
God:
It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the flre and the stream of blood
quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory
seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God, who had wrought
so wonderfully for them thus to enclosed their enemies in their hands and give them
so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enemy.
Christ Mato Nunpa, “A Sweet-Smelling Sacrifice: Genocide, the Bible, and the Indigenous
Peoples of the United States, Selected Examples,” Confronting Genocide: Judaism,
Christianity, Islam (ed. Steven Leonard), at p55 (2010).
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The “Great Swamp Massacre” of “King Philip’s War” (1675-1678)
In 1675, the Wampanoag Tribe started an uprising against the colonists. The
Narragansett attempted to stay neutral, but the colonists accused them of harboring
Wampanoag refugees. In December 1675, the colonist forces launched a pre-emptive
genocidal attack on the Narragansett palisade fortress in Rhode Island, in what became
known as the “Great Swamp Massacre.” Samuel Appleton, captain of the Massachusetts
Bay Colony troops, described the purpose of that campaign in divinely sanctioned terms:
By the prayers of God’s people, our Israel in his time may prevail over this cursed
Amalek; against whom I believe the Lord will have war forever until he have
destroyed him.
In his celebratory 1676 book A brief history of the War with the Indians in New England,
Puritan minister Increase Mather also appealed to I Samuel 15’s genocidal imperative. In
the Great Swamp Massacre, Increase Mather reported that colonial forces set fire to
hundreds of Wigwams, “in the which men, women and Children (no man knoweth how
many hundreds of them) were burnt to death.”
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Exhortations during “King William’s War” (1688-1697)
In 1689, Cotton Mather (Increase Mather’s son) again appealed to I Samuel 15’s
genocidal imperative in a sermon to rally colonial forces in King William’s War against the
French and Indians:
Turn not back until they are consumed. Wound them that they shall not be able to
Arise. Though they cry let there be none to save them. But beat them small as
the dust before the wind, and Cast them out, as the dirt in the streets. Let not the
Expression seem harsh, if I say unto you, “sacrifice them to the ghosts of the
Christian, whom they have murdered.”
Click here to continue
The Bloody Legacy of I Samuel 15’s Genocidal Imperative
(continued from page 1)
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Manifest Destiny and Westward Expansion
This section is under development. For general information, see the 30-minute video and
links at American Indian Holocaust.
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“Haun’s Mill Massacre” during the 1838 Mormon War
Exterminationist rhetoric from the Old Testament was invoked by both Mormons and the
Protestants who opposed and expelled them. Between 1833 and 1838, Missouri settlers
expelled Mormon immigrants from one location to another. Mormons were forced to flee
Jackson County into Clay County, and from there to Caldwell County, until open warfare
broke out in the “1838 Mormon War.” In an oration delivered on July 4, Mormon leader
Sidney Rigdon declared that the Mormons would no longer be driven from their homes,
and should a mob attempt to do so, “it shall be between us and them a war of
extermination..., and one party or the other shall be utterly destroyed.”
Barely a month passed before the war began. After the Mormons won a series of battles,
Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs issued Missouri Executive Order 44, which stated that
“the Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the
State if necessary for the public peace.” Two days later, 17 Mormon men and boys were
killed in the savage “Haun’s Mill Massacre,” leading to the Mormon’s surrender and
emigration to Illinois. Conflicts soon followed the Mormons there, and beginning in 1846,
the Mormons began yet another mass emigration, to the Utah territory.
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“Mountain’s Meadow Massacre”
In September, 1857, Mormon leaders of Parowan and Cedar City, Utah, organized a
surprise attack on a wagon train of emigrants traveling from Arkansas to California.
At the end of a 5-day siege, the militia commander ordered the emigrants’
annihilation. Militia officer John D. Lee negotiated a “truce” with the emigrants, in
which the emigrants agreed to be escorted to a nearby city in exchange for
turning over their livestock and supplies. As the emigrants exited their
fortification, they were completely disarmed, and the men were separated and
paired with militia escorts. After a signal was given, the Mormon militiamen
turned and shot each man by their side. After killing the men, the militia
ambushed the women and children, killing all of them too, except for 17
children under the age of 7. An estimated 120 disarmed men, women, and
children were murdered on that fateful day (September 11, 1857).
The 2007 Canadian film September Dawn powerfully dramatizes the plotting
of the massacre, the chilling exterminationist Biblical oratory invoked to rally
the militiamen to the attack, and the savage attack (click on poster to the
right to see the film trailer).
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Rwanda Genocide
In the genocidal uprising of the Hutus against the Tutsis in Rwanda, Hutus frequently
appealed to I Samuel 15 as divine justification for their campaign to annihilate the Tutsis,
in which an estimated 800,000.were killed. In his book Laying Down the Sword: Why We
Can’t Ignore The Bibl’es Violent Verses (2011), Philip Jenkins writes
Many of the most determined leaders, the génocidaires, drew on Christian
inspiration--some in fact were clergy--and they turned to predictable portions of the
Bible. Stirring his flock to violence, one pastor preached on I Samuel 15:
He compared the Tutsis to the Amalekites, and said Saul was rejected by God
because he failed to exterminate all of the Amalekites. He said, “If you don’t
exterminate the Tutsis, you’ll be rejected. If you don’t want to be rejected by
God, then finish the job of killing the people God has rejected. No child, no wife,
no old man should be left alive. And the people said “Amen.”
(p.141) (internal citation omitted).
