God told Saul to kill every Amalekite — man, woman, child, and infant. Is that a command Christians are actually supposed to defend?

• R

  Ravi1d ago

  I've been a Christian for 34 years and I genuinely do not have a clean answer for this passage. I've read the apologists. I've read the theologians. At some point 'God's ways are higher than our ways' starts to sound less like theology and more like giving up.

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• M

  Morgan8h ago

  This is literally why I left the church. Not atheism, not sin, not some scandal. I asked this exact question in a small group in 2019 and the elder looked me dead in the eye and said 'God is God and we are not.' And that was the end of the conversation. Four years of silence later I'm still working out what I believe. I miss community but I cannot go back to a place that treats questions like threats.

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• Y

  Yuki21h ago

  okay so the babies who were 'nursing infants' in verse 3 personally attacked the Israelites. got it.

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• A2

  Avery 218h ago

  I've wrestled with this passage for two decades as an Old Testament professor. The most honest thing I can say is: the text is what it is. You do not get to domesticate it. The question isn't 'how do I explain this away' — the question is 'what does it mean that a text like this exists inside a canon I believe is authoritative?' That's a much harder and much more productive question. And I don't think it has a tidy answer, and I've made peace with that.

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• Z

  Zara9h ago

  Everyone in this thread is doing their best and God knows that. But I'll say this: the church that can't sit in a room with a hard passage and say 'this troubles me too, let's think together' is a church that's going to keep bleeding people. Not because the hard question defeats Christianity. Because the refusal to engage it does.

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• A

  Alex20h ago

  The 'infants' problem is where every single apologetic I've ever read falls apart. You can make a case for collective guilt, generational judgment, divine sovereignty — I get it, I've taught it myself from the pulpit. But the specific inclusion of nursing babies as targets is almost never addressed honestly. It gets folded into the general category of 'God's judgment' and we move on. That's not exegesis. That's avoidance.

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• EK

  Elena K.9h ago

  Also if it was all hyperbole why did God PUNISH Saul for not completing it? The entire theological point of the chapter is that Saul's partial obedience was sinful disobedience. If the command was figurative, what exactly did Saul fail to do figuratively?

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• F

  Feli12h ago

  I think the honest Christian move here is to sit in the tension and not paper over it. The Old Testament is not a flatly literal transcript of everything God said and approved. Ancient peoples regularly understood their military victories and commands through the framework of divine sanction. That doesn't mean Samuel made it up. It means inspiration is more complex than dictation, and that complexity is terrifying for people whose entire theological system depends on a perfectly clean text.

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• J

  Jordan4h ago

  Here's what I'd push back on everyone defending this: if you genuinely believe God commanded the killing of nursing infants, and you defend that as righteous — what moral principle are you actually standing on? You've handed over your entire ethical faculty to textual authority. And if that same logic was used by someone with a different text and a different god, you would immediately recognize it as dangerous. Explain why your version is different, because 'my God is the real one' is exactly what they'd say too.

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• RS

  Riley S.5h ago

  Brother or sister above — I hope you find your way. Genuine questions deserve genuine engagement, not a theological shut-down. That elder failed you and I'm sorry.

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• HL

  Hana L.11h ago

  The hyperbole argument is interesting until you get to verse 3 and it specifies ox and sheep and donkeys too. You're telling me the livestock were part of the rhetorical convention? They itemized the animals. That's not poetry. That's a list.

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• T_

  Theo _x23h ago

  The Amalekites attacked Israel at their weakest moment, when they were exhausted refugees coming out of Egypt. They specifically targeted the old, the weak, the stragglers at the rear (Deuteronomy 25:18). This wasn't a random act — it was predatory. The judgment in 1 Samuel 15 is divine justice across generations. You may not like it, but the text has a coherent internal logic.

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• Z2

  Zara 218h ago

  people forget that this is the same chapter where samuel personally hacks agag to pieces. 'Samuel said, As your sword has made women childless, so shall your mother be childless among women.' that's not reluctant judgment that's samuel enjoying it a little bit. the whole passage is uncomfortable on multiple levels and pretending it's only uncomfortable for skeptics is dishonest

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• S

  Sam14h ago

  That argument above literally proves the skeptic's point. 'You have to accept all the disturbing passages or none of them' is supposed to be a DEFENSE of the faith?

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• L9

  Liam 923h ago

  Paul Copan and Matthew Flannagan wrote an entire book on this (Is God a Moral Monster?) and their basic argument is that the language of total destruction — 'man, woman, child' — is ancient Near Eastern hyperbole for decisive military defeat, not a literal body count. The archaeological record doesn't show Amalekite annihilation either, since they appear again later in the narrative. It's a literary convention, not a kill order.

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• Z

  Zara5h ago

  The Christological solution that nobody's brought up yet: Jesus himself is the interpretive lens for the whole Old Testament. He reframes retaliation, enemy treatment, and violence at every turn. 'You have heard it said…but I say to you.' That doesn't mean 1 Samuel 15 didn't happen. It means we understand God's FULL character through Christ, and the movement of Scripture is FROM passages like this TOWARD the cross. The trajectory matters.

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• N2

  Nina 2112h ago

  So your solution is just to say Samuel got it wrong? That God didn't actually say it? Okay. Explain to me exactly which parts of Scripture you've decided are reliable and which parts are just ancient people projecting. And explain who gave YOU that authority.

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• Y

  Yuki3h ago

  That's a nice hermeneutical move but it sidesteps whether the command was real and good. If God commanded it and it was genuinely right, Jesus doesn't change its rightness. If Jesus changes it, then either God changed, or God didn't actually command it the way Samuel presents it. You still have to pick.

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• A

  Alex5h ago

  The hyperbole reading actually troubles me more than the literal one does. If the text is hyperbole it means Samuel and the narrator present God commanding something they knew he didn't actually command. That's a much bigger problem for biblical authority than just saying God commanded something hard.

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• T

  Theo9h ago

  The person above raises the strongest secular objection to this passage and it deserves a real answer. My answer: divine command ethics only functions within a framework where God's nature IS goodness itself, not merely an authority who defines goodness by fiat. If God's nature is essentially loving, just, and good — then a command like this either reflects a justice we can't fully perceive from our vantage point, or our perception of the command is incomplete. Neither option is fully satisfying. Both are more honest than pretending the question doesn't land.

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• MR

  Maya R.17h ago

  If you're not okay with God killing children in 1 Samuel 15 you also need to deal with the Passover, the flood, and about a dozen other passages. Selective discomfort with Old Testament judgment isn't a theological position, it's just emotional bias toward whichever story gets quoted at you first.

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• I

  Iris7h ago

  my sunday school answer used to be 'god knows the hearts of all people and judges justly.' i still kind of believe that. but i won't pretend it fully answers the infants question. sometimes i think the most faithful thing i can do is hold the discomfort and not let it go, instead of resolving it too fast in either direction.

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