"Thus says the LORD of hosts: “I will punish Amalek for what he did to Israel, how he ambushed him on the way when he came up from Egypt. Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them. But kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.” (I Samuel 15:2-3, spoken by Samuel to King Saul)
If you read the rest of the chapter, you will see that Saul fulfilled this command, except that he spared some animals and the Amalekite king, Agag. Saul “utterly destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword” (verse 8). Shortly thereafter, the prophet Samuel himself killed Agag (verse 33).
So I guess there were no more Amalekites left in the world after Saul and Samuel finished their job, right?
Wrong.
About 15 to 20 years later (according to some timelines I consulted), David went to war with the Amalekites (as recounted in I Samuel 30). David defeated them, and of the Amalekites “not a man escaped, except four hundred young men who rode on camels and fled” (verse 17).
Umm…
How can we go from ZERO Amalekites to well over 400 Amalekites in two decades or less? I know where Amalekite babies come from, and so do you. Amalekite babies require Amalekite parents! But there weren’t any Amalekites at all, because they were all slain by Saul and Samuel, right?
Wrong.
We have here biblical proof that the language which, when literally understood, sounds like genocide, means anything but. Whatever Saul did, he left enough Amalekites alive that less than 20 years later 400 of them ran away from David.
We have here an example of an idiom. When God told the Israelites to kill all the men, women, and children, nobody at the time interpreted it literally. (Similarly, I’ve heard many Americans talk about “bombing such-and-so back to the Stone Age”, though nobody understands that literally.)
So next time someone is troubled about God commanding genocide in the Old Testament, you can assure him that God never did any such thing. He merely used language which has been ignorantly interpreted in a literal manner not intended. Can you imagine what people speaking a language yet unborn 3,000 years from now are going to make of our American documents that speak of “bombing X back to the Stone Age”? They’ll make a hash of it, even as we have of God’s supposedly genocidal commands.
It’s ridiculous. We grossly distort the Bible, then blame God for commanding something (i. e., genocide) that He never commanded.