Deuteronomy 25:17-19--"Remember what the Amalekites did to you along the way when you came out of Egypt. When you were weary and worn out, they met you on your journey and cut off all who were lagging behind; they had no fear of God. When the Lord your God gives you rest from all the enemies around you in the land he is giving you to possess as an inheritance, you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget!"
Some readers and critics seem to believe that this passage encourages ethnic cleansing--that is, widespread killing of a people group for racist reasons. The meaning of the verse is undeniably clear: Yahweh instructed the Israelites to exterminate the Amalekites at a future point in time. Passages like this often frighten both Christian and non-Christian readers. Is Yahweh racist? Is this genocide morally justifiable?
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| What should Christians, theonomists and non-theonomists alike, make of genocides authorized by God in the Bible? |
Deuteronomy 25:17-19 prescribes what amounts to capital punishment on a national scale for the transgressions of the Amalekites. I have proven elsewhere that the Bible opposes racism in all its forms [2]. This slaughter is not authorized merely because the Amalekites were outsiders and foreigners, but because they had oppressed God's people during an important event: they had oppressed the Jews during their exodus from Egypt. The prescribed future killing of the Amalekites in this passage has nothing to do with racism and everything to do with God demanding terrestrial justice, one of the primary themes of Mosaic Law as a whole. As humans made in God's image, the Amalekites held just as many ontological moral rights as the Jews. As people who committed an act of great evil, the Amalekites deserved to die. While many readers will surely still be disturbed by Deuteronomy 25:17-19, they cannot legitimately charge the passage with actual racism.
This killing was not instructed because the Amalekites merely inconvenienced the Jews. Instead, they had actively attacked stragglers migrating away from Egypt, a place where the Jews had experienced severe mistreatment and oppression on racial grounds. Their attacks would have likely targeted the weak, sick, elderly, and young who gravitated towards the rear of the advancing Jewish group. King Saul eventually carries out this command--partially--in 1 Samuel 15.
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| Not all genocide is motivated by racism, although many illicit genocides have been enacted in the name of cleansing the world from a deficient or inferior ethnicity or people group. |
When bothered by things like this, Christians need to evaluate if they derive their ethics solely from divine revelation and purely logical extensions of it [3] and non-Christians need to realize that they have no supportable basis for making objective moral claims. Muslims rely on a book that contradicts the Old Testament, which the Quran claims to align with; atheists (and, by extension, everyone else who isn't a rationalistic theonomist!) can cite only their own personal, arbitrary, subjective discomfort or the contradicting moral traditions and fads of their respective cultures to reinforce their moral beliefs; collective societies can merely adopt inherited moral traditions or act according to either the random decrees of an elite leader (or group of leaders) or the happenstance consensus of the majority; other groups or individuals fare no better. Religious texts containing verifiable contradictions and errors, social popularity, and personal conscience are not sound sources of moral knowledge! Since Christianity is the only religion that can be supported with external facts, its ethical system is the only one that can be rationally defended. With all this in mind, we must remember that we cannot hope to discover moral truths on our own--they must be revealed to us by God.
[1]. http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/05/misrepresented-harshness-deuteronomy.html
[2]. In short, God imbued all humans with his image (Genesis 1:26-27), secured moral rights for all humans (Leviticus 24:22), and repeatedly condemned discrimination against and exploitation of foreigners (Exodus 23:9, for example), and thus all racism stands in direct opposition to Biblical morality and theology. See here:
http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-foundations-of-racism.html
[3]. By purely logical extension I mean something that follows logically without resorting to any fallacies. For example, consider pedophilia. The Bible does not mention pedophilia specifically in Mosaic Law, but it condemns rape and bestiality, both forms of non-consensual sex, as capital crimes (Deuteronomy 22:25-27 and Exodus 22:19 respectively). It also says that unengaged and unmarried singles who have sex should get married (Exodus 22:16-17; no, premarital sex is not sinful in and of itself--see http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/08/on-exodus-2216-17.html) and married people are forbidden from having extramarital sex (Exodus 20:14, Deuteronomy 22:22). Based on these various passages, it is explicitly clear that the Bible condemns sex that is forced and that does not either lead to or occur in a committed relationship. Thus, although the Bible does not condemn pedophilia by name, pedophilia is condemned by a purely logical extension of explicit Biblical commands.
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