The Amalekites

***QUOTE***

Samuel claims that God wants the Israelites to kill every man, woman, child, infant, cattle, etc. That in itself may not be wrong, however note the motive that Samuel attributes to God. This attack is punishment for crimes committed over 300 year prior. The sentence is carried out on infants and nursing mothers who cannot have taken part in the act that caused the judgment.

Notice that Samuel attaches an evil motive to the action. This makes the action evil. Thus, if someone believes that there is a God who is the basis for the moral law written on our hearts, they are justified in concluding that the God is not the one referred to in the Bible.

http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2006/07/particularism-and-christianity.html

***END-QUOTE***

Here’s the umpteenth example of an apostate who launches into a clueless attack on Scripture.

1.If Bill Curry had bothered to brush up on the history of the Amalekites, he’d see that Scripture is not simply skipping over 300 hundred years of intervening history, as if nothing else had happened.

2. The enmity between the Israelites and the Amalekites began with the wilderness wandering, but it didn’t end there.

During the days of the Judges, the Amalekites continued to form military alliances hostile to Israel (Judg 3:13; 6:3-5,33).

And it didn’t end with King Saul, for David also had to contend with the Amalekites (1 Sam 27:6; 30:1-20).

And it came to a head with Haman, a man of Amalekite extraction,* who attempted to exterminate the Jews once and for all time.

*Cf. D. Clines, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther (Eerdmans 1992), 293.

So the Amalekites were Israel’s mortal enemy from start to finish.

3.The Amalekites were given fair warning when they first opposed the children of Israel (Exod 17:8-16; Num 24:20; Deut 25:17-19).

Oracles of judgment are implicitly conditional (cf. Jer 18:7-10). If a nation repents, God will withhold judgment.

The Amalekites did not repent. To the contrary, they remained impenitent and implacable to the bitter end.

4.The acontextual allusion to Jer 31:33 has actual reference to members of the new covenant, not to the universality of human conscience.

And, in any event, a God-given conscience can become calloused (1 Tim 4:2).

5.The prophet Samuel did not attribute an evil motive to God. That is Curry’s acontextual spin.

6.Curry fails to explain why, from a secular standpoint, it’s ever wrong for one meat machine to terminate another meat machine.