fourth world: Why must Amalek be exterminated? A Short Biblical lesson

Laurent Guyénot
November 4th

This October 28th, in a speech given in Hebrew, Netanyahu justified the massacre of the civilian population of Gaza using the Bible.

“You must remember what Amalek did to you,” says our Holy Bible. And we do remember it. And we fight. Our brave soldiers and fighters who are now in Gaza and all other parts of Israel, join the chain of Jewish heroes, a chain that began 3,000 years ago, from Joshua ben Nun, to the heroes of 1948, the Six Day War, the October War of 73 and all the other wars in this country. Our heroic troops have one supreme goal: to completely defeat the murderous enemy and secure our existence in this country. We always said never again. And never again, it’s now.”

In the Holy Bible, which serves as the basis of Israel's national romance, there is the promise of the Promised Land, and there is the commandment for the genocide of Amalek, their women, children, infants and livestock included (for Israel does not not distinguish between their enemy and their enemy's cattle). It is indeed the same God who speaks. Conquering Canaan and exterminating Amalek are one and the same thing, because to conquer Canaan, it was necessary to cross the territory of Amalek, and that nation opposed this.

The Bible presents the Amalekites as an Arab people descended from Abraham. They are the first hostile people that the Hebrews encounter during their journey between Egypt and Canaan. In a cynically paradoxical formulation, Yahweh asks Moses to remember that Amalek is not to be remembered: “Write this in a book for remembrance, and declare to Joshua that I will blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven” (Exodus 17:14). The idea is repeated in Deuteronomy 25:19: “When Yahweh your God has made you safe from all your surrounding enemies, in the land which Yahweh your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess, you will erase the memory of Amalek from under the heavens. Do not forget !"

Mysteriously, Amalek survives the genocide the first time around, and we find him in the first Book of Samuel, when Yahweh orders King Saul: “I have resolved to punish what Amalek did to Israel, by cutting off his path when he came up from Egypt. Now go, strike Amalek, condemn him to anathema with all that he possesses, have no pity on him, kill men and women, children and infants, oxen and sheep, camels and donkeys.” (1Samuel 15,8). Now Saul spares “King Agag and the best of the flocks and herds, the fatlings and the lambs”. He therefore disobeyed Yahweh by showing mercy, and will lose the kingship for this, because Yahweh has no pity for the non-Jews: “I repent of having given the kingship to Saul, because he turned away from me and did not carry out my orders” (15.11). Yahweh removes Saul's kingship and Samuel "slaughters" Agag (the meaning of the Hebrew verb, shsf, is open to debate, with some translations suggesting that he cut him into pieces or quartered him). Despite this theoretically perfect biblical genocide, Amalek remains Israel's eternal nightmare.

Like his grandfather Esau, Amalek is often associated with Rome and therefore, from the 4th century onwards, with Christianity. Amalek is also sometimes associated with Iran, because the villain of the Book of Esther, Haman, is specifically referred to as an Agagite, that is, a descendant of the Amalekite king Agag. This is why the hanging of Haman with his ten sons and the massacre of 75,000 Persians, celebrated annually at the festival of Purim, are associated in Jewish tradition with the extermination of the Amalekites and the execution of their king Agag. The episode of the Exodus, which concludes with “Yahweh is at war against Amalek from generation to generation” (Exodus 17.16), constitutes the biblical reading for the morning of Purim.¹

“Tradition says that the Amalekites are the eternal enemy of the Jews,” explained Jeffrey Goldberg in 2009 in a New York Times article entitled “Israel’s Fears, Amalek’s Arsenal.” He reports that, having asked a close adviser to the Prime Minister how to assess “the depth of Mr. Netanyahu’s concern regarding Iran,” he was told: “Think Amalek.”²

Netanyahu seems more than ever obsessed with Amalek, which for him is simultaneously Iran and Hamas. But by now calling on Israelis to remember Amalek while their army shells Gaza, men, women, children, infants and livestock included, Netanyahu is only trying to unite his country around a war cry very familiar to more and more pious Jews in Israel and around the world. Let's listen, for example, to this sermon by Rabbi Eliyahu Kin, the last in his series on "the 70 most difficult questions in Judaism." Here, the question of the day is: “Why does God ask the Jews to destroy Amalek?”

To summarise: The Amalekites deserved their fate, explains Rabbi Kin, because they wanted to prevent the Jews from crossing their lands to invade Palestine. However, God's will was for the Jews to cross their land. And the will of God is Good, while opposing the will of God is Evil (“evil being the opposite of good”, is the necessary clarification from the Rabbi). It’s not complicated: “ultimate good is that which accomplishes God’s will in this world,” while evil is “whatever opposes the accomplishment of God’s will” (5:26 -45). So exterminating Amalek is Good, while not exterminating Amalek is Evil.

This is why Saul did evil by sparing the king and the livestock of the Amalekites. To punish him, God made him mad and took back the kingship from him to give it to David, who was a better exterminator (for example for the inhabitants of Rabba, whom he “tore to pieces with saws, harrows of iron and axes, and passed them through brick kilns” (2 Samuel 12:31 and 1 Chronicles 20:3).

Let us remember that before the Amalekites, there were the Midianites. They too deserved to be exterminated, because they encouraged Jews to marry non-Jews. But God's will is that Jews marry exclusively among themselves. God therefore orders Moses to carry out a complete genocide. But now his people are reluctant to do the task and spare, among the Midianites, the women and their little children. Moses is not happy. “Why did you let all the women live? They are the ones who (…) were for the Israelites a cause of infidelity to Yahweh.” The Jews must therefore massacre these women and their male children, but Moses, in his leniency, still authorizes them to keep “the little girls who have not shared a man's bed, and let them be yours ". The loot amounts to “675,000 head of small cattle, 72,000 head of herd, 61,000 donkeys, and, in terms of people, women who have not shared a man's bed, 32,000 people in everything” (Numbers 31,1-47). It was kind of Yahweh to spare the livestock. Normally, for cities that resist it, it is necessary to kill "everything that breathes", men and beasts indiscriminately (Deuteronomy 20,13-18), as for example in Jericho, where "everything that breathes" was put to the sword: “everything that was in the city, men and women, young and old, even the bulls, sheep and donkeys” (Joshua 6:21).

If God ordered the extermination of all these peoples, explains our good rabbi, it is because these massacres are the expression of his goodness. This is why, “the best way to love what God loves is to hate what God hates. If you hate what God hates, you will love what God loves. That's how it works. To truly love what God loves, you must hate what He truly hates. And God hates Amalek.

Be careful, there is a subtlety, which the rabbi does not avoid: Amalek does not always want to eliminate the Jews. Sometimes he just wants to assimilate them, which is almost worse. “So if you don’t defeat him, if you don’t wage war against him, you run the risk of being assimilated.”

If the Amalekites are so dangerous, it is because they received “a concentration of impure souls”, while the Jews, it is well known, received “a concentration of divine souls”. “According to the Torah, the Jew is the most capable of doing good.” As, for example, in exterminating Amalek.

This explains why Amalek does not like the Jews. “What bothers Amalek is that the Jew believes in mussar, or morality. He doesn’t like it when we show goodness and kindness. He does not like our Torah, because he believes in its exact opposite.” Indeed, the Amalekites reject the Torah which orders them to be exterminated, so they reject good and do evil. Therefore, they must be exterminated.

Ultimately, Rabbi Kin sums it up thus: “We are cruel to Amalek because we have to be. Because that's exactly what they would do to us if they had the chance. If they could, they would destroy the Jewish people.” Hence the parable of the Jewish doctor who, if he had been a prophet, would have cut up and filleted Hitler at birth. Because it must be said: “Amalek is the concentration of hatred”. Now, we must hate hatred – except the hatred of God for Amalek, whom we must love – therefore we must hate Amalek with all the hatred of Yahweh, who is love. This is not complicated !

But, asks the Rabbi, why exterminate the animals too? “Well, animals can easily steer our feelings... Look at all these animal lovers, running all over the world to save the whales !” Another explanation for your menu: “So why get rid of these poor animals? Because [God] did not want to leave any opening whatsoever for pity on anything that belongs to, or is associated with, Amalek.” When you are God, you don't do things by halves.

In summary, Amalek must be exterminated because God ordered it, and his command is eternal. Exterminating Amalek is good, because it is the will of God. When Amalek is completely exterminated, then “all evil will cease to exist. All evil will disappear. There will be no more harm.” Good will triumph, “God will be king of the entire universe”. It will be the reign of the Torah. For this, it is up to the Jews to exterminate Amalek, again and again until not a single one remains. God doesn't want to do it himself. “It is the job of the Jews to repair the world and bring the coming of God into our world.” “Who can make a difference and repair the world? The Jewish people. How ? Through the Torah, which gives us the strength to overcome the heart of evil.” By annihilating Amalek.

But then, who was Amalek in 2009? “The answer is very clear: it was Germany.” Indeed, the Germans caused the eternal Holocaust. Hitler, who called himself a prophet, believed that God wanted to exterminate the Jews. But he was wrong. It is the opposite: God wants to exterminate the Amalekites, who sometimes disguise themselves as Germans, and sometimes as Iranians or Arabs.

In conclusion: if an Amalekite declares that God commands the extermination of the Jews, it is absolute Evil. But if Netanyahu reminds us that God wants the Jews to exterminate the Amalekites, who are the Gazans, then all is well, and the heads of state of the Christian world respond to the call.

For we, Christianised peoples, have been taught that in ancient times, God chose the Jews, gave them Palestine, and ordered them to exterminate the Amalekites. What could we possibly object to the rabbi? That God, in his youth, had let himself be carried away a little, but that he has changed? That God didn't mean what he said, or that he was speaking allegorically? That the Amalekites are no longer what they were, and that they now have the right to oppose the biblical project? All this squirming is ridiculous. After all, God, the creator of the universe, does indeed order, in the Christian Bible, to exterminate Amalek. It is undeniable, indisputable, irrefutable. And God is God, goddammit.

Unless the devil has been pretending to be God for two thousand years. It is true that, if you look closely, Yahweh looks like a dragon, with the smoke that comes out of his nostrils and the devouring fire that comes out of his mouth (Psalm 18:8-9 and 2 Samuel 22:9), his wings (Psalms 17.8; 36.8; 91.4), and his taste for the smell of well-burned burnt offerings (Genesis 8.21).