The biblical Amalekites are the Israelites’ enemies—and their kin
Enemies are real. They are also closer to us than we may care to imagine.
I have never preached about the Amalekites, ancient Israel’s hereditary enemy, passed down from generation to generation. I can imagine the wide eyes and ashen faces staring back at me. My pastoral intuition tells me to clean up the Bible’s violence, to justify God or those who misheard God. I want to alleviate the terror of such stories.
In our Christian tradition of proclamation, we often cut carefully around the edges of our scriptures, clipping troubling stories out of their place within the Bible’s narrative arc. At the Islamic school in my city, the young students not only study the Qur’an but work toward memorizing it. They are formed for a discipline of encountering the text as a whole, able to recite their holy writ for hour after hour. The Christian tradition in which I was raised was more interested in committing individual verses to memory, plucking them from context to be wielded however we desired.
A reading practice of cutting and stitching back together will not serve us well in our encounter with the story of the Amalekites. For ancient Jewish readers, Amalek is swept into the long story of God’s faithfulness to Israel, the complicated choosing of a king, and the protection of God’s people from their enemies. It’s one response to terror among the internal tensions of stories, prophecies, and teachings of compassion and forgiveness that directly contradict more violent commands. Earlier readers, our foremothers and fathers, show us how to live within the broad reach of the Bible. We have to read the entire story.
