What Does Your Proof Text Prove (27)

“Then they turned back and came to En-mishpat (that is, Kadesh) and defeated all the country of the Amalekites, and also the Amorites who were dwelling in Hazazon-tamar.”

The passage quoted above is from Genesis 14. It describes the actions of four kings who fought with five other kings in the valley of Siddim in the land of Canaan, where Abraham lived. Battles were going on around the patriarch as he pitched his tent in the land God had promised him, and Abraham, it seems, generally kept as far away from these as he could.

In this case, his relative Lot lived in Sodom, which had been pillaged in the conflict. With family involved, Abraham couldn’t morally stay out of it.

Whither the Amalekites?

We will not get further into that story. But it is interesting that on the basis of the reference to the “country of the Amalekites” in this verse, some commentators conclude the Amalekites were not descendants of the grandson of Esau (Abraham’s grandson), as it would appear from the table of nations in Genesis 10 and from other historical records, but rather the descendants of a much earlier group of people. The idea is that if a nation was mentioned this early in scripture, it must have existed at that time.

One prominent example: The Bible Study Tools Encyclopaedia says this:

“They [the Amalekites] are not to be identified with the descendants of Esau (Genesis 36:12, 16) because they are mentioned earlier, in the account of the invasion of Chedorlaomer (Genesis 14:7).”

Notwithstanding the esteemed source, a statement like the one quoted above betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the “labels” the writers of the Old Testament attached to the cities, towns, nations and people groups in the histories they wrote.

The Problems of Geography and Time

These men were often writing centuries (sometimes millennia) after the events they described, and writing for an audience that sometimes had little familiarity with the things about which they were writing. Much had happened between the original events and the account given about them and, in many cases, the ethnicity of the people that lived in any particular geographic location had changed drastically. The dilemma for the writers of the Old Testament was always how to refer to the geographic locations that had once been home to a certain ethnic population, but at the time they were writing were now home to a totally different people group; or were at one timed named ‘X’ and were now named ‘Y’. Which name do you use? Which designation will communicate most effectively with your target audience?

The answer we find in scripture is that its writers often described ancient territories in then-current language, just as you and I might say, for the sake of clarity, that “the Israelites conquered Palestine”.

Technically, this is a totally false statement. Historically speaking, the Israelites never conquered “Palestine”. The first known historical reference to Palestine is almost 900 years later than Israel’s conquest of Canaan. Even the word Palestine comes from the word Philistin, which refers to a distant descendant of Noah, and became a version of the name by which the tribes the Old Testament called “Philistines” were sometimes designated. All the same, if you look up “Palestine” in Wikipedia today, it is impossible to ignore the fact that there are very significant (almost total) geographical overlaps between both the boundaries of the land of Canaan that God gave to Abraham, the boundaries of OT Israel, and the boundaries of what was called Palestine in subsequent millennia. It is perfectly fair to describe the Israelite conquest of the Canaanite tribes as a “conquest of Palestine”, only provided we recognize that it wasn’t called that at the time they conquered it. The name came later.

What the Heck is a ‘Babylonian’?

Another helpful example: as we are discovering in our ongoing study of the prophecy of Habakkuk, the Babylonian Empire and the Neo-Babylonian Empire were ruled by multiple ethnic factions, all of which were headquartered in the city of Babylon and were from time to time referred to as “Babylonian”.

The original Babylonian Empire was an ancient Akkadian-speaking state ruled by the Amorites from 1894 BC through 1595 BC. In 1595 BC, the Kassites came from the Zagros mountains in Iran and conquered Babylon. Their rule was the longest in Babylonian history at 576 years, and if you asked anybody in that region at that time who was in charge of their world, they would have said, “the Babylonians”, not “the Kassites”, even though, ethnically speaking, it was indisputably Kassites who were living in Babylon and running the show.

It gets worse. In 1155 BC, the Elamites took Babylon from the Kassites, becoming “the Babylonians” insofar as history is concerned. That lasted little more than 100 years, after which the Assyrians ruled Babylon, though Babylon was just one city in the larger Assyrian Empire dominated by the capital city of Nineveh.

Finally, at the tail end of the Assyrian Empire, a group of migrants from the south called Chaldeans took Babylon from the people living there, who at the time were referred to as “Babylonians”, though some were probably Elamites, some were Assyrians, some were Kassites, some may have been long-in-the-tooth Akkadians, or any possible combination or permutation of the above, as happens when people marry cross-culturally. Whatever, the conquering Chaldeans were promptly designated Babylonians. Go figure. That’s why historians distinguish the Neo-Babylonian Empire from the Babylonian, because they were two very different ethnic entities notwithstanding the similar names. Scripture deals only with the Neo-Babylonian Empire, which is synonymous with the Chaldeans.

Realistically, how were the writers of the Old Testament supposed to sort that business out, let alone describe it in a way that best suited every generation of readers and made the situation equally clear to everyone who might have come across the text at any point in time? It was utterly impossible.

The Past Described in Terms of the Present

The answer is that the writers of scripture often described past events in then-current terms in order that their present generation of readers would have the slightest clue what they were talking about. There are numerous examples of this in scripture. “The Philistines” were at least two distinct people groups over the centuries, but the name has been kept consistent for the sake of the audience for which the historical books of the Old Testament were written. Like “Babylonian”, “Philistine” describes the then-present inhabitants of a geographic territory in the Bible. It is not an ethnic designation.

All to say that when the writer of Genesis refers to “the country of the Amalekites”, he is not telling us the children of Amalek existed at the time of Abraham. He is telling us that the country invaded by the four kings in the process of fighting against five others in the time of Abraham now (“now” being when he wrote) belonged to the Amalekites.

So, no, Genesis 14:7 does not prove what The Bible Study Tools Encyclopaedia thinks it does. Amalek was Esau’s grandson, and the Amalekites were relatives of both the Edomites and, further back, relatives of Israel. The words “the country of the Amalekites” in Genesis should not be interpreted as some sort of obscure indication the Amalekites existed as a people generations before they actually did. It should be understood to mean “the country the Amalekites now occupy” as of the date the passage was written. 95% of Bible commentators agree with my understanding of this and I am very close to 100% certain that consensus is correct. There are too many similar precedents to consider in scripture. We would be fools to ignore them.

Applications for the Great Tribulation

Just for fun, if you want to boggle your mind, start applying this principle to the prophetic scriptures that speak of the attack on Israel during the great tribulation in terms of the geographic realities that obtained at the time the relevant prophet wrote or spoke. The answer is that anyone who is as certain as Hal Lindsey (The Late Great Planet Earth) was about which modern nations will show up for Armageddon is simply not aware of the problems of identification that ancient documents still pose for the modern reader.

God will do everything he promised in the prophets. But if we think we can figure all that out from our current perspective with the present state of historical and archeological evidence, we are presuming way, way too much.