Amalekites Revisited

I love looking at Old Testament stories and tracing history through its books. Sometimes I try to draw practical lessons from the things that happened in times past. Other times I leave that process mostly to the reader. Some lessons are more obvious than others, and we don’t always need to be beaten with a 2×4 to register what the Holy Spirit is trying to tell us.

Early last year we published a post I entitled “The Prototypical Enemy”. It concerned the Amalekites and their relationship with the nation of Israel over a 900-year period. In that post, I tried to link together a bunch of different scriptures to present a history of the Amalekite people. It was a lengthy one, so I left most of the practical applications to the reader.

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.

The Prototypical Enemy

Amalek is Israel’s prototypical enemy. Or perhaps I should say “was” rather than “is”. That requires a bit of explanation ...

Israel became a nation during its period of Egyptian slavery, so we can certainly number the Egyptians among Israel’s earliest mortal antagonists. But Israel fought no battles with Egypt. At the Red Sea, no Israelite even drew his sword. Instead, God fought for his people, and the nations were awed, just as God had anticipated: “The peoples have heard; they tremble; pangs have seized the inhabitants of Philistia. Now are the chiefs of Edom dismayed; trembling seizes the leaders of Moab; all the inhabitants of Canaan have melted away.”

Who is absent from this list of trembling peoples? Amalek.