God ordered the killing of infants and nursing babies

First Samuel 15 presents God commanding King Saul to attack the Amalekites and "put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys."¹ The Hebrew is explicit: olel refers to children still being weaned, while yoneq describes infants at the breast.² This is a specific enumeration of the most vulnerable human beings, commanded to be killed as a religious act.

The biblical text

God delivers the command through the prophet Samuel.

"Samuel said to Saul, 'I am the one the LORD sent to anoint you king over his people Israel; so listen now to the message from the LORD. This is what the LORD Almighty says: "I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys."'" 1 Samuel 15:1-3¹

The Hebrew olel v'yoneq (עֹלֵל וְיוֹנֵק) refers to children still dependent on nursing and infants at the breast.^{2, 3} The same terminology appears in Lamentations 4:4, where the prophet describes children's tongues cleaving to the roof of their mouths for thirst.⁴ The language denotes children too young to walk, too young to speak, too young to have any moral agency.

"Totally destroy" translates hacharem (הַחֲרֵם), from the root cherem (חרם), denoting complete devotion to destruction as a sacred act.² The command is not merely military but religious: the Amalekites and everything they possess are to be offered to God through annihilation.

The context and motivation

The stated reason for this command is punishment. God orders this destruction as retribution for what "the Amalekites did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt."¹ This refers to an incident described in Exodus 17:8-16, where the Amalekites attacked the Israelites shortly after the Exodus.⁵ In that earlier passage, God declares perpetual war against Amalek: "The LORD will have war against Amalek from generation to generation."⁵

The critical point is chronological. The Exodus 17 attack occurred during the wilderness wanderings, traditionally dated to the thirteenth century BCE.⁶ The command to Saul comes during his reign, traditionally dated to approximately 1047-1007 BCE.⁷ That gap is roughly two to three centuries. The infants commanded for slaughter were not even born when the offense occurred — their great-great-great-grandparents may not have been born. They were guilty only of being born into the wrong ethnic group at the wrong time.

The herem concept

Cherem (חרם) — "devotion to destruction" — meant irrevocable dedication to God through complete annihilation.⁸ Nothing could be kept, used, or spared. Everything — people, animals, and possessions — had to be destroyed as a religious offering.⁹ The concept appears throughout the Pentateuch and historical books.

"When the LORD your God delivers them over to you and you defeat them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy." Deuteronomy 7:1-2¹⁰

"However, in the cities of the nations the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them." Deuteronomy 20:16-17¹¹

The destruction of Jericho provides the paradigmatic example.

"They devoted the city to the LORD and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it, men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys." Joshua 6:21¹²

When Achan violated the cherem by keeping some of the devoted things, he and his entire family were stoned and burned.¹³ The severity of punishment for violating cherem underscores its sacred, non-negotiable character.

Biblical instances of herem (devotion to destruction)^{8, 9}

God's anger at incomplete obedience

What makes 1 Samuel 15 particularly striking is God's response when Saul fails to carry out the command completely. After the battle, Saul spares King Agag and the best livestock — "everything that was good" — destroying only what was "despised and weak."¹⁴

God's reaction is immediate: "I regret that I have made Saul king, because he has turned away from me and has not carried out my instructions" (1 Samuel 15:10-11).¹⁴ The Hebrew nacham (נָחַם) expresses divine grief and reconsideration — the same verb used in Genesis 6:6 when God regrets making humanity before the flood.¹⁵

When Samuel confronts Saul, the king offers an excuse: the people spared the best animals "in order to sacrifice them to the LORD your God."¹⁶ Samuel's response has become one of the most quoted passages in the Hebrew Bible.

"Does the LORD delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obeying the LORD? To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams. For rebellion is like the sin of divination, and arrogance like the evil of idolatry. Because you have rejected the word of the LORD, he has rejected you as king." 1 Samuel 15:22-23¹⁷

Saul is condemned not for excessive violence but for insufficient violence. His partial mercy — sparing Agag and the best livestock — constituted "rebellion" against God. Samuel then personally completed the judgment: "Samuel put Agag to death before the LORD at Gilgal."¹⁸ The Hebrew verb shasaph (שָׁסַף) means to hew in pieces.¹⁹

The moral problem stated plainly

The passage presents God commanding the deliberate killing of infants and nursing babies — not as collateral damage, not as metaphor, not as hyperbolic warfare language, but as an explicit, enumerated command. God then punishes the person who shows partial mercy, rejecting him from kingship because he did not kill enough.

The phrase olel v'yoneq appears in a list alongside men, women, cattle, sheep, camels, and donkeys.¹ Nursing babies are not an afterthought; they are an explicit target.

The deliberate killing of nursing babies is among the gravest moral wrongs in any ethical system. The International Criminal Court defines intentional killing of civilians, including children, as a war crime and crime against humanity.²⁰ The Geneva Conventions protect children as persons who "shall be the object of special respect."²¹ The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child affirms children's "inherent right to life."²²

These frameworks represent not merely contemporary preferences but the crystallization of moral intuitions nearly universal across cultures. The protection of infants is one of the few genuine moral universals, rooted in our evolutionary psychology and reinforced by virtually every ethical and religious tradition.²³

Common theological defenses

Theologians and apologists have offered various defenses of passages like 1 Samuel 15. Each defense encounters significant philosophical difficulties.

The irredeemable wickedness defense

Some defenders argue that the Amalekites had become so thoroughly evil that their destruction was necessary. The Amalekites are portrayed elsewhere in Scripture as particularly wicked: they attacked Israel's stragglers, "the weary and worn out," rather than engaging the main force.²⁴ On this view, the culture had become so corrupt that complete eradication was the only solution.

This defense fails for nursing babies. Whatever moral corruption existed in Amalekite society, infants at the breast cannot participate in it. A nursing baby has no beliefs, no intentions, no capacity for moral choice. To describe one as "irredeemably wicked" is incoherent. The defense may work for adults, but it categorically cannot justify killing infants.

The divine sovereignty defense

The most common defense holds that God, as creator and sovereign over all life, has the authority to give and take life as He sees fit. Since God grants existence, He may terminate it without moral wrong. What would be murder for a human is simply God exercising His prerogative.

This defense encounters the Euthyphro dilemma, articulated by Plato in the dialogue of the same name: is an action good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is good?²⁵ If actions are good simply because God commands them, then goodness is whatever God wills, and the term loses all content. Torturing infants would be good if God commanded it. The word "moral" becomes meaningless, equivalent to "whatever the powerful being wants."²⁶

If instead God commands things because they are good, then there is a standard of goodness independent of God's will by which God's actions can be evaluated. This preserves the meaning of moral language but makes God subject to moral evaluation. And if we can evaluate God's actions, then we can ask whether commanding the killing of nursing babies is morally good, and the answer from any recognizable ethical framework is no.²⁶

The cultural context defense

Some argue that we cannot judge ancient texts by modern moral standards. Warfare in the ancient Near East was brutal, and the Israelites were products of their time. The command reflects the cultural context of ancient warfare, not timeless moral prescriptions.

This defense is available only to those who view the Bible as a human document reflecting human cultural limitations. If the Bible is divinely inspired, and if God is timeless and morally perfect as classical theism holds, then cultural context provides no excuse.²⁷ A perfect God would not command infanticide in any era. If God accommodated Himself to the brutal norms of ancient warfare, this accommodation would constitute moral compromise, inconsistent with divine perfection. The defense essentially concedes that the command is morally problematic and offers an explanation for why a human author might have written it, not a justification for why a perfect God would issue it.

The hyperbole defense

Some scholars argue that ancient Near Eastern warfare accounts routinely employed hyperbolic language. Kings boasted of total annihilation when they achieved partial victories. On this reading, phrases like "destroy all that belongs to them" and "do not spare" are conventional exaggeration, not literal commands.²⁸

This defense struggles with the specific enumeration in 1 Samuel 15:3. The command does not simply say "destroy everything." It lists categories: men, women, children, infants, cattle, sheep, camels, donkeys. The specificity undermines the hyperbole interpretation. If the author intended hyperbolic total destruction, why enumerate nursing babies specifically? The very precision that makes the passage morally troubling also makes the hyperbole defense less plausible.

Furthermore, God's anger at Saul's incomplete obedience suggests literal intent. If the command were merely hyperbolic, one would expect God to be satisfied with partial fulfillment, since hyperbole is not meant to be taken literally. Instead, God rejects Saul as king because he did not complete the destruction.¹⁷ The narrative treats the command as binding in its particulars.

The future threat defense

Some defenders argue that God, being omniscient, knew that these children would grow up to threaten Israel. By destroying them young, God was protecting Israel from future harm. The children were not being punished for what they had done but removed to prevent what they would do.

This amounts to pre-crime punishment, a concept widely rejected in moral philosophy and jurisprudence.²⁹ Punishing individuals for crimes they have not yet committed violates basic principles of justice. If the future is determined such that the children would inevitably become enemies, then free will does not exist, and the entire framework of sin and redemption collapses. If the future is not determined, then the children might have chosen differently, making their preemptive killing unjust.

Moreover, this logic could justify any atrocity. Any population might hypothetically produce future enemies. By this reasoning, any genocide could be defended on grounds that some members of the target group might eventually cause harm. The defense proves too much: it provides a template for justifying the killing of any children anywhere.

The broader pattern

First Samuel 15 is not an isolated incident. The Hebrew Bible contains multiple passages where God commands or endorses the killing of children as part of warfare or judgment. This represents a systematic pattern, not an anomaly requiring special explanation.

In Deuteronomy 2:34, regarding the conquest of Sihon's territory: "At that time we took all his towns and completely destroyed them, men, women and children. We left no survivors."³⁰ Deuteronomy 3:6 describes the same for Og's kingdom: "We completely destroyed them, as we had done with Sihon king of Heshbon, destroying every city, men, women and children."³¹

Joshua 6:21 describes Jericho: "They devoted the city to the LORD and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it, men and women, young and old."¹² Joshua 8:24-26 describes Ai: "When Israel had finished killing all the men of Ai in the fields and in the wilderness where they had chased them, and when every one of them had been put to the sword, all the Israelites returned to Ai and killed those who were in it... all who fell that day, both men and women, were twelve thousand."³²

Numbers 31:17-18 contains a particularly disturbing command regarding the Midianites.

"Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man." Numbers 31:17-18³³

This passage combines the killing of children with the taking of virgin girls, presumably as war brides or slaves.

Biblical commands to kill children^{8, 9}

Theological implications

The command creates a logical problem for classical theism, which holds that God is simultaneously omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent.³⁴

If God is omnipotent, He could have achieved His purposes without killing infants — changing hearts, relocating populations, striking only guilty adults, or any of infinite alternatives. The killing was not necessary; it was chosen.

If God is omniscient, He knew alternatives existed and foresaw all consequences. He chose infant slaughter with full knowledge that other paths were available.

If God is omnibenevolent, He would not command the killing of innocents. No moral framework that deserves the name "ethics" permits the deliberate killing of nursing babies.²⁶

Something must give. Either God is not all-powerful, not all-knowing, not all-good in any recognizable sense, or the passage does not accurately represent God's commands. Each option requires abandoning some element of traditional theistic belief.

Comparison with modern ethics

Every major moral framework condemns the killing of infants — this is not contemporary preference but a near-universal moral intuition across cultures and ethical systems.

Deontological ethics holds that certain actions are intrinsically wrong regardless of consequences. Kant's categorical imperative requires treating people never merely as means but always as ends in themselves.³⁵ Killing nursing babies to punish their ancestors treats them purely as means, violating their inherent dignity.

Consequentialist ethics evaluates actions by their outcomes. Even the most permissive consequentialism struggles to justify infant slaughter. The suffering inflicted is immediate and certain; the benefits are speculative at best. An omnipotent God could achieve any good outcome without this harm, making the harm unnecessary and therefore unjustified even on consequentialist grounds.³⁶

Virtue ethics asks what a person of good character would do. No virtue, whether justice, mercy, courage, or wisdom, calls for killing nursing babies. The action expresses no virtue and exemplifies no excellence of character. A virtuous person, by definition, would not perform such an act.³⁷

Natural law theory, prominent in Catholic moral theology, holds that certain actions are intrinsically evil and can never be justified regardless of circumstances or intentions. The direct killing of innocents is a paradigm case of intrinsic evil in natural law thinking.³⁸ A nursing baby is the clearest possible example of an innocent; killing one is therefore intrinsically and absolutely wrong.

Even divine command theory, which holds that morality derives from God's commands, faces difficulty here. Most divine command theorists add that God would never command something truly evil because God is good.²⁶ But this presupposes a standard of goodness by which God's commands can be evaluated. If that standard exists, the command to kill nursing babies fails it. If that standard does not exist, then "good" means nothing more than "whatever God commands," and the theory becomes trivial.

Moral implications

Whether understood as history or sacred literature, 1 Samuel 15 presents a portrait of God that raises fundamental moral questions. If historical, God commanded the deliberate killing of nursing babies as a religious act and punished a king for showing too much mercy. If literary, the biblical authors believed this was an appropriate way to characterize their deity.

The dilemma is stark. One can reject the passage as non-historical mythology. This preserves divine goodness but requires reinterpreting significant portions of Scripture as non-literal — and if this passage is not historical, which others might not be?

One can accept the passage as accurately representing God's commands, preserving biblical authority at the cost of moral coherence — maintaining that killing nursing babies is good when God commands it.

Or one can acknowledge the tension without resolving it, living with the discomfort of a sacred text that contains morally troubling material. This approach has intellectual honesty but admits that Scripture, tradition, and moral intuition are not easily harmonized.

What one cannot consistently maintain is that the command was morally good in any recognizable sense. If killing nursing babies is wrong when humans do it, then either it is wrong when God commands it, or the word "wrong" has no stable meaning.