1 Samuel 15:7-8 says Saul utterly destroyed all the Amalekites with the edge of the sword. The same chapter lets Agag's mother survive (15:33), David is still slaughtering Amalekites years later in 1 Samuel 27:8 and 30:1-17 (with 400 escaping), and an Amalekite kills Saul in 2 Samuel 1:8-10. The text contradicts its own "utterly destroyed all" claim multiple times within a few chapters.
Proposed answers
People have answered this in several ways; GEBible presents them as equal peers.
Yes
And Saul smote the Amalekites from Havilah until thou comest to Shur, that is over against Egypt. And he took Agag
the king of the Amalekites alive, and utterly destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword. ...
And Samuel hewed Agag in pieces before the LORD in Gilgal.
1 Samuel 15:7-8, 33
7Saul struck the Amalekites, from Havilah as you go to Shur, that is before Egypt.8He took Agag the king of the Amalekites alive, and utterly destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword.
33Samuel said, “As your sword has made women childless, so your mother will be childless among women!” Then Samuel cut Agag in pieces before Yahweh in Gilgal.
33Samuel said, “As your sword has made women childless, so your mother will be childless among women!” Then Samuel cut Agag in pieces before Yahweh in Gilgal.
8David and his men went up and raided the Geshurites, the Girzites, and the Amalekites; for those were the inhabitants of the land, who were of old, on the way to Shur, even to the land of Egypt.9David struck the land, and saved no man or woman alive, and took away the sheep, the cattle, the donkeys, the camels, and the clothing. Then he returned, and came to Achish.
And then David killed them all again, just to make sure. (Except this time 400 guys escaped.)
And it came to pass, when David and his men were come to Ziklag on the third day, that the Amalekites had invaded
the south, and Ziklag, and smitten Ziklag, and burned it with fire; . . . And David smote them from the twilight even unto
the evening of the next day: and there escaped not a man of them, save four hundred young men, which rode upon camels,
and fled. 1 Samuel 30:1, 17
1When David and his men had come to Ziklag on the third day, the Amalekites had made a raid on the South, and on Ziklag, and had struck Ziklag, and burned it with fire,
17David struck them from the twilight even to the evening of the next day. Not a man of them escaped from there, except four hundred young men, who rode on camels and fled.
8He said to me, ‘Who are you?’ I answered him, ‘I am an Amalekite.’9He said to me, ‘Please stand beside me, and kill me; for anguish has taken hold of me, because my life lingers in me.’10So I stood beside him and killed him, because I was sure that he could not live after he had fallen. I took the crown that was on his head and the bracelet that was on his arm, and have brought them here to my lord.”
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement— a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
1 Samuel 15 is the herem chapter, framed as a test of Saul's obedience to a command of total annihilation. The mandate in 15:3 is comprehensive: "slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass." The narrative backdrop is the older grudge: Exodus 17:8-16 and Deuteronomy 25:17-19 command Israel to "blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven," while Balaam's oracle in Numbers 24:20 already pronounces Amalek's end. The chapter's report of execution is sweeping. Verses 7-8: Saul "smote the Amalekites from Havilah until thou comest to Shur, that is over against Egypt," took Agag alive, and "utterly destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword." The Hebrew heḥerim kol-ha'am le-fi-ḥarev is a totalizing formula.
The same chapter punctures it. Verse 33: Samuel tells Agag, "as thy sword hath made women childless, so shall thy mother be childless among women." Agag's mother is alive — "all the people" of verse 8 was not actually all the people. The problem compounds across the books. 1 Samuel 27:8-9 has David raiding the Amalekites among the "old inhabitants of the land." 1 Samuel 30:1 has Amalekites numerous enough to sack Ziklag and carry off captives, and David's reprisal in 30:17 explicitly lets 400 escape on camels. Then 2 Samuel 1:8-10 has an Amalekite present at Saul's death — the very nation Saul allegedly exterminated furnishes his executioner (or claimed one). Centuries later in Esther 3:1, Haman the "Agagite" — read by tradition as a descendant of Agag — is grand vizier of Persia. The line Saul was to extinguish keeps reappearing.
The strongest apologetic position is that "utterly destroyed all" is ancient Near Eastern war-rhetoric hyperbole, not a census claim. Paul Copan, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and Richard Hess argue this from comparative epigraphy. Egyptian, Assyrian, and Moabite royal inscriptions routinely claim total annihilation that was demonstrably non-literal. The Mesha Stele's boast that Israel "perished forever" is the textbook case — Israel demonstrably persisted. Merneptah's Stele claims "Israel is laid waste, his seed is not," again hyperbolically. The function of such language is to assert decisive, divinely-backed victory, not to log a body count. K. Lawson Stone defended a comparable reading for the Joshua conquest material, and Younger's monograph documents the conquest-account genre in detail.
The hyperbole reading has real evidentiary backing, and a critical scholar should grant it. But it cuts both ways. If 1 Samuel 15:8 is rhetorical hyperbole, then the text reports as accomplished something that did not literally happen — and the same standard then has to apply to Joshua and Judges, where the conquest is similarly totalizing and similarly contradicted (Judges 1 has Canaanites everywhere Joshua said they were destroyed). More acutely, the herem texts cannot be simultaneously literal divine commands carrying real moral and theological weight and convention-bound rhetoric that nobody expected to be true. The apologist who wants Yahweh's command in 15:3 to be a genuine moral act and the execution report in 15:8 to be non-literal convention has imported two incompatible reading-frames into a single chapter. The hyperbole defense resolves the internal numerical tension only by surrendering the historicity the same reader usually wants to preserve.
Most critical scholars (McCarter, Hertzberg, Klein, Niditch, Edelman) read the chapter as stylized theological narrative whose function is to explain Saul's rejection, not to chronicle a literal genocide. On that reading the "all" of verse 8 is formulaic, the later Amalekite appearances reflect the ongoing reality the formula overwrote, and the tension is a byproduct of combining an idealized herem account with the realistic court history of David.
Where the critical reading lands: harmonizable as ANE hyperbole, but only at the cost of conceding the report is non-literal — which dissolves the contradiction and the literalist reading together.
Sources for this reading
P. Kyle McCarter Jr., 1 Samuel (AB 8; Garden City: Doubleday, 1980) pp. 260-269on 1 Samuel 151 Samuel 15
Hans Wilhelm Hertzberg, I and II Samuel (OTL; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1964) pp. 121-128on 1 Samuel 151 Samuel 15
Ralph W. Klein, 1 Samuel (WBC 10, 2nd ed.; Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2000) pp. 145-155on 1 Samuel 151 Samuel 15
Susan Niditch, War in the Hebrew Bible: A Study in the Ethics of Violence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) pp. 28-77
Diana Edelman, King Saul in the Historiography of Judah (JSOTSup 121; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1991) pp. 71-93
Paul Copan, Is God a Moral Monster? Making Sense of the Old Testament God (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2011) pp. 158-178[apologetic hyperbole reading]
Nicholas Wolterstorff, "Reading Joshua," in Michael Bergmann, Michael J. Murray, and Michael C. Rea, eds., Divine Evil? The Moral Character of the God of Abraham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) pp. 236-256[apologetic non-literal reading]
K. Lawson Younger Jr., Ancient Conquest Accounts: A Study in Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical History Writing (JSOTSup 98; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1990) pp. 227-266
Lawson G. Stone, "Ethical and Apologetic Tendencies in the Redaction of the Book of Joshua," Catholic Biblical Quarterly 53 (1991): pp. 25-36
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
1 Samuel 15 is the herem chapter, framed as a test of Saul's obedience to a command of total annihilation. The mandate in 15:3 is comprehensive: "slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass." The narrative backdrop is the older grudge: Exodus 17:8-16 and Deuteronomy 25:17-19 command Israel to "blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven," while Balaam's oracle in Numbers 24:20 already pronounces Amalek's end. The chapter's report of execution is sweeping. Verses 7-8: Saul "smote the Amalekites from Havilah until thou comest to Shur, that is over against Egypt," took Agag alive, and "utterly destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword." The Hebrew heḥerim kol-ha'am le-fi-ḥarev is a totalizing formula.
The same chapter punctures it. Verse 33: Samuel tells Agag, "as thy sword hath made women childless, so shall thy mother be childless among women." Agag's mother is alive — "all the people" of verse 8 was not actually all the people. The problem compounds across the books. 1 Samuel 27:8-9 has David raiding the Amalekites among the "old inhabitants of the land." 1 Samuel 30:1 has Amalekites numerous enough to sack Ziklag and carry off captives, and David's reprisal in 30:17 explicitly lets 400 escape on camels. Then 2 Samuel 1:8-10 has an Amalekite present at Saul's death — the very nation Saul allegedly exterminated furnishes his executioner (or claimed one). Centuries later in Esther 3:1, Haman the "Agagite" — read by tradition as a descendant of Agag — is grand vizier of Persia. The line Saul was to extinguish keeps reappearing.
The strongest apologetic position is that "utterly destroyed all" is ancient Near Eastern war-rhetoric hyperbole, not a census claim. Paul Copan, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and Richard Hess argue this from comparative epigraphy. Egyptian, Assyrian, and Moabite royal inscriptions routinely claim total annihilation that was demonstrably non-literal. The Mesha Stele's boast that Israel "perished forever" is the textbook case — Israel demonstrably persisted. Merneptah's Stele claims "Israel is laid waste, his seed is not," again hyperbolically. The function of such language is to assert decisive, divinely-backed victory, not to log a body count. K. Lawson Stone defended a comparable reading for the Joshua conquest material, and Younger's monograph documents the conquest-account genre in detail.
The hyperbole reading has real evidentiary backing, and a critical scholar should grant it. But it cuts both ways. If 1 Samuel 15:8 is rhetorical hyperbole, then the text reports as accomplished something that did not literally happen — and the same standard then has to apply to Joshua and Judges, where the conquest is similarly totalizing and similarly contradicted (Judges 1 has Canaanites everywhere Joshua said they were destroyed). More acutely, the herem texts cannot be simultaneously literal divine commands carrying real moral and theological weight and convention-bound rhetoric that nobody expected to be true. The apologist who wants Yahweh's command in 15:3 to be a genuine moral act and the execution report in 15:8 to be non-literal convention has imported two incompatible reading-frames into a single chapter. The hyperbole defense resolves the internal numerical tension only by surrendering the historicity the same reader usually wants to preserve.
Most critical scholars (McCarter, Hertzberg, Klein, Niditch, Edelman) read the chapter as stylized theological narrative whose function is to explain Saul's rejection, not to chronicle a literal genocide. On that reading the "all" of verse 8 is formulaic, the later Amalekite appearances reflect the ongoing reality the formula overwrote, and the tension is a byproduct of combining an idealized herem account with the realistic court history of David.
Where the critical reading lands: harmonizable as ANE hyperbole, but only at the cost of conceding the report is non-literal — which dissolves the contradiction and the literalist reading together.
Sources for this reading