In 1 Samuel 15, God commands Saul to kill every Amalekite man, woman, child, and infant. A command to slaughter babies cannot come from a morally perfect being — this is straightforward genocide attributed to God.

Why people find it persuasive

There is no plausible reading of 'kill infant and suckling' that turns it into anything other than mass killing of non-combatants, including children who by definition could not have participated in whatever wrongs are being punished. If a modern general issued this order it would be an unambiguous war crime.

Important distinctions

• • Ancient Near Eastern hyperbolic 'total destruction' (herem) military rhetoric vs. literal, exhaustive infanticide as later warfare would understand it.
• • Corporate covenant judgment against a nation vs. individual eternal damnation of the people killed.
• • Narrated events in Scripture vs. Scripture endorsing every action within a narrative as a timeless moral template.
• • This as a unique, occasion-specific judicial act within Israel's founding history vs. as a general principle for how any nation may treat enemies.

Christian response

• • Old Testament scholars (e.g., Kenneth Kitchen, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Paul Copan) have shown that herem warfare language ('utterly destroy,' 'leave nothing that breathes') is common stock ancient Near Eastern military hyperbole, comparable to other conquest accounts from the period that boast of 'total destruction' of cities that are later shown, in the same textual corpus, to still exist and be fought again. This does not erase the moral difficulty, but it does mean the text may not intend a literal claim that every infant was in fact killed, any more than 'we crushed them, nothing survived' in ancient annals always meant literal extermination.
• • The judgment against Amalek is presented within the narrative as the culmination of centuries of unprovoked, particularly savage aggression against Israel (Exodus 17, Deuteronomy 25) including attacks on the weak and stragglers, framed as a specific corporate judicial act analogous to (and continuous with) divine judgments like the Flood or Sodom — extraordinary, non-repeatable acts of judgment on a persistently violent society, not a template for ordinary warfare or ethnic policy, which is precisely why Israel is elsewhere given detailed laws restraining conduct in ordinary war (Deuteronomy 20).
• • If theism is true and God is the author and sustainer of life with rightful authority over it, the question of whether God could, in a particular case of settled and otherwise unmitigated judgment, justly end even innocent lives is different in kind from the question of whether a human king could rightly do so on his own authority — this doesn't resolve the discomfort but locates the real point of dispute in whether God has such prerogatives at all, which is a broader question about divine sovereignty over life and death (also raised by natural death, disease, and disaster) rather than something unique to this text.
• • Christian ethicists have historically distinguished between describing what happened (or was commanded on a specific occasion, in a text written from a limited ancient vantage) and prescribing a general ethic; this text has never functioned, either in Jewish or Christian tradition, as a template used to justify contemporary killing of civilians — unlike laws that are treated as ongoing moral instruction, herem texts are treated as bounded to Israel's unique conquest-era history.
• • None of this removes the text from the category of 'deeply difficult' — many thoughtful Christians hold this passage in tension rather than claiming full resolution, treating it similarly to other hard providence texts where trust in God's revealed character elsewhere (steadfast love, justice, mercy to the stranger and orphan) is held alongside honest acknowledgment that this particular narrative resists a fully satisfying moral accounting from a modern vantage.

Christian counterresponse

The theist should concede this is among the hardest texts in Scripture and resist glib resolution; the best response is genuine epistemic humility paired with the observation that the text sits within a canon that elsewhere unambiguously condemns child-killing (2 Kings 17:17, Psalm 106:37-38) and portrays God as defender of orphans — meaning Christians read this passage as sui generis, hard providence rather than a revealed general ethic, while acknowledging it remains one of the strongest objections raised against scriptural inerrancy or against a straightforwardly literal reading of the conquest narratives.