The young Amalekite
, of course, had at Saul's own request
The king sent Haman, the Amalekite
, to investigate, and Haman was promoted to prime minister after he foiled the plot.
It should be remembered that, having been spared by King Saul, the Amalekite
king Agag is brought before Samuel, who promptly executes him, but not before uttering this harsh goodbye: "As your sword has bereaved women, so shall your mother be bereaved among women" (I Sam.
Significantly, it is only after Saul confesses that "I feared the [Jewish] nation and [therefore spared some of the Amalekite
cattle]" that Samuel concludes that Saul's royal dynasty will not last beyond his own lifetime (I Samuel 15:24--26).
But such animosity between a Benjaminite and an Amalekite
certainly would not have justified the violation of a royal order (Esth 3:2).
In the days preceding purim and on purim itself, we read three times of the struggle of the Jewish people against the forces of evil, personified as Amalek: first, in the special maftir from Deuteronomy 25 read on Shabbat Zachor (the Sabbath when we are admonished to remember Amalek); next, in the halfarah for Shabbat Zachor, from chapter 15 of I Samuel, which tells of the Jewish people's war with Amalek under the leadership of King Saul; and third, in Megillat Esther, where the Jews' enemies are identified as descendants of the Amalekite
King Agag, who appears in chapter 15 of I Samuel.
Commenting on the Amalekite
assault upon the "stragglers" at the rear of the camp (Deut 25: 18), the midrash explains that the enemy could harm only those "who 'straggled' from [obeying] God's ways and found themselves cast out from under the wings of the cloud.
These interpreters repeat this argument when explaining David's killing of the Amalekite
youth (II Sam.
In a variation of the technique, the narrator describes the death of Saul (1 Samuel 31), after which the reader hears a very different report from a character who may or may not have been present at the event, namely, the Amalekite
who informs David of Saul's death in 2 Samuel 1.
The reader should remember that Saul was deposed for a political sin, for not destroying Agag the Amalekite
, and not for any other of his delicts; and God decides to end Ahab's political monarchy when he allows Ben Hadad to live, and not because of any other of his many moral sins.
The contradictory instructions or impulses expressed both in "Aqebot" and in "Instructions for Crossing the Border" clearly derive from a set of similarly contradictory Biblical instructions, also written after a catastrophe - the Amalekite
attack upon the Israelite camp after the Exodus from Egypt.
There is another account of Saul's suicide in the report by the Amalekite