Commentaria in I Regum (I Samuelis)
2. I HAVE RECKONED UP ALL THAT AMALEC DID TO ISRAEL.—The Chaldee, I have remembered; Origen, homily 19 on Numbers, I have considered again; the Hebrew, I have visited; the Septuagint, now I will avenge. For God stores up in His most tenacious memory the sins of men, that He may avenge them in His own time; unless they be blotted out by man through penance. Hear Jeremias, chap. 17, 1: “The sin of Juda is written with a pen of iron, with a point of a diamond, it is graven upon the table of their heart, and upon the horns of their altars.” See what is said there. Wisely St. Augustine on the Psalm cited, verse 8: “Let not God so appear to thee merciful, as not to appear also just.” And soon: “When thou hast treasured up to thyself wrath against the day of wrath, wilt thou not find just Him whom thou hast despised as kind?” St. Jerome, or whoever is the author (for many ascribe it to Rabanus), on that of Lamentations 3, 12: He hath bent his bow. “In a bow,” he says, “the longer the string is drawn, the more strongly the arrow comes forth from it; so the day of the last judgment, the longer it is put off from coming, the more strict will the sentence be that proceeds from it when it comes.”
The cause is given by St. Laurence Justinian in the Tree of Life, chap. 4, saying: “The divine wrath proceeds with slow step to take vengeance on thee, and compensates the tardiness of punishment by its weight. For the Most High is a patient repayer; because those whom He bears with long, that they may be converted, He condemns the more severely if not converted; and the longer He waits for them to amend, the more heavily will He judge if they neglect.” Wherefore the Psalmist: “Mercy and judgment,” he says, “I will sing to thee, O Lord.”
3. AMALEC,—that is, the Amalecites, sprung from Amalec, grandson of Esau, who tried by all means to hinder the Hebrews’ journey into the holy land; and therefore were cut down by Josue, Exodus 17. See what is said there. Mystically, from Origen and St. Gregory, Bede: “Amalec,” he says, “who, after the Red Sea was crossed, withstood Israel, represents those sins which, after the wave of Baptism, oppose us lest we come to the promised kingdoms of the heavenly country: all which we are commanded to destroy, and not to spare them.”
Moreover Amalec in Hebrew is the same as a licking people; whence it denotes gluttons and carnal men: likewise demons, says St. Gregory: “For theirs,” he says, “is to lick, that is, to soothe the mind to sin by the flattery of the flesh; for they seek, as it were, to lick by the touch of the tongue, when by light suggestions they touch the mind.”
KILL FROM MAN EVEN TO WOMAN, AND CHILD AND SUCKLING.—God, who is Lord of death and life of all, had commanded the Amalecites to be wholly destroyed, not only men but beasts; and thus their memory to be abolished: but this memory endured in their posterity (even if these had done no injury); wherefore He commanded them to be cut off utterly; especially since they themselves had put on their parents’ hatred against the Jews, and imitated their other sins. For this reason Samuel killed Agag king of Amalec, saying in verse 33: “As thy sword hath made women childless, so shall thy mother be childless among women.” The little ones also, by original sin, were guilty of death, and for them an early death was a benefit rather than a punishment; lest, if they grew up, they should sin more gravely, and therefore be punished more sharply in Gehenna. Whence St. Ambrose, book 2 On Cain, chap. 9: “The long life granted to Cain,” he says, “is vengeance.” For it is better that sinners die quickly, lest they increase guilt and Gehenna for themselves. Whence the same St. Ambrose, in the book On the Entreaty of David: “By living,” he says, “we contract losses of innocence; by death we obtain an end of error. Gain therefore is acquired by death, but by the use of life, as to wretched debtors under the name of usury, the interest is increased unto guilt.”
This is what Balaam prophesied:
“Amalec, the first of the nations, whose latter end shall be destroyed,” Num. 24, 20. See what is said there. Wherefore St. Chrysostom, homily 22 on Genesis, asking why God shortened the age of men to 120 years, answers that He did it out of mercy, lest by living longer they should feel longer the miseries of this life, and, following their desires, sin more gravely, and therefore be punished more sharply. And Origen, homily 4 on Numbers: “It is a mark of the goodness of God,” he says, “to destroy kingdoms hostile to the wicked, and by war with their own nation to overthrow nations.”
But the proper and chief cause why God so severely commanded the Amalecites to be destroyed was that they tried to turn away from Him the people of the Hebrews, now lately joined to God at Sinai, and as it were novices in faith and religion, and following God in the pillar of cloud, as a leader going before, through all things into the promised land; nay to overthrow this whole work of God. For they were themselves descendants of Esau, who therefore, seeing so great an army of the Hebrews, feared lest that prophecy should now be fulfilled, Genesis 25, 23: “The elder shall serve the younger,” that is, the descendants of Esau the elder should serve the descendants of Jacob the younger; wherefore they feared lest they be put under the yoke by the Hebrews, and be forced to serve them. Therefore, as if fighting for liberty, they attempted every extremity against the Hebrews. Hence learn how gravely God takes and punishes those who scandalize novices in faith or religion, and strive to turn them away from it. For these kill in them as it were the God and Christ who is being born in them; and are therefore as it were deicides and christicides. For this crime, then, God commanded the Amalecites with all theirs to be cut off root and branch, and made a cherem, that is, an anathema, nay to be set for all future ages as a living and perpetual example of the bitter wrath and vengeance of God, like Sodom and Gomorrha. So Abulensis.
To this belongs the terrible punishment of Pretextata, which St. Jerome recounts, epistle 7 to Laeta: “Pretextata,” he says, “once a most noble woman, at the command of her husband Hymettius, who was uncle of the virgin Eustochium, changed her dress and attire; and braided her neglected hair in the worldly fashion, desiring to overcome both the virgin’s purpose and the mother’s desire; and behold the same night she sees in sleep an angel come to her, threatening punishments with a terrible voice, and breaking out in these words: Hast thou dared to prefer a husband’s command to Christ! to lay thy sacrilegious hands on the head of a virgin of God! which hands shall now wither, that thou mayest feel in torment what thou hast done, and when the fifth month is ended thou shalt be led to the infernal regions. But if thou persevere in the crime, thou shalt be bereft at once of thy husband and of thy children. All was fulfilled in order; and a swift death sealed her late and wretched penance. So does Christ avenge the violators of His temple, so does He defend His gems and most precious ornaments.”
he who separates the precious from the vile, namely the soul from the world, shall be as the mouth of God; he from whose mouth and hand the soul clinging to God is drawn away to the world, what will he be? Shall not that fall upon him which the Lord says: He that gathereth not with me scattereth; and he that is not with me is against me?”
Hear also St. Bernard, epistle 111, sharply rebuking parents who called their son Elias away from Religion: “O hard father! O cruel mother! O cruel and impious parents! nay not parents, but slayers, whose grief is their child’s salvation, whose consolation is the death of their son. Who would rather that I perish with them than reign without them. A strange abuse. The house is on fire, the flame presses at the back, and he who flees is forbidden to go out, he who escapes is urged to return. And this by those who are placed in the conflagration, and by most obstinate madness, and most mad obstinacy, will not flee the danger. O fury! If you despise your own death, why do you also seek mine? If, I say, you neglect your own salvation, what does it profit to persecute mine too?” Finally St. Chrysostom exaggerates this crime greatly, book 3 Against the Detractors of the Monastic Life.
4. AND NUMBERED THEM AS LAMBS,—as if to say: Saul numbered his soldiers, as a shepherd is wont to number and count his lambs. Our Interpreter read ke-telaim; now they read be-telaim, which Vatablus takes as the proper name of a place, and renders, in Thelaim. Whence the Septuagint and Josephus render, in Galgal, as if Thelaim were a place near Galgal, but more obscure than it. But others take telaim as a common noun signifying lambs. Whence the Chaldee renders, with the Paschal lambs; the Rabbis, he numbered them by lambs; which they so explain, as if each soldier brought a lamb, that from the number of the lambs the number of the soldiers might be known.
They add the reason, that it was forbidden by God to number the people according to themselves; wherefore the soldiers here were numbered not man by man in themselves, but by the lambs which each singly brought. But this is frivolous, as well as false, concerning soldiers, for they are numbered everywhere in Scripture. The sense is therefore that which I gave at the beginning.
Moreover, he aptly compares soldiers to lambs, to note both the simplicity, readiness and obedience of the soldiers, in that like lambs they follow their king; and their meekness, union and concord, in that as meek lambs go in a flock, and where one goes before, the rest follow, so the soldiers of Saul were united, that where he went before, all followed. Excellently Tertullian, in the book To the Martyrs contending with the devil: “May he find you,” he says, “fortified and armed with concord, for your peace is war to him.”