The Slaughter of the Amalekites and other Atrocities

I listened with great interest to the Great God Debate between Pastor Mark D. Roberts, author of Can We Trust the Gospels, and Christopher Hitchens, author of God is Not Great.

The debate started out with the usual back and forth over evidence or lack of evidence for God's existence and then the conversation moved towards the issue of morality, another well-trodden path. Roberts made the usual theistic argument that 'without God, we have no objective basis of morality.' Hitchens responded by asking if Roberts thought that the God-ordered atrocities in the Old Testament were a good basis for morality. Roberts said that he was troubled by the atrocities in the Old Testament, but that he preferred to look at the 'big picture' of the Old Testament story.

I was thoroughly disappointed with Roberts' response. Actually, it seemed more like a duck than a response. The question Hitchens asks is very simple and deserves a coherent answer by anyone who thinks the Bible is an authoritative source of morality. To spell it out:

1. It is indisputable that the Old Testament says that Hebrew God, YHWH, through his prophets ordered the Israelites to commit genocide against entire groups of peoples, i.e, the city of Jericho, the Amalekites and others. Imagine if you will this scene: Israelite soldiers going into a village and running their spears and swords through women, children, babies and old people. Meanwhile God is sitting in Heaven pleased because his will is being done on earth. If there is any doubt about God being pleased with the slaughter, one only has to look at the reason that the throne of Israel was taken away from Saul - because he failed to fully complete a genocidal mission for God. The book of I Samuel is clear that God turned away from Saul because he let the king of the Amalekites and a few of the Amalekite herd animals live. (Samuel quickly took care of the first problem by cutting the Amalekite king into small pieces with a sword).

2. Based on what we read in the Old Testament accounts, would the Bible-believer affirm that the wholesale slaughter of women and children is morally acceptable (at least when God orders it)? If they hold that the Old Testament is a "God-breathed" document and provides us with information about the nature of God, then this conclusion seems inevitable.

3. If the literalist position is that genocides were God's will, then on what basis do they condemn the notorious genocides of the 20th century (the Holocaust, Rawanda, Stalin's Russia, etc) or any other period for that matter? Is the sole distinction that God ordered the Old Testament slaughters, but didn't order the 20th century ones?

If they attempt an 'end-around' and claim the genocides were acceptable in the Old Testament, but now we live under the 'law of love' from Christ, then doesn't this undermine the whole notion of a firm and objective morality that is supposed to emanate from God 'who changest not'? And wouldn't this also mean that morality does in fact change over time at the whim of God? Wouldn't this also infer that God might change his mind tomorrow and start ordering genocides again?