The First Enemy and The First Convert

The First Enemy and the First Convert
EXODUS 17: 22- 18: 27

We just watched a movie called The Reader. One of its central characters is a German girl who in about 1940 worked as an S.S. guard in Auschwitz, had been living ever since with the guilt of that, and to the very end never escapes that guilt. Another is a man who was too young to have been directly involved in the war but who therefore belongs to a generation of Germans that is needing to come to terms with what the war meant. In Jewish thinking, Hitler was the twentieth-century Amalekite. The president of Israel referred to Amalek in his letter declining to show mercy to the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. In the Second World War, however, alongside people who got sucked into collaborating with the Nazis were people who resisted and who as Gentiles took risks and sometimes sacrificed their own lives to protect Jews. Some did so because they recognized the Jewish people as God’s people; some did so out of simple human instincts. The movie Schindler’s List tells of one such Gentile. The Jerusalem Holocaust Memorial, Yad VaShem, commemorates them as well as commemorating the Jews who died...

The Amalekites and Jethro represent these two attitudes to Israel and to the Jewish people over the millennia. Ironically and in some way significantly, both Amalek and Jethro were descendants of Abraham. The relationship between Israel and the two peoples of Amalek and Midian (to which Jethro belonged) is not like its relationship with Egypt. It is a relationship within the family. The same was true of the relationship between the Nazis and the Jews; most of the Nazis were Christians, as were most of the people who sought to protect the Jews. (It hurts Christians to describe the Nazis as Christians because we see their behavior and attitude as incompatible with Christian faith; but they were professing Christians.)

So the Amalekites attack the Israelites as they make their journey through the wilderness. Exodus gives no reason for the attack. Perhaps they thought they could appropriate the Israelites’ flocks and herds. Living in the wilderness south of Canaan, perhaps they felt threatened by the Israelites’ advancing their way. Greed, resentment, and fear have often fueled anti-Semitism. But Exodus gives no reason, and this underlines the link between the mystery of hostility to Israel and the Jewish people that has been a recurrent aspect of Israelite and Jewish experience.

What do you do when Amalek attacks you? Jews today sometimes critique their grandparents’ generation for the submission with which they walked to the death camps and determine that Amalek or Hitler will never have that experience again (we have to keep this in mind when seeking to understand the Middle Eastern situation; some Jews see the Palestinians or Iranians as another version of the Amalekites). Moses and Joshua provide them with a contrary model. Moses again assumes control of the power God had given to him at the Reed Sea and directs the forces of heaven in the battle that follows, with the amusing need for him to be given physical support as he does so. The way the battle works shows it is not merely a this-worldly one but one where God’s forces are active in ensuring that Israel is not defeated. It resembles the conflict with Pharaoh, except that here for the first time the Israelites are involved in fighting; they do not just watch while God acts. Joshua wins a vital victory, though it does not involve annihilating Amalek; indeed, it is not explicit that the Israelites killed anyone (maybe the Amalekites fled from the Israelites when they saw they were prepared to fight rather than lie down and be killed!). Thus the promises with which the story closes are important for the future, and they remain important for the Jewish people.

The story of the Midianite Jethro offers a contrast. Moses has the chance to tell his father-in-law what God had done for Israel in rescuing them from Pharaoh and then from the troubles they have had on their journey through Sinai (like the problems about food and water and the attack of Amalek). Jethro bursts out in praise and brings his offerings to show he means it. It is quite a reaction from a Midianite priest. One should perhaps not call him the first convert; maybe that was Hagar in Genesis, and then there are all those other people who accompanied the Israelites when they left Egypt. But he is the first person whose detailed conversion story we are told. He also stands as a reminder of a better promise than the one concerning the destruction of Amalek, a promise that God will bring about that drawing of the world to acknowledge Israel’s God.

After seeing Jesus, the “wise men” do not become disciples; they go back home to resume their lives. Yet they can never be the same. After offering Moses some fatherly advice, Jethro does not stay with Israel; he goes back home to resume his life. Yet he can never be the same.


Taken from Exodus and Leviticus for Everyone by John Goldingay