It was not 'God' (a monotheistic concept) who commanded Saul to genocide the Amalekites, it was YHWH, the god of the Hebrews, who later became conflated with El as polytheistic Yahwism evolved towards monotheistic Judaism. Any modern person who takes this command to genocide as an example of superior ethics and morality is seriously deluded. Whether this actually happened, or things like it, or not, Hebrews got what was coming to them several times over in the following centuries, and there are few Hebrews practicing Yahwism today.* The Torah of the Second Temple era, compiled during the Persian empire, demanded that only the Messiah could rebuild a state for the Jews, and this was re-iterated after the Bar Kokhba revolt in the Talmud Three Oaths. Anyway, there is negligible evidence that the Amelekites even existed in Saul's time, let alone that Saul organized 200,000 soldiers to fight them. The Agagites, the alleged descendants of Amelekites, were a rival group in Babylon who hoped to exterminate Jews because Mordecai wouldn't bow to Haman. Negligible evidence of that too.
[Posted to this thread, doubtful it won't be censored.]
*Or perhaps, Zionism is the re-emergence of Yahwism, a tribal rather than universal religion.
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