◉ The Amalekite Infants: Divine Command, Collective Punishment, and the Collapse of Christian Moral Discernment

First Samuel 15 represents Samuel as ordering Saul, in the name of the biblical deity, to destroy Amalek and to include children and infants. Contemporary defenses often answer with adult wickedness, collective judgment, ancient war rhetoric, divine ownership, afterlife compensation, hidden reasons, or the claim that a genuine divine command fixes the act’s moral status. This paper asks a narrower question than whether the narrated event occurred or whether moral realism is true: what must a Christian defender surrender in order to affirm that intentional infant killing was, or could have been, good? The infant is diagnostic because ordinary accounts of culpability depend on agency, while an infant cannot participate in ancestral wrongdoing, battle, or refusal to repent. I distinguish textual representation from historical execution and grant that a genuinely nonliteral or fallibilist reading can remove the target. For defenders who retain the literal or counterfactual authorization, I introduce a source-switch test that holds the command, creator status, knowledge, purpose, alternatives, and alleged reasons fixed while changing only the deity’s identity. The test exposes a three-way pressure. A defense must generalize to the rival, in which case the command cannot independently disqualify that rival; deny the authorization, accepting a hermeneutic or doctrinal cost; or make accepted divine identity decisive, preserving a coherent voluntarism while conceding that conduct no longer independently tests the source. The conclusion is conditional and metaethically modest. It does not disprove Christianity or theism, diagnose believers, or establish stance-independent wrongness. It shows that source-specific exculpation converts moral discernment into retrospective authorization unless a relevant, portable difference is supplied.