"The divine commandment to exterminate all the men, women, children, and even the animals of the Amalekite nation is what in contemporary terms has been called nothing less than genocide. Louis Feldman helps us to understand how the earliest systematic commentators on the Bible - the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo in his many essays on biblical themes, the mysterious, still unclassified Pseudo-Philo in his Biblical Antiquities, and the premier Jewish historian and polymath Josephus in his Jewish Antiquities - wrestled with the issues involved in this divine command, especially its provision that an entire people must be punished for all time for the misdeeds of their ancestors."--BOOK JACKET.