I will surely wipe out the name of Amalek. The noun zekher, though cognate
with “remembrance,” zikaron, in the previous clause, here bears its
usual meaning of “name,” as in 3:15. The written record will continue to
memorialize odious Amalek, but the nation will lost its “name,” its posterity—an
ultimate curse in the ancient Near East. In all this, as in the Plagues
narrative, history is transformed into symbolic typology. Ancient Israel was surrounded
by enemies—the Canaanite peoples with whom it fought for territory, marauders
like the Midianites to the east and the Amalekites to the south, and the great
empires of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Historical survival required nearly continual
armed conflict. But distinctions are made among enemies, and Amalek here
becomes the very type of the truthless fore that seeks to annihilate Israel.
(Hence much later, in the Book of Esther, Haman will be cast as a descendant of
the Amalekite king Agag.) This nation, then, becomes the enemy of God Himself,
Who pledges its utter destruction. (Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible,
3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 1:285-86)
