…don’t forget that you won’t remember this…

 Then the LORD said to Moses, “Write this as a memorial in a book and recite it in the ears of Joshua, that I will utterly blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven.”
Exodus 17:14

This is a bizarre text at first reading. God tells Moses to write something down so it won’t be forgotten, but the thing he’s writing down is about something that God Himself is going to make everyone forget about. Surely I’m not the only one that sees that as a confusing command, and, on the surface, counterproductive as well. If you want to forget something you don’t write it down, you put it out of your mind and do your best not to establish any connection with it. But this curious turn of phrase holds a siginificant idea though. The idea of hope is deeply tied to what God says here.

The Amalakites…