Reply To: Yoav's Misreading

So I think I found a source that it was in fact Amalekite females that Yoav spared. The Yalkut Hamechiri on Psalms 18:61 brings a midrash about Yoav singlehandedly killing thousands of Amalekites. After describing the bloodshed it says:

??? ??? ????? ?? ???? ???? ?? ??????? ??????? ??? ????? ????? ???? ?? ??? ???? ???? ????? ?”? ?? ????? ??? ???? ??? ??? ???? ???? ?????? ????

http://hebrewbooks.org/pdfpager.aspx?req=32636&st=&pgnum=132

But there are several problems with this:

1) The Yalkut Hamechiri is not an original work. It is a collection on midrashim. So what is the original source of this midrash? The Yalkut Hamechiri introduces it as …???? ???? ???? ??? ???? ???

The problem, as eloquently expressed by Solomon Buber in the footnote, is: ???? ???? ?? ???? ?? ?????

2) In this midrash Dovid asks Yoav if he fulfilled the Torah’s command of ???? ?? ??? ???? and Yoav responds that he did – he only spared the king, the children, and the women. And Dovid does not object to this.

3) The Gemara in Bava Basra, and for that matter the pesukim in Melachim, are pretty clear that the war under discussion was with Edom.

Perhaps it is theoretically possible that there were two different wars and both times Yoav spared the females and Dovid only objected the second time. However, (besides for the fact that this seems extremely unlikely,) if the Gemara was in fact talking about Edom and the midrash was talking about Amalek then the Sefer Hachinuch should have cited the midrash, not the Gemara.

So I think it’s still a ?”?.