The verb chamal means to spare someone from harm out of compassion or pity — to look upon someone in a pitiable condition and withhold deserved judgment or destruction. It is often used in contexts of military conquest (sparing the defeated enemy), divine judgment (God sparing or not sparing), and maternal compassion.
The most consequential negative use of chamal is in 1 Samuel 15:9: Saul spared King Agag and the best of the livestock against God's explicit command. His misplaced compassion — showing mercy where God demanded judgment — cost him the kingdom. Samuel's haunting rebuke underlines that chamal in the wrong direction is disobedience, not virtue. Conversely, Exodus 2:6 records Pharaoh's daughter having chamal on the infant Moses — an irony of history where the daughter of the oppressor shows the compassion that preserves Israel's deliverer. God's own use of chamal is the pivot point of grace: in Ezekiel 36:21, God acts not because Israel deserves it but for His own name's sake. The interplay between divine justice and divine compassion — when God spares and when He does not — is one of the deepest theological themes in the prophets.