Rabbi Eliezer claimed that a single Hebrew word in the Torah contained an entire military history encoded as an acronym. The word is "vayachalosh," which appears in the account of Joshua's battle against Amalek at Rephidim (Exodus 17:13). Most translations render it simply as "he weakened" or "he defeated." But Rabbi Eliezer broke it apart letter by letter.
"Vayachalosh" means "and he broke." "Amalek" refers to the king himself. "Et Amalek" encompasses his wife and children. "Amo" means "his people," the warriors who fought alongside him. "Et amo" extends to the warriors who fought alongside his children. In Rabbi Eliezer's reading, this single verse is not just saying Joshua won a battle. It is cataloguing the total annihilation of an entire military structure: the king, his family, his soldiers, and the soldiers attached to his family.
This method of acronymic reading, called notarikon in rabbinic terminology, treated every word of the Torah as a compressed archive of meaning. The rabbis believed that God chose each word with infinite precision, and that human language in Scripture could contain layers of information far beyond its surface meaning. Rabbi Eliezer's decoding transforms a simple battle report into a detailed record of total victory. The war against Amalek was not a skirmish. It was the systematic dismantling of an enemy nation, and the Torah recorded every dimension of that destruction inside a single word.