THE LORD SAID to Moses, 2“Take vengeance on the Midianites for the Israelites. After that, you will be gathered to your people.”
3So Moses said to the people, “Arm some of your men to go to war against the Midianites and to carry out the LORD’s vengeance on them. 4Send into battle a thousand men from each of the tribes of Israel.” 5So twelve thousand men armed for battle, a thousand from each tribe, were supplied from the clans of Israel. 6Moses sent them into battle, a thousand from each tribe, along with Phinehas son of Eleazar, the priest, who took with him articles from the sanctuary and the trumpets for signaling.
7They fought against Midian, as the LORD commanded Moses, and killed every man. 8Among their victims were Evi, Rekem, Zur, Hur and Reba—the five kings of Midian. They also killed Balaam son of Beor with the sword. 9The Israelites captured the Midianite women and children and took all the Midianite herds, flocks and goods as plunder. 10They burned all the towns where the Midianites had settled, as well as all their camps. 11They took all the plunder and spoils, including the people and animals, 12and brought the captives, spoils and plunder to Moses and Eleazar the priest and the Israelite assembly at their camp on the plains of Moab, by the Jordan across from Jericho.
13Moses, Eleazar the priest and all the leaders of the community went to meet them outside the camp. 14Moses was angry with the officers of the army—the commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds—who returned from the battle.
15“Have you allowed all the women to live?” he asked them. 16“They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and were the means of turning the Israelites away from the LORD in what happened at Peor, so that a plague struck the LORD’s people. 17Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, 18but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.
19“All of you who have killed anyone or touched anyone who was killed must stay outside the camp seven days. On the third and seventh days you must purify yourselves and your captives. 20Purify every garment as well as everything made of leather, goat hair or wood.”
21Then Eleazar the priest said to the soldiers who had gone into battle, “This is the requirement of the law that the LORD gave Moses: 22Gold, silver, bronze, iron, tin, lead 23and anything else that can withstand fire must be put through the fire, and then it will be clean. But it must also be purified with the water of cleansing. And whatever cannot withstand fire must be put through that water. 24On the seventh day wash your clothes and you will be clean. Then you may come into the camp.”
25The LORD said to Moses, 26“You and Eleazar the priest and the family heads of the community are to count all the people and animals that were captured. 27Divide the spoils between the soldiers who took part in the battle and the rest of the community. 28From the soldiers who fought in the battle, set apart as tribute for the LORD one out of every five hundred, whether persons, cattle, donkeys, sheep or goats. 29Take this tribute from their half share and give it to Eleazar the priest as the LORD’s part. 30From the Israelites’ half, select one out of every fifty, whether persons, cattle, donkeys, sheep, goats or other animals. Give them to the Levites, who are responsible for the care of the LORD’s tabernacle.” 31So Moses and Eleazar the priest did as the LORD commanded Moses.
32The plunder remaining from the spoils that the soldiers took was 675,000 sheep, 3372,000 cattle, 3461,000 donkeys 35and 32,000 women who had never slept with a man.
36The half share of those who fought in the battle was:
337,500 sheep, 37of which the tribute for the LORD was 675;
3836,000 cattle, of which the tribute for the LORD was 72;
3930,500 donkeys, of which the tribute for the LORD was 61;
4016,000 people, of which the tribute for the LORD was 32.
41Moses gave the tribute to Eleazar the priest as the LORD’s part, as the LORD commanded Moses.
42The half belonging to the Israelites, which Moses set apart from that of the fighting men—43the community’s half—was 337,500 sheep, 4436,000 cattle, 4530,500 donkeys 46and 16,000 people. 47From the Israelites’ half, Moses selected one out of every fifty persons and animals, as the LORD commanded him, and gave them to the Levites, who were responsible for the care of the LORD’s tabernacle.
48Then the officers who were over the units of the army—the commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds—went to Moses 49and said to him, “Your servants have counted the soldiers under our command, and not one is missing. 50So we have brought as an offering to the LORD the gold articles each of us acquired—armlets, bracelets, signet rings, earrings and necklaces—to make atonement for ourselves before the LORD.”
51Moses and Eleazar the priest accepted from them the gold—all the crafted articles. 52All the gold from the commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds that Moses and Eleazar presented as a gift to the LORD weighed 16,750 shekels. 53Each soldier had taken plunder for himself. 54Moses and Eleazar the priest accepted the gold from the commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds and brought it into the Tent of Meeting as a memorial for the Israelites before the LORD.
Original Meaning
BATTLE AGAINST THE MIDIANITES. Moses has a few more miles to go and promises to keep before it is time for him to sleep (cf. Num. 27:12–14).1 One major piece of unfinished business is to fulfill the divine command issued after the Baal of Peor scandal: “Treat the Midianites as enemies and kill them, because they treated you as enemies when they deceived you in the affair of Peor and their sister Cozbi” (25:16–18). Because Midian is a tribal confederation constituting a kind of nation, corporate retributive justice requires a major military operation.
Along with the Israelite army of one thousand from each tribe (31:3–5),2 Moses sends Phinehas, the priest (31:6). For one thing, this is a holy war commanded by God. It can be argued that all wars in the ancient Near East were holy wars in the sense that soldiers believed their deities were with them in battle. But not many wars are described as specifically initiated by deities, like this one.3 Generally it was monarchs who made decisions to embark on military campaigns because that was the royal thing to do (cf. 2 Sam. 11:1—“In the spring, at the time when kings go off to war . . .”).
Phinehas and the unspecified holy objects that he takes with him represent the Lord’s presence with the troops. When he blows the teruʿah signal on a silver trumpet (cf. 10:9), they will know that the divine King in their midst (cf. 23:21) will give them victory. Another reason to send Phinehas, specifically, is the fact that this unsqueamish priest has energetically begun the process of vengeance by slaying Cozbi (25:8, 15). So his presence will inspire the Israelite soldiers to finish the job.
Rather than relishing the gory details, Numbers 31 describes the actual battle with brevity (31:7) that is almost as breathtaking as Julius Caesar’s famous Veni, Vidi, Vici (“I came, I saw, I conquered”). Among the slain are the kings of five major subdivisions of the Midianite tribal nation (v. 8a). Oh, by the way, the Israelites “also killed Balaam son of Beor with the sword” (v. 8b). With his insight regarding Israel’s God, the unprofitable prophet must have returned from home (cf. 24:25) to incite the Midianites and Moabites to deception against the Israelites at Shittim (31:16; see comments on ch. 25). The success of this tempter and his female agents was their own undoing because they succeeded in arousing the Lord and his people to deadly resolve.
When the triumphant Israelite warriors return with captives and spoils of war (31:12–13), having destroyed all Midianite men (31:7), we expect Moses to be overjoyed. Instead, he is angry with the army officers for keeping alive the Midianite women, who have been the most dangerous enemies as instruments of apostasy to penetrate the Israelite camp (31:14–16) like a Trojan horse. Even if the officers have received no explicit orders regarding these women, as Saul does later regarding the Amalekite women (1 Sam. 15:3), Moses thinks they should have known what to do.
Having attempted to destroy the Israelites, the Midianites have forfeited mercy. So Moses orders summary execution of all captives except for 32,000 young virgin girls (31:17–18, 35). These can be assimilated into the Israelite community by marrying Israelite men, who will provide them with new family identities. Absorption of the girls will help to restore the Israelite population depleted by loss of the 24,000 who died at Shittim (25:9).
Purification and distribution. All soldiers who have come in contact with corpses are required to remain outside the main encampment, where the holy sanctuary is, and to undergo ritual purification (31:19; cf. 5:1–4; 19) to avoid bringing the conceptual sphere of impurity/death into association with divine holiness/life (see comments on Lev. 12). Since this dynamic conceptual system is abundantly attested in the context of biblical Israel, there is no need to speculate that such cleansing expresses “ambivalence concerning the ethics of war.”4
Operating under the assumption that the surviving girls have contacted dead bodies, the Israelites also purify them for a week (31:19b), during which time they have to babysit these unhappy campers before they can be placed in new homes. In addition to persons, a wide variety of objects taken into battle or captured from the Midianites require purification from corpse contamination. Regarding these, Eleazar the high priest picks up where Moses left off (31:20; cf. 19:18–19, 21), conveying supplementary instructions that Moses received from the Lord (31:21–24). It is appropriate that the high priest should serve as God’s spokesman concerning such matters, especially because Moses will soon be departing from the scene and the people need to get used to listening to someone else.
Metal objects are to be purified by fire and the “water of lustration” (31:22–23a), which contains the ashes of the red cow (cf. ch. 19). Other things that cannot withstand fire are to be passed through water instead (31:23b) and also sprinkled with the “water of lustration.”5 D. P. Wright points out that the requirement of fire/water purification in addition to the “water of lustration” supplements the rules of chapter 19 to provide for washing of corpse-contaminated objects, just as contaminated persons need to be sprinkled with the special ash water (19:12, 19) plus laundering their clothes and bathing (19:19).6
The rest of Numbers 31 describes distribution of the spoils of war (31:25–54). The captured girls and animals are to be equally divided between the warriors and the rest of the community. Part of each of these half portions is to be set apart for the Lord and his sanctuary: one five-hundredth from the soldiers and one fiftieth from the community.
Both of the mandatory contributions to God are much lower percentages than the voluntary tithe Abraham gave the priest Melchizedek after his victory over four kings (Gen. 14:20). Perhaps the numbers of captured girls and animals are simply too great for the sanctuary, priests, and Levites to absorb at the ten percent rate. For one thing, there are more sheep than the total number of Israelite men counted in the military census (Num. 31:32; cf. 26:51)!
Gold purified through fire. The distribution just described deals only with captured persons and animals. All other plunder belongs to the soldiers who have taken it, every man for himself (31:53). However, the army officers are grateful to God that in Operation Remember Baal Peor their casualties amount to a miraculous zero. So as a valuable offering (qorban) to ransom (kipper) their lives (plural of nepeš) before the Lord (31:50b), they present the crafted items of gold—primarily jewelry—that they have seized (31:48–54). This ransom is like the half shekel census tax (Ex. 30:12–16) in the sense that the lives of those who were counted (cf. Num. 31:4–6) have been spared. Notice that rather than holding a grudge against Moses for upbraiding them for failing to slay the Midianite women (31:14–16), the army officers treat Moses with great respect by speaking to him as “your servants” (31:49).
Moses and Eleazar bring the commander’s contribution into the sacred tent as a memorial/reminder for the Israelites before the Lord (31:54), testifying to the fact that their lives have been ransomed (cf. the terminology in Ex. 30:16). The rich endowment shows the fine attitude of Israel’s military leaders, who care about the men under their command, are unselfish, respectfully acknowledge the human authority over them, and are grateful to the Lord. This is a breath of fresh air for Moses, who can end his career on an upbeat. His ransomed people are becoming like that memorial: gold purified through fire (cf. Num. 31:22–23; Rev. 3:18).
Bridging Contexts
DIVINE JUSTICE AND GENOCIDE. The Israelites have wiped out a major segment of the Midianite population and totally destroyed the people of Arad, as well as the subjects of Sihon and Og (Num. 31; Deut. 2–3). These massacres are just a preview of what they are commissioned to do to the inhabitants of Canaan:
However, in the cities of the nations the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the LORD your God has commanded you. (Deut. 20:16–17)
This can only be described as systematic, divinely mandated genocide.7 How can a God of love (1 John 4:8) be so merciless? We cannot simply blame the Israelites; they are the Lord’s agents. Instead of destroying the peoples of Canaan by fire as he did Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen. 19:24–28), he used the Israelites as his terrible swift sword, at least partly to teach them faith through the discipline of war (cf. Judg. 3:2, 4).
Some scholars refuse to accept the possibility that God—at least the God revealed by Jesus—could have ever commanded genocide under any circumstances. So they must posit radical discontinuity between Israel’s God and the God of the New Testament and/or interpret the Old Testament as misrepresenting God’s true character.8 Those of us who accept the entire Bible as the Word of God have no choice but to admit that God sometimes gives up on groups of people and chooses to destroy them (Gen. 6–7; 19; Rev. 20), and that during a certain phase of history he uniquely delegated a carefully restricted part of his destructive work to his chosen nation of ancient Israel, which he tightly controlled and held accountable under theocratic rule.9
It will only be with the frank acknowledgment that ordinary ethical requirements were suspended and the ethical principles of the last judgment intruded that the divine promises and commands to Israel concerning Canaan and the Canaanites come into their own. Only so can the conquest be justified and seen as it was in truth—not murder, but the hosts of the Almighty visiting upon the rebels against his righteous throne their just deserts—not robbery, but the meek inheriting the earth.10
It is pointless either to defend or condemn God (cf. Job 40:2). Our attempts at theodicy—justifying God’s character—are stimulating exercises,11 but in the final analysis we can only stand back and let God be God, admitting that our reasonings are flawed by inadequate perspective. Ultimately, our acceptance of his character is a matter of faith. He has given us plenty of evidence to trust him, but not enough to penetrate all the mysteries of his ways (cf. Deut. 29:29).
There are some clues that the Lord’s treatment of the peoples in Canaan was in harmony with his character of mercy and justice.12 (1) He gave these people ample opportunity to know him through witnesses such as Abraham and Melchizedek (e.g., Gen. 14:17–24).
(2) He kept his people of Israel waiting in Egypt until the end of four centuries of probation for the Amorites (Gen. 15:13, 16). This is more than three times the 120 years he gave the antedeluvian world (6:3).
(3) Depraved inhabitants of Canaan practiced gross immorality (e.g., Lev. 18:3, 27–28) and child sacrifice (e.g., Deut. 12:31). If God hadn’t destroyed them, he would have owed the people of Sodom and Gomorrah an apology (cf. Gen. 18–19).
(4) As exemplified by what happened at Shittim (Num. 25), idolatrous and immoral men and women in close proximity to the Israelites would inevitably corrupt them and thereby cause their destruction (Deut. 7:4; 20:18). The Lord’s ideal for the Israelites was incompatible with the Canaanite environment. Aesop illustrates the principle of incompatibility:
A Charcoal-Burner carried on his trade in his own house. One day he met a friend, a Fuller, and entreated him to come and live with him, saying that they should be far better neighbors and that their housekeeping expenses would be lessened. The Fuller replied, “The arrangement is impossible as far as I am concerned, for whatever I should whiten, you would immediately blacken again with your charcoal.”13
(5) The fact that the Lord threatened to treat unfaithful Israelites like Canaanites (Lev. 18:28; Num. 33:55–56; see Bridging Contexts section on Num. 16:1–35) shows that his vendetta was against wickedness, not ethnicity. Those who rebel against him are subject to “equal-opportunity punishment.”
Contemporary Significance
JIHAD AND GENOCIDE. An ardent pacifist, Albert Einstein wrote: “Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism—how passionately I hate them! How vile and despicable seems war to me! I would rather be hacked in pieces than take part in such an abominable business.”14 Unfortunately, Einstein’s twentieth century witnessed war and genocide on an unprecedented scale, with the annihilation of millions of Armenians, Jews, Gypsies, Tutsis, Hutus, and others simply because they belonged to certain groups.
For us, genocide evokes revulsion and instant condemnation. But then we read the Bible and find that God’s chosen people carried out on their enemies—of all things—genocide! Not only does the Bible condone this behavior; God commanded holy wars of extermination and punished his people for rebellion if they failed to shed the last drop of blood (Num. 33:55–56; 1 Sam. 15).
The brutal question is: How is genocide by the Israelites different from all other genocides? What gave them any more right to massacre entire populations, including women and children, than other “holy warriors” through the centuries? After all, “Christian” Crusaders in the Middle Ages, who piously perpetrated unbelievably bloody atrocities, and their Islamic opponents both acted in accordance with sincere beliefs that they were engaging in holy war approved by their respective deities. Hans Küng pointedly observes:
Many massacres and wars not only in the Near East between Maronite Christians, Sunni and Shiʾite Muslims, between Syrians, Palestinians, Druse and Israelis, but also between Iran and Iraq, between Indians and Pakistanis, Hindus and Sikhs, Singhalese Buddhists and Tamil Hindus, and earlier also between Buddhist monks and the Catholic regime in Vietnam, as also today between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, were or are so indescribably fanatical, bloody and inexorable because they have a religious foundation. And what is the logic? If God himself is ‘with us,’ with our religion, confession, nation, our party, then anything is allowed against the other party, which in that case must logically be of the devil. In that case even unrestrained violation, burning, destruction and murder is permissible in the name of God.15
Today, Islamic militants view themselves as simply continuing an international jihad (“holy war”). When Yasser Arafat rallies his supporters by yelling “Jihad!” he appeals to a kind of divine mandate. However Americans and their Western allies may characterize the so-called “war on terrorism,” those on the other side have consistently said that it is a religious war motivated by zeal to carry out (their interpretation of) commands enshrined in their “holy books.”
If the jihad of firebrand groups such as Al-Qaeda, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hizballah involves indiscriminate slaughter of men, women, children, and the elderly, why is anyone surprised? Shocked, dismayed, angered, of course, but why surprised? This is the way their kind of “holy war” works. Those whom we despise as kooks, fanatics, and serial murderers are idolized as heroes and martyrs by those who share their religious worldview. If ancient Israelite holy war does not disturb us the way modern Islamic jihad does, it is at least partly because the carnage of the former is chronologically removed from us. CNN and Time magazine do not assault us with the visual impact of corpses and mangled wreckage in ancient Arad, Heshbon, and Jericho (Josh. 6).
For me, a believer in the divine authority of the Bible, Israel’s holy wars were unique because that nation was a true theocracy acting on the basis of direct revelation from God and carrying out retributive justice on his behalf. When God tells you to do something, you do it, even if it is unusual and unpleasant. A towering example of such obedience was carried out by Abraham, the father of the Jews and Arabs and the spiritual father of the Christian faith. When God commanded him to offer his son as a human sacrifice, he set about to do this painful deed and was stopped only by another divine command (Gen. 22).
The problem is that other groups also claim to be theocracies acting on commands from God/god(s)/Allah. We immediately think of the Taliban in Afghanistan or the Shiʾite regime of Iran, which have attempted to enforce on modern civil society the rules and penalties stated in the Koran and other sources, as if Allah were uttering direct commands today. Historically speaking, Christians have not been immune from this approach. For example, the medieval church claimed divine authority and in some respects the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony tried to live as a theocracy, enforcing authoritative biblical revelation as binding on their society.
None of the groups just mentioned have been theocracies in the sense that Israel was because they have lacked the resident, manifest Presence of the divine King in their midst and the powerful checks and balances that go with his ongoing, intimate control. With Israel, the Lord was operating the brakes as well as the accelerator, making sure that his people carried out his orders and then stopped. Thus he commanded the Israelites to wipe out the inhabitants of Canaan, but not people of other nations (Deut. 20) and especially not relatives of Israel (Num. 20; Deut. 2), unless their hostility made them dangerous (Ex. 17; Num. 21, 31; Deut. 2–3). When King Saul, in his misguided zeal, broke Israel’s sworn treaty with the Gibeonites (Josh. 9) by attempting to wipe them out like other peoples of Canaan, God held him and his family seriously accountable (2 Sam. 21).
The Lord’s goal was to provide a spiritually and physically secure home for his people within a limited geographic area so that they could flourish in their own land without being destroyed by idolatrous, corrupt, and predatory neighbors. By sharp contrast with Islam, Israel was not commissioned to use military force anywhere in the world for propagating the faith and attempting to destroy polytheism.16
Of course, my belief that ancient Israel was a theocracy is precisely that: a belief, which is based on the same holy book produced by that theocracy. The Israelite holy wars were commanded by the Lord of the Bible. For Muslims, their jihad is authorized by Allah of the Koran. In spite of all the similarities between our monotheistic deities and all of our attempts at ecumenical “bridge-building,” respect for other religious groups, and postmodern “political correctness,” if we are not Muslim, we do not accept the Koran as authoritative revelation from the true God. Conversely, Muslims do not accept the Bible the way we do.
We confront the hard reality that our approach to the ethics of “holy war” genocide depends on our answer to a religious question: Which deity is true and therefore has ultimate authority over human life? Problems such as the political and ideological environment of the Middle East will never be satisfactorily and permanently solved at any conference table as long as moral attitudes and ethical judgments are founded on different religions. If we could agree that because theocracy no longer exists on Planet Earth, there is no such thing as “holy war” in the twenty-first century and therefore indiscriminate slaughter is unconscionable, inhumane, and universally condemnable, we would have a solid basis for resolution of conflict. The catch, however, is that this is a religious statement alien to the worldview of many Muslims.
Given that we have different religions, we must ask: “Can people with fundamentally different truth claims live together without killing each other?”17 Hans Küng argues in the context of gruesome modern history that “there can be no peace among the nations without peace among the religions. In short, there can be no world peace without religious peace.”18 The prognosis looks bleak indeed unless/until some kind of dramatic change occurs. Pope John XXIII was on target when he said, “The world will never be the dwelling-place of peace, till peace has found a home in the heart of each and every man, till every man preserves in himself the order ordained by God to be preserved.”19
The British satirist Jonathan Swift wrote that we have just enough religion to make us hate but not enough to make us love one another. This reminds me of a schnauzer named Bear. His owners enrolled him in a training course for guard dogs with two parts: to develop aggression and then to control it. Bear passed the first with flying colors but flunked the second.
Obviously we cannot force other people to change their worldviews, but we can improve our own contribution to world peace. A first step is to get acquainted with those of different persuasions as human beings. Philip Yancey describes his reaction to a conference in New Orleans between Muslims, Jews, and Christians:
Suffering sometimes serves as a moat and sometimes as a bridge. The Muslim who fled from the soldiers at Deir Yassin years later had an automobile accident in the United States. It was a Jewish nurse who stopped, tied a tourniquet with her scented hanky, and painstakingly plucked glass from his face. He believes she saved his life. The Muslim man’s wife, a physician, went on to say that she had once treated a patient with a strange tattoo on his wrist. When she asked about it, he told her about the Holocaust, a historical event omitted from her high school, college, and graduate school education in Arab countries. For the first time, she understood Jewish pain.
Why do human beings keep doing it to each other? Yugoslavia, Ireland, Sudan, the West Bank—is there no end to the cycle of pain fueled by religion? As Gandhi observed, the logic of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” cannot sustain itself forever; ultimately both parties end up blind and toothless.
Our meeting in New Orleans did not, rest assured, change the Middle East equation, or make peace between three major religions any more likely. But it did change us. For once we focused on intersections and connections, not just boundaries. We got to know Hillel, Dawud, and Bob, human faces behind the labels Jew, Muslim, and Christian.20
As Christians, what we need is not less of religion, but more of truer religion (cf. Matt. 5:20) that is permeated by Christ’s self-sacrificing love. Leaving vengeance up to God to administer according to his wisdom (Deut. 32:35; Rom. 12:19; Heb. 10:30), we must love others as ourselves (Lev. 19:18; Matt. 22:36–40; John 13:34–35; Rom. 13:8; etc.). The holy war that we are to wage is love.