Midianite Battle - Numbers 31

Chapter 31 has a lot to do with the previous chapters concerning the event with Balaam and Balak where the king Balak hired the “priest” Balaam to curse Israel with evil so that Balak could defeat them in battle. At the end of their encounter, there was an uplifting account of Balaam refusing to curse Israel because it was so obvious to him that God had already blessed them and Balaam refused to go against God. Everyone went home and if that was the end of the story then that would have been just fine. The problem became that Balaam went back to Balak and told him that Israel was only protected by God if they were righteous to Him and encouraged Balak to send in his women to corrupt the Israelite men, and the Israelite men were happy to be corrupted. This resulted in God sending a plague upon the people, killing 24,000 of them and only ended because Phineas, a prominent priest and Eleazar’s son, speared an Israelite man while having sex with a Midianite women, killing them both. Because all this happened, after God punished Israel with the plague, he turned his attention to Midian and in chapter 31 tells Moses to “avenge the children of Israel of the Midianites.”

I would imagine that this was hard for Moses because his wife and her family that Moses loved were Midianites, but it seems like Midianites were a large, extended tribe that encompassed a great area of land, so I don’t think that it meant that Moses had to go to war against his wife’s family, but probably distantly related family, very distantly related. After the most recent census we know that there were over 640,000 Israelite soldiers, but here God tells Moses to only collect 1,000 soldiers from each tribe. This was interesting because there is no number of how many soldiers were in the Midianite army that they would be facing. I googled it and the only speculation about how many soldiers there would be was the 32,000 virgin women taken as slaves afterward which maybe would could do an estimate working backward from that number. Like if there are 640,000 males of fighting age in Israel, then it can be estimated that there would have been between 2-3 million Israelites in total. If there were 32,000 unmarried, young women left to be taken as slaves after the battle, then I don’t know, there would have been at least more than that as soldiers so even if we just take that as a guestimate, there were still only 12,000 Israelite soldiers so they were vastly outnumbered, which is interesting because they didn’t have to be because they had literally hundreds of thousands of men available to fight. Which begs the question, why would God do that, especially since this is one of the first battles that Israel will go into? The obvious answer is that God limited the number of soldiers sent to fight because He wanted it to be obvious that when Israel won the battle while significantly outnumbered that the victory came from God and not Israel’s abilities or numbers of skill or anything like that. He wanted it to be obvious to EVERYONE, Jew and Gentile alike, that this victory came because of God, and there was no other reason possible. Now that’s a life lesson He’s trying to beat into my head recently.

Israel goes to war and the only commentary is in verse 7 which says “and they slew all the males.” TB makes a note of how little information the Old Testament gives concerning the details of battle and that made me think about the comparison to the descriptions of the battles in the Book of Mormon and how much more of an intimate feel the Book of Mormon has. The Bible feels very “bird’s eye view” whereas the Book of Mormon feels more “fireside chat” like in nature. With only the men being killed what did Israel do with all the women and children? They brought them back as spoils of war and Moses was not pleased, but not because the women and children were being taken as slaves but because they were allowed to live. That makes me stop and think for a second. Moses commands that all the women “that hath known man by lying with him” to be killed as well as all the male children. Seems harsh, and yes it is.

TB notes that this was inline but also different than the practices of war at the time. The winners took the women and children as slaves to increase their wealth and population, so the killing of the women was unusual. The logic for that decision that TB speculated was that because the sexually active women were the ones who tempted the Israelite men to sin against God, only the sexually active women should be killed. Obviously there were probably a lot of women who weren’t involved in the whole corruption of Israel thing that were collateral damage, so that’s unfortunate. The young, non-sexually active women (girls) were to be kept “for yourselves” which is super gross to me but it was a different time I guess. Why were the male children killed? TB says that it’s because anciently, for people of this time and location, because being taken as a slave following a defeat was the norm, a young boy too young for combat would have had a father who was old enough for combat and would have been defeated and killed by the enslavers previous to the boy’s capture, therefore every boy captured slave knew that his job was to grow up and avenge his father’s death so all these boys would have eventually grown up to be problems for Israel later if allowed to live now.

This only makes sense in the context of an eternal perspective in which all wrongs and made right and compensated for to the degree that this life would have been worth it compared to the rewards. That is the only way that this makes sense from a believer’s perspective. This life is just one step in our persona journey to salvation and Jesus is highly involved in each part of each step for us, so we have to trust that he will make it worth it. The rest of the chapter has to do with the purification rituals that the returning soldiers had to undergo before they could rejoin their community. Yes, these things are part of the law of Moses, but the mention of the requirements here makes me wonder why. Soldiers returning from war were filthy, maybe still wearing bloody clothes, maybe bloody weapons, and it would be easy to welcome those returning soldiers as heroes and maybe even adopt a little bit of a warring mindset, bloodlust, a focus on the fighters and not on the God that delivered the victory to them. By taking the 7 days to engage in the religious aspect of the purification ritual, there is a clear message that the warrior mindset and blood do not belong inside the camp of God, those are outside factors that are to be engages in only when God commands it and with only His victory at the forefront. It’s a decompression and disconnect from the combat that has taken place and a clear demarcation of where war and violence belong and that’s not in the camp of Israel.

There is also another census taken where the fighters are numbered, which would make sense after a battle to see how many survived, and the amount of treasure that was taken as spoils were counted to be divided. The most fascinating thing though is that not a single Israelite soldier died. So when we hear about the stripling warriors in Helaman, this is something that Mormon would have been familiar with because it was in the torah that he would have probably had access to in the brass plates. Just statistically speaking, it seems very unlikely that 12,000 soldiers went to war, and fought with swords not distance weapons like we have, and that NONE were killed? Seems statistically very unlikely.