Historicity and theology around 1200 BCE during the
19th Dynasty of Egypt in the ancient southern
Transjordan region The scholarly consensus is that this war did not take place, certainly not as narrated. Scholars such as
Mark S. Smith assert that Israelite culture emerged from the wider Canaanite culture surrounding it, with whom it had strong
linguistic,
religious and other cultural links. There was no political unification of several
Semitic Canaanite tribes into a single Israelite state until after 1100 BCE. Na'aman argued that the existing narrative in the collective Hebrew memory of Egyptian rule "was remodeled according to the realities of the late eighth and seventh centuries in Canaan, integrating the experience with the
Assyrian oppression and deportations." The narrative of Numbers 31 specifically is one out of many in the Hebrew Bible seeking to establish the Israelites as the chosen people of the god Yahweh, who blessed them with victory in battle, health and prosperity, as long as they were faithful to his commands. This suggests she was not a historical character, but invented as a metaphor for danger to the Israelites. Both Olson and Brown noted that Moses is portrayed as remarkably passive in chapter 25 and, as he was failing to solve the problem, Phinehas had to intervene and take the initiative to slay Kozbi and Zimri, was granted the eternal priesthood and later allowed to lead the Israelites against Midian. This contradicts verses 25:1–3, which states the women were Moabites, and verses 25:16–18, in which Yahweh himself claimed that the plague did not hit the Israelite camp until the Midianite princess Kozbi entered it (without reference to sex or foreign gods worship), leading Yahweh to instruct Moses to kill the Midianites, not the Moabites. The fact that the Moabites and Midianites are equated as having committed the same offences, and Moses blames Balaam (a Moabite) for whatever the Midianite women (or rather, a single Midianite woman, who had already been slain) did, has puzzled scholars.
Barnes likewise suggests that the Peor incident was only perpetrated by the Midianites. Thus, the appearance of the Moabites in Numbers 25:1 is most likely due to the Moabites initiating the incident or being close courtiers of Balak, according to
Benson.
Poole on the other hand affirms the connection between the Midianites and Moabites but argues that the Moabites were spared due to being descendants of
Lot. Alternatively, he argues that the Midianites sinned more egregiously than the Moabites in the Peor incident, thus warranting their extermination. Likewise,
Coke describes the Midianites as 'cruel and odious' offenders who were willing to prostitute a daughter of an 'honorable family' to disgrace and destroy Israel.
Foreign idolatry hypothesis Hamilton (2005) concluded that Yahweh commanded holy war against Midian "in retaliation for the latter's seduction of Israel into acts of harlotry and idolatry". Finally, Olson argued that Moses' apparent failure to punish the idolaters (25:4–5) is what motivated Phinehas to take matters into his own hands by killing Zimri and Kozbi.
Jamieson-Fausset-Brown (1871) as well as Keil and Delitzsch (1870) suggested that the Midianites had instigated the Moabite women to seduce the Israelite men (verses 1 and 2), and so only the Midianites were to atone for the 'wickedness' which 'violated the divinity and honour' of Yahweh, not the Moabites.
Tabernacle desecration hypothesis Sarah Shectman argued in 2009 that Zimri and Kozbi were not guilty of sexual transgressions at all; sex with a foreigner is never even considered a capital offence by the Holiness code (H). and in Numbers 16:42–50 (or Numbers 17:7–15 in some Bible editions), this actually happened and 14,700 Israelites died of a plague before Aaron stopped it by making an incense offering to Yahweh. or Numbers 17:25–28 Balak's motives for waging war against Israel range from pure hatred to self-defense.
Ethics Scholarly discussions Susan Niditch explained in 1995 that the 'priestly ideology of war in Numbers 31' regarded all enemies as unclean, and therefore 'deserving of God's vengeance', except those still in possession of feminine virginity: "Female children who have not lain with a man are clean slates in terms of their identity, unmarked by the enemy, and, after a period of purification, can be absorbed into the people Israel." Hamilton in 2005 called Numbers 31 a "gruesome chapter, where only young virgin girls may be spared ..., and not even young boys are exempted". He argued that the two major concerns of Number 31 are the idea that war is a defiling activity, but Israelite soldiers need to be ritually pure, so they may only fight wars for a holy cause, and are required to cleanse themselves afterwards to restore their ritual purity. Simultaneously, however, the Israelite soldiers are said to be defiled by the killing, and in need of a seven-day purification of their bodies, clothes and metal possessions, and to require "atonement for ourselves before Yahweh" (verse 50). The following command to purify the Midianite girls and the Israelite soldiers in Numbers 31:19 is also used to argue that the Israelites recognized war as being "destructive". In
The Age of Reason (1795),
Thomas Paine wrote about the chapter: "Among the detestable villains that in any period of the world would have disgraced the name of man, it is impossible to find a greater than Moses, if this account be true. Here is an order to butcher the boys, to massacre the mothers, and debauch the daughters."
Richard Watson, the Bishop of Llandaff, sought to refute Paine's arguments: In 2010, Hitchens mocked the
Ten Commandments for banning
adultery but not
rape: "Then again, what about rape? It seems to be very strongly recommended, along with genocide, slavery, and infanticide, in Numbers 31:1–18, and surely constitutes a rather extreme version of sex outside marriage." In the 2006 documentary
The Root of All Evil? Part 2: The Virus of Faith,
Richard Dawkins condemned Moses' acts in Numbers 31, asking: "How is this story of Moses morally distinguishable from
Hitler's
rape of Poland, or
Saddam Hussein's
massacre of the Kurds and
the Marsh Arabs?" He contrasted this behaviour with Moses' own
Commandment of '
Thou shalt not kill'.
Seth Andrews wrote in
Deconverted (2012) that Numbers 31 was one of several parts of the Bible that made him seriously question the Christian God's ethics, claiming that his Christian friends and family did not have satisfactory answers, and ultimately did not really care to think about the moral implications of such texts. In 2012, M. A. Neeper called Numbers 31:17–18 'appalling': "Instead of trying to "save" the people of Midian, [Moses] orders many of their deaths. The "lucky" people, the virgin girls who are allowed to live, are made into sex slaves for disgusting, homicidal post hoc mercenaries that do all of their bidding from a man who says that a god that (no one can see) tells them to do. This is one of the most sickening things in the so-called 'Holy' Bible." Christian apologist John Berea speculated in 2017 that Balaam was 'dismissed without pay by king Balak of Moab', and then set up the Midianite women to seduce the Israelite men to sexual immorality and idolatry in the same manner as he had previously done with the Moabite women. The execution of Midianite women who had had sex with (Israelite) men was therefore a just punishment for 'compromising the men of Israel', while turning prisoners into sex slaves was supposedly 'inconsistent with the many other laws against sexual immorality'. Berea concluded that making the surviving virgin women and girls "as servants and integrating them into Israel may have been the best among lousy alternatives".
Fate of the 32 virgins It is not clear what happened to Yahweh's 0.1% share of the spoils of war, including 808 animals (verses 36–39) and 32 human virgin women/girls (verse 40), who are entrusted to the
Levites, who are responsible for maintaining Yahweh's tabernacle (verses 30 and 47). Two Hebrew terms are used to indicate they are a 'tribute' or 'levy' that is 'offered' or 'contributed' to Yahweh: •
me·ḵes or
ham·me·ḵes (verses 28, 37 and 41), generally translated as 'tribute', 'tax' or 'levy'. Outside these three occurrences in Numbers 31, it appears nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible. It is also attested in
Ugaritic as
mekes and in
Akkadian as
miksu. An
inflection of
mekes is וּמִכְסָ֥ם
ū·miḵ·sām, occurring only in verses 38, 39 and 40. •
tə-rū-maṯ (verses 29 and 41); the term
terumah (plural:
terumat) is generally translated as '(heave) offering' or 'contribution' and is associated with
heave offerings. Some scholars have concluded that these 32 human virgins were to be sacrificed to Yahweh as a burnt offering along with the animals. For example, in 1854, Carl Falck-Lebahn compared the incident with the near-sacrifice of
Iphigenia in
Greek mythology, claiming: "According to Levit. xxvii, 29, sacrifices of human victims were clearly established among the Jews." After recounting the story of
Jephthah's daughter in
Judges 11, he reasoned: "the Jews (according to Numbers, chap 31) took 61,000 asses, 72,000 oxen, 675,000 sheep, and 32,000 virgins (whose fathers, mothers, brothers &c., were butchered). There were 16,000 girls for the soldiers, 16,000 for the priests; and on the soldiers' share there was levied a tribute of 32 virgins for the Lord. What became of them? The Jews had no nuns. What was the Lord's share in all the wars of the Hebrews, if it was not blood?" Carl Plfuger in 1995 cited Exodus 17, Numbers 31, Deuteronomy 13 and 20 as examples of human sacrifice demanded by Yahweh, adding that according to
1 Samuel 15,
Saul "lost his kingship of Israel because he had withheld the human sacrifice that Yahweh, the god of Israel, expected as his due after a war." Susan Niditch remarked in 1995 that, at the time of her writing, "increasingly scholars suggest that Israelites engaged in state-sponsored rituals of child sacrifice". Although "[s]uch ritual activity is condemned by Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and other biblical writers (e.g., Lev 18:21, Deut 12:31, 18:10; Jer 7:30–31, 19:5; Ezek 20:31), and the seventh-century reformer king
Josiah sought to put an end to it, [the] notion of a god who desires human sacrifice may well have been an important thread in Israelite belief." She cited the
Mesha Stele as evidence that the neighbouring Moabites performed human sacrifices with prisoners of war to their god
Chemosh after successfully attacking an Israelite city in the 9th century BCE. Before the 7th-century BCE reformers of king Josiah of the southern
Kingdom of Judah tried to end the practice of human/child sacrifice, it appears to have been commonplace in Israelite military culture. Other scholars have concluded that the virgins and animals were kept alive and used by the Levites as their share of the spoils. Some even posited that human sacrifice (especially child sacrifice) was foreign to the Israelites, thus making the possibility of sacrificing the Midianite virgins unfeasible.
Carl Friedrich Keil and
Franz Delitzsch argued in 1870 that the 32 were enslaved: == See also ==