1And the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, 2“Wreak the vengeance of the Israelites against the Midianites. Afterward you shall be gathered to your kin.” 3And Moses spoke to the people, saying, “Send forth a vanguard of men from you for the army, for them to be against Midian to exact the LORD’s vengeance from Midian. 4A thousand for every single tribe, for all the tribes of Israel you shall send to the army.” 5And a thousand for the tribe, twelve thousand of the thousands of Israel, were delivered as vanguards of the army. 6And Moses sent them out, a thousand for the tribe to the army—them and Phinehas son of Eleazar the priest, to the army, and the sacred vessels and the trumpets for blasting were in his hand. 7And they arrayed against Midian, as the LORD had charged Moses, and they killed every male. 8And they killed the kings of Midian, besides their slain men—Evi and Rekem and Tsur and Hur and Reba, the five kings of Midian, and Balaam son of Beor they killed by the sword. 9And the Israelites took the Midianite women captive, and their little ones, and all their cattle and all their livestock and all their wealth they plundered. 10And all their towns in their places of settlement and all their encampments they burned to the ground. 11And they took all the booty and all the spoil both human and beast. 12And they brought to Moses and to Eleazar the priest and to the community of Israelites the captives and the spoil and the booty, to the camp in the steppes of Moab which are at the Jordan opposite Jericho. 13And Moses and Eleazar the priest and all the chieftains of the community came out to meet them outside the camp. 14And Moses was furious with the commanders of the force, the captains of the thousands and the captains of the hundreds who came from the battling army. 15And Moses said to them, “You have let every female live! 16Look, these are the ones who led the Israelites by Balaam’s word to betray the LORD’s trust in the affair of Peor, and there was a scourge against the LORD’s community. 17And now, kill every male among the little ones, and every woman who has known a man in lying with a male, kill. 18And all the little ones of the women who have not known lying with a male, let live. 19And you, camp outside the camp seven days. Everyone who has killed a person and everyone who has touched the slain, you shall cleanse yourself on the third day and on the seventh day, you and your captives. 20And every garment and every article of leather and everything made of goatskin and every wooden vessel you shall cleanse.” 21And Eleazar the priest said to the men of the army who came to the battle, “This is the statute of teaching that the LORD charged Moses: 22Only the gold and the silver and the bronze, the iron, the tin, and the lead, 23everything that can come into fire you shall pass through fire and it will be clean. Only in riddance water shall it be cleansed. And everything that cannot come into fire you shall pass through water. 24And you shall wash your garments on the seventh day and you shall be clean. Afterward shall you come into the camp.” 25And the LORD said to Moses, saying, 26“Count the heads of the spoil of captives, both human and beast, you and Eleazar the priest and the heads of the fathers of the community. 27And you shall divide the spoil in half between those who bore arms in battle, who went out to the army, and the whole community. 28And you shall raise a levy for the LORD from the men of war who go out to the army, one living creature out of five hundred from the humans and from the cattle and from the donkeys and from the sheep. 29From their half-share you shall take it and give to Eleazar the priest as the LORD’s donation. 30And from the half-share of the Israelites you shall take one part of fifty from the humans, from the cattle, from the donkeys and from the sheep, from all the beasts, and you shall give them to the Levites, keepers of the watch of the LORD’s Tabernacle.” 31And Moses, and Eleazar the priest, did as all that the LORD had charged Moses. 32And the spoil, over and above the plunder that the troops of the army had plundered, came to six hundred seventy-five thousand sheep, 33and seventy-two thousand head of cattle, 34and sixty-one thousand donkeys, 35and human persons, of the women who had not known lying with a male, all the persons came to thirty-two thousand. 36And the half, the share of those who went out to the army, the number of sheep was three hundred thirty-seven thousand and five hundred. 37And the levy for the LORD from the sheep came to six hundred seventy-five. 38And the cattle, thirty-six thousand head, and their levy to the LORD, seventy-two. 39And donkeys, thirty thousand five hundred, and their levy to the LORD, sixty-one. 40And human persons, sixteen thousand, and their levy to the LORD, thirty-two persons. 41And Moses gave the levy of the LORD’s donation to Eleazar the priest as the LORD had charged Moses. 42And of the half-share of the Israelites that Moses had split off from the men serving in the army—43the half-share of the community came to three hundred thirty-seven thousand and five hundred sheep. 44And cattle, thirty-six thousand head. 45And donkeys, thirty thousand five hundred. 46And human persons, sixteen thousand. 47And Moses took from the half-share of the Israelites one part of fifty from the humans and from the beasts, and he gave them to the Levites, keepers of the watch of the LORD’s Tabernacle, as the LORD had charged Moses. 48And the commanders of the army’s thousands, the captains of the thousands and the captains of the hundreds, approached Moses. 49And they said to Moses, “Your servants have counted the heads of the men of war who are in our hands, and not a man of them is missing. 50And we would offer up the LORD’s offering, each man what he found of gold ornaments, armband and bracelet, ring, earring, and pendant, to atone for our lives before the LORD.” 51And Moses, and Eleazar the priest, took from them every wrought ornament. 52And all the gold of the donation that they donated to the LORD came to sixteen thousand seven hundred and fifty shekels, from the captains of the thousands and from the captains of the hundreds. 53But the men of the ranks had each of them taken booty for himself. 54And Moses, and Eleazar the priest, took the gold from the captains of the thousands and the hundreds, and they brought it to the Tent of Meeting as a remembrance for the Israelites before the LORD.
CHAPTER 31 NOTES
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2. Afterward you shall be gathered to your kin. In the rather intermittent narrative progress of the later chapters of Numbers, this military campaign against the Midianites, with the invocation of Moses’s imminent death, should properly come after (or just before) God tells Moses of his impending demise in chapter 27 and after the Israelite involvement with the seductive Midianite women reported in chapter 25.
3. Send forth a vanguard. The verbal root ḥ-l-ts can mean “to pull out” or “to gird.” Either sense might lead to the specialized noun used in military contexts, ḥaluts, “vanguard.” Here the root occurs strictly as a verb, but the likely meaning is that the men should constitute a vanguard.
to exact the LORD’s vengeance from Midian. Rashi wonders why the Moabites, who after all were the ones who engaged Balaam to curse Israel, are not mentioned. His answer is that the Moabites acted out of fear of Israel, whereas the Midianites took up a quarrel that was not theirs. It may be more likely that the writer has in mind Midian’s enticing the Israelites to join in pagan orgies in the Baal Peor incident, as Moses’s angry words in verse 16 suggest.
4. to the army. Throughout this episode, this term could also be interpreted to mean “for military service.”
6. them and Phinehas son of Eleazar the priest. One of several apparent discrepancies between this story and the antecedent narrative is that a priest is sent out as a frontline chaplain but there is no mention of a field commander, and certainly not of Joshua.
the sacred vessels and the trumpets for blasting. It is not clear which sacred vessels are to be brought, though it was common to bring instruments of divination, such as the Urim and Thummim, to the battlefield to guide tactical decisions. Some medieval commentators, with the Ark Narrative in 1 Samuel in mind, propose that the Ark was taken on the campaign. The trumpets for blasting would be used to muster the troops.
8. besides their slain men. The “slain” (ḥalalim) is the term for those fallen in battle. These kings were then killed after being taken captive.
Balaam son of Beor they killed. Here Balaam, in contrast to his performance in the Oracles narrative, appears as a negative figure, evidently assumed to have instigated the actions of the Midianite women (verse 16).
17. kill every male among the little ones, and every woman who has known a man. Moses’s command—one should note that it is Moses’s, not God’s—to perpetrate this general massacre, excluding only virgin females, is bloodcurdling, and the attempts of the interpreters, traditional and modern, to “explain” it invariably lead to strained apologetics. The practice of massacring most or all of a conquered population was widespread in the ancient Near East (the Moabite Mesha stele records a similar “ban” or ḥerem against a defeated enemy, using certain Semitic terms cognate to ones that are employed here), but that is not exactly a palliative. It is painfully evident that this is an instance in which the biblical outlook sadly failed to transcend its historical contexts. Many commentators have also puzzled over the fact that Moses, whose own wife is Midianite, should now show such intransigence toward the Midianite population. Either two conflicting traditions are present in these texts, or, if we try to conceive this as a continuous story, Moses, after the Baal Peor episode, reacts with particular fury against the Midianite women (not to speak of all the males) because he himself is married to one of them and feels impelled to demonstrate his unswerving dedication to protecting Israel from alien seduction. But it must be conceded that the earlier picture of the Midianite priest Jethro, Moses’s father-in-law, as a virtual monotheist and a benign councillor of Israel does not accord with the image in these chapters of the Midianite women enticing the Israelites to pagan excesses.
18. all the little ones of the women. This phrase is a literal representation of the Hebrew, which sounds equally odd. The obvious sense is: all the young females not yet nubile. This leads Rashi and others to infer that sexually mature virgins were included in the massacre, though that inference seems to be contradicted by the emphasis on “the women who have not known lying with a male.”
19. you shall cleanse yourself. The instructions here are in strict keeping with the regulations in chapter 19 regarding purification from ritual contamination imparted by contact with a corpse.
23. everything that can come into fire. That is, everything that can be passed through fire without being destroyed. This seems to have been viewed as the preferred process of purification.
Only in riddance water shall it be cleansed. The repetition of “only” (ʾakh) from the previous sentence is a bit confusing. If the text is dependable, the sense is that after having been passed through fire, the fireproof substances are to be washed in the specially prepared “riddance water” (chapter 19) to complete the process of purification. Other substances must simply be cleansed with water.
28. one living creature. The Hebrew ʾeḥad nefesh is peculiar on two counts: the number precedes the noun instead of following it as it ordinarily does, and the number is masculine whereas nefesh is feminine. There are, however, instances in which numbers precede nouns, and the use of the masculine number here may be influenced by the phrase for “one part of fifty” (verse 30), which equally reverses the usual order of number and noun: ʾeḥad ʾaḥuz.
32. six hundred seventy-five thousand. The approximate correspondence to the number of adult male Israelites in the wilderness is obvious. The numbers are schematic and patently exaggerated, as are other details of the defeat of the Midianites (most extravagantly, the report in verse 49 that the Israelites did not suffer a single casualty).
50. armband and bracelet, ring, earring, and pendant. Despoiling the defeated enemy of jewelry was a standard practice and is alluded to elsewhere as an expected procedure (compare David’s elegy over Saul and Jonathan: “O daughters of Israel, weep over Saul, / who clothed you in scarlet and bangles, / who studded your garments with jewelry of gold” [2 Samuel 1:24]). Of the items mentioned here, armbands and rings (that is, signet rings) could be worn by either sex, but the bracelets, earrings, and pendants are women’s ornaments. The exact meaning of kumaz, the term translated as “pendant,” is not entirely certain. Rashi imagines it is “an image of the vagina,” which is perhaps fanciful but not completely off the mark, since ancient pendants have been found in this general region showing erotic female figures.
52. all the gold of the donation. As in the case of the Israelite donations for the making of the Tabernacle, the sundry gold ornaments are to be melted down and then refashioned as sacred vessels.
53. But the men of the ranks. More literally, “the men of the army.” The form of the verb here clearly suggests contrast: the ordinary soldiers, in contrast to the officers, kept what they had taken as booty, the entire donation being made up by the officers.