Bird's-eye view
This passage confronts us with the stark realities of holy war, a concept that makes modern Christians understandably squeamish. But we must not read these accounts with the therapeutic sensibilities of the 21st century. This is a formal act of divine judgment, a covenantal execution, carried out by Israel as God's appointed instrument. The war against Midian was not a land grab or an ethnic squabble; it was vengeance for a deliberate and insidious spiritual attack. The Midianites, at the counsel of Balaam, had used their women to seduce Israelite men into idolatry and sexual immorality at Peor, a sin which resulted in a devastating plague from Yahweh. Moses's anger at the sparing of the women was not misogynistic cruelty; it was righteous indignation that the very root of the corruption, the vector of the spiritual disease, had been brought back into the camp. The commands that follow, as harsh as they sound to our ears, are about radical spiritual surgery. The nation had to be purged of the idolatrous contagion and purified from the defilement of death before they could continue as God's holy people. This is a picture, written in blood and fire, of the absolute antithesis between the worship of the true God and the corrupting worship of the world.
The central theme is the preservation of covenantal purity. God's people cannot make peace with the very thing that seeks to destroy them from within. The judgment against the Midianite women who had participated in the seduction at Peor, and the execution of the male children who would grow up to perpetuate this pagan culture of rebellion, was a total removal of the threat. The subsequent laws for purification underscore the fact that even a righteous war brings defilement. Contact with death, even in the execution of justice, makes one unclean and requires a period of separation and cleansing. This points us forward to the ultimate cleansing agent, the blood of Christ, which alone can purify us from the deepest defilement of sin and death.
Outline
- 1. The Incomplete Victory (Num 31:13-20)
- a. The Leaders' Welcome (Num 31:13)
- b. The Lawgiver's Anger (Num 31:14-16)
- i. The Confrontation (Num 31:14)
- ii. The Indictment: Sparing the Source of Sin (Num 31:15-16)
- c. The Covenantal Purge (Num 31:17-18)
- i. Judgment on the Corrupt (Num 31:17)
- ii. Mercy for the Innocent (Num 31:18)
- d. The Necessary Purification (Num 31:19-20)
- i. Cleansing from the Defilement of Death (Num 31:19)
- ii. Cleansing for All Spoils of War (Num 31:20)
Context In Numbers
This chapter follows directly on the heels of the apostasy at Baal Peor in Numbers 25. There, Israelite men were lured by Moabite and Midianite women into sexual immorality and the worship of their gods. This syncretism was a direct assault on the first commandment and provoked God's wrath, resulting in a plague that killed twenty-four thousand Israelites. The plague was only stopped by the zealous action of Phinehas, who executed an Israelite man and a Midianite woman in the very act of their sin. In response to this treachery, God commanded Moses, "Harass the Midianites and strike them, for they have harassed you with their wiles, with which they beguiled you in the matter of Peor" (Num 25:17-18). Numbers 31 is the fulfillment of that divine command. It is not an isolated incident of violence but the judicial consequence of a specific, grievous act of spiritual and sexual subversion. It is Yahweh's righteous vengeance upon a people who tried to curse and corrupt His chosen nation.
Key Issues
- The Nature of Holy War (Herem)
- Righteous Anger vs. Sinful Anger
- Corporate Responsibility for Sin
- The Connection Between Idolatry and Sexual Sin
- The Principle of Radical Separation from Evil
- Ceremonial Purity and Defilement from Death
- The Application of Old Testament Case Law
The Anger of the Lawgiver
Moses was angry. We are told this plainly, and we should not rush to soften it. This is not the same anger he displayed when he struck the rock in Numbers 20, an act of impatient unbelief for which God barred him from the promised land. This is different. This is the anger of a covenant mediator who sees the very poison that nearly destroyed his people being carried triumphantly back into the camp. This is the anger of a shepherd who sees his flock threatened not by a wolf from the outside, but by a disease carried in by his own undiscerning sheepdogs.
His anger was not with the fact of the victory, but with the foolishness of it. The commanders of the army had won the battle but had failed to understand the war. The war was not fundamentally against Midianite men with swords; it was against the demonic idolatry of Peor, an idolatry that had been introduced by Midianite women. To kill the soldiers but spare the priestesses of this false religion was like cutting down the weeds but carefully potting the roots to bring home. It was a catastrophic failure of spiritual discernment. Moses's anger was a reflection of God's own holy wrath against syncretism and compromise. It was the fury of a man zealous for the holiness of God's name and the purity of God's people. This kind of anger is not a sin; it is a virtue. It is the righteous opposition to that which God Himself opposes. A church that cannot get angry at the world's attempts to seduce it into idolatry is a church that has already lost the war.
Verse by Verse Commentary
13 And Moses and Eleazar the priest and all the leaders of the congregation went out to meet them outside the camp.
The leadership of Israel goes out to greet the returning army. This is a formal welcome for a victorious military campaign. They go "outside the camp," which is significant. The camp of Israel was to be a holy space, and an army returning from battle, having been in contact with death, was ceremonially unclean. This meeting place is a transitional zone, a boundary between the defilement of the world and the holiness of God's dwelling place. Everything that follows must be understood in light of this fundamental distinction between the clean and the unclean, the holy and the common.
14 And Moses was angry with the officers of the army, the commanders of thousands and the commanders of hundreds, who had come from service in the war.
The welcome quickly turns into a confrontation. Moses's anger is not directed at the common soldiers, but at the leadership: the officers, the commanders. Leadership carries responsibility, and their failure was a failure of leadership. They had executed the military aspect of their orders but had failed to grasp the theological and spiritual purpose of the mission. They saw the war in purely physical terms, but Moses understood it as a matter of covenantal justice. His anger is the righteous anger of a statesman who sees a critical strategic blunder that threatens the very existence of the nation.
15 So Moses said to them, “Have you spared all the women?
This is a rhetorical question dripping with incredulity. "You did what?" He gets straight to the point. The central failure was not a lack of courage or a failure to fight. It was a failure to identify the true enemy. In ancient warfare, it was common to kill the men and take the women and children as spoils of war. The commanders were likely operating according to the standard rules of engagement for their day. But this was not a standard war. This was herem, a holy war, a war of divine judgment. And the rules were different because the purpose was different.
16 Behold, these caused the sons of Israel, through the word of Balaam, to act unfaithfully against Yahweh in the matter of Peor, so the plague was among the congregation of Yahweh.
Here is the basis for the indictment. Moses connects the dots for his spiritually dense commanders. "These" women are not just generic captives; they are the very agents of seduction who, on the advice of the prophet-for-hire Balaam, led Israel into apostasy. The sin at Peor was not a simple case of soldiers behaving badly. It was a deliberate strategy of spiritual warfare. The goal was to get Israel to break covenant with Yahweh, thereby bringing a curse upon themselves that Balaam could not pronounce directly. The strategy worked, and twenty-four thousand Israelites died in the resulting plague. To spare these women was to show a shocking ignorance of recent, and devastating, history. It was to invite the plague back into the camp.
17 So now, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man intimately.
This is the command that causes our modern stomachs to turn. But it is a command for radical spiritual surgery. The execution of the male children was to prevent the next generation of Midianites from rising up to seek vengeance and continue their idolatrous culture. The execution of the women "who has known man intimately" was a targeted judgment. This was not every woman, but specifically those who were sexually active and therefore participants in the Baal-Peor seduction and the culture of ritual prostitution that accompanied it. This was the removal of the cancerous cells from the body politic. It is a terrifying picture of how seriously God takes idolatry and the deliberate seduction of His people into sin.
18 But all the girls who have not known man intimately, spare for yourselves.
Here we see that the judgment, while severe, is also discriminating. The young virgin girls were not participants in the sin of Peor. They were deemed innocent of that particular corporate crime. They were to be spared and incorporated into the nation of Israel, where they would be raised under the laws of Yahweh, not the corrupting influence of Baal. This is not a license for sexual exploitation, as some have charged. These girls would have become part of Israelite households, likely as servants or future wives, under the full protection of Israel's laws, which were far more humane than those of the surrounding nations.
19 And you, camp outside the camp seven days; whoever has killed any person and whoever has touched any slain, purify yourselves, you and your captives, on the third day and on the seventh day.
Now the focus shifts from judgment to purification. Even in the execution of a righteous command, contact with death brings ceremonial defilement. Death is the wages of sin, and it is unclean. The soldiers, and even their new captives, must remain outside the holy camp for a full week. They must undergo a ritual of purification on the third and seventh days. This demonstrates a profound theological point: God's holiness is so absolute that even the instruments of His justice are rendered unclean by the work of justice. No one can come into His presence stained by death.
20 And you shall purify for yourselves every garment and every article of leather and all the work of goats’ hair and all articles of wood.”
The purification extends not just to the people but to all their possessions, the spoils of war. Everything that came from the defiled Midianite culture and was touched by death must be cleansed. Porous materials like clothing and leather had to be washed. This is a comprehensive purging. Before the wealth of Midian can be brought into the congregation of Israel, it must be consecrated, cleansed of its pagan associations. This is a physical picture of the spiritual truth that we cannot bring the defiled things of the world into the church without first cleansing them through the Word and dedicating them to God.
Application
It is easy to read a passage like this and thank God that we live under the new covenant where things are not so bloody. But that is to miss the point entirely. The principle of holy war has not been abolished; it has been transferred from the physical realm to the spiritual. Our fight is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places (Eph 6:12). And in this war, God still demands a radical, uncompromising purity.
The modern church is constantly tempted to do what the commanders of Israel's army did: to win a few skirmishes with the world while bringing its most dangerous agents right into the camp. We are tempted to make peace with worldly ideologies, to adopt worldly methods of worship and entertainment, and to tolerate sexual ethics that are indistinguishable from the pagans around us. We spare the very things that led to the plague at Peor. We welcome the seductive philosophies of the age because they seem harmless, even attractive. Moses's anger should be our anger. We should be indignant when we see the holiness of God's people compromised by a foolish and sentimental tolerance for sin.
The command to purify ourselves from contact with death is also for us. We live in a world saturated with death, both physical and spiritual. We cannot engage in our spiritual warfare without being affected by it. We need constant cleansing. But our purification does not come from the ashes of a heifer, but from the blood of Jesus Christ. He is the one who entered into death for us, and He is the one who cleanses us from all unrighteousness (1 John 1:9). The call of this passage is a call to radical separation from the world's evil, a call to righteous zeal for the purity of the church, and a call to continual repentance and cleansing at the foot of the cross.