The Spoils of Holy War Text: Numbers 31:32-35
Introduction: God's Holy Auditing
We live in an age that is squeamish about God. Not the god of our own making, of course. That god is always respectable, tame, and affirming. He is a celestial therapist who would never dream of offending anyone. But the God of the Bible, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is another matter entirely. He is a consuming fire. He is a man of war. And in passages like this one in Numbers 31, our modern, sentimental therapeutic deism runs aground on the hard granite of divine holiness and divine justice.
The chapter before us recounts the holy war against Midian. This was not a border skirmish or a dispute over grazing rights. This was an act of holy vengeance, commanded by God Himself. Why? Because the Midianites, at the counsel of the corrupt prophet Balaam, had deliberately targeted Israel for spiritual destruction. They sent their women to seduce the men of Israel into idolatry and sexual immorality at Peor. This was not just sin; it was strategic, spiritual warfare. It was a satanic attempt to corrupt the covenant people and derail God's redemptive plan. The plague that followed killed twenty-four thousand Israelites. Midian had declared war on God, and God, through Israel, was now answering.
Our text is an inventory. It is an accounting of the spoils of that war. To our soft generation, this sounds crass. It sounds like looting. It sounds materialistic and unspiritual. And the inclusion of human beings, specifically virgin women, in this list is, for many, the final straw. They slam the book shut, convinced that this God is a monster, and that anyone who worships Him is morally compromised. But this reaction is a failure of nerve and a failure of theological imagination. It is the result of judging God by the standards of fallen men instead of judging fallen men by the standards of a holy God.
What we have here is not a descent into barbarism, but rather a display of God's meticulous justice and His covenant faithfulness. This is not about greed; it is about government. It is about the righteous dispossession of the wicked and the endowment of the covenant people. It is a physical picture of a profound spiritual reality: that the wealth of the wicked is laid up for the just. And it is a stark reminder that in the war between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent, there are no neutral parties, and there is real plunder to be taken.
The Text
Now the loot that remained from the plunder which the men of war had plundered was 675,000 sheep, and 72,000 cattle, and 61,000 donkeys, and of human beings, of the women who had not known man intimately, all the persons were 32,000.
(Numbers 31:32-35 LSB)
The Righteous Plunder of the Wicked (v. 32-34)
We begin with the inventory of the livestock and animals.
"Now the loot that remained from the plunder which the men of war had plundered was 675,000 sheep, and 72,000 cattle, and 61,000 donkeys." (Numbers 31:32-34 LSB)
The first thing to notice is the sheer scale of the plunder. This was a wealthy nation that was utterly dispossessed. This is a fulfillment of the covenant promise. God had promised Abraham that his seed would possess the gates of their enemies. He promised Israel that they would inhabit cities they did not build and reap harvests they did not sow. This is not theft. It is righteous confiscation. When a culture gives itself over to idolatry and seeks the destruction of God's people, it forfeits its claim to God's world.
All wealth is ultimately God's. He gives it as a stewardship. The Midianites had used their wealth to fund idolatry and to wage war against the covenant. Therefore, God, the true owner, repossessed it and transferred the title to His people. This is a fundamental principle of biblical economics. Proverbs 13:22 tells us that "the wealth of the sinner is stored up for the righteous." This is not a promise that Christians will all get rich in this life. It is a statement about the direction of history. God is in the business of disinheriting the wicked and establishing the inheritance of His saints.
Notice also the orderliness of it all. This is not a chaotic free-for-all. The loot is gathered, counted, and will be distributed according to God's specific instructions. Half goes to the soldiers who fought, and half goes to the congregation that remained behind. And from both halves, a portion is tithed to the Lord, for the priests and the Levites. This is God teaching His people that the spoils of victory are not for personal enrichment alone, but for the establishment and maintenance of the covenant community and its worship. Even in the aftermath of a bloody war, God demands orderly accounting and faithful tithing. This is His world, and He governs it by His rules, down to the last sheep.
The Problem of Human Spoils (v. 35)
Now we come to the part of the text that causes the most trouble for modern readers.
"and of human beings, of the women who had not known man intimately, all the persons were 32,000." (Numbers 31:35 LSB)
Let us be blunt. Our generation, which champions the industrial slaughter of the unborn and celebrates sexual chaos, has no moral high ground from which to critique this passage. But that does not absolve us of the need to understand it. Why were these women and girls spared, and why are they listed here as "loot"?
First, we must remember the context of the judgment. Every male was executed, as were all the women who were not virgins. Why? Because this was a precise, surgical strike against the very heart of the Midianite sin. It was the adult women of Midian who had been the instruments of seduction at Peor. They were not innocent non-combatants; they were the front-line soldiers in a spiritual war. They, along with the men, bore the full culpability for the attack on Israel. The judgment was therefore directed at them specifically. This was not random cruelty; it was targeted justice.
The young virgin women, on the other hand, had not participated in this specific, high-handed sin. They were not part of the Baal-Peor conspiracy. Therefore, they were spared the sentence of death. God's justice is discriminating. He does not punish the innocent with the guilty. The sparing of these women is an act of mercy in the midst of judgment.
But why are they called plunder? We must strip away our modern, individualistic assumptions and think covenantally. In the ancient world, a people conquered in war were incorporated into the conquering nation. These 32,000 women were not being rounded up for sexual abuse. That is an anachronistic and perverse reading of the text. They were being brought into the commonwealth of Israel. They would have been integrated into Israelite households as servants or, in many cases, as wives. They would come under the legal protections of the Torah, which provided far more security and dignity for women than anything in the surrounding pagan cultures. They were being saved from the judgment that fell on their nation and given a place within the covenant people of God. It was a harsh mercy, to be sure, but it was mercy nonetheless.
Their inclusion in the list of spoils signifies a transfer of assets. People, in the Old Testament economy, were part of the wealth of a nation. These women represented a future for Israel. They would become mothers in Israel, assimilated into the covenant and taught the ways of Yahweh. This was God, in His sovereignty, taking those who were instruments of a pagan culture and grafting them into His own people. It is a picture, however dimly, of the Gentile inclusion in the New Covenant.
Conclusion: Spiritual Warfare and the Great Commission
It is easy for us, living under the grace of the New Covenant, to dismiss this as a bloody story from a primitive past. But that would be a grave mistake. The principles of this holy war are still very much in effect, though the weapons of our warfare have changed. We do not fight with swords and spears, but with the Word of God and the gospel of Jesus Christ.
The world, like Midian, is in rebellion against God. It uses its cultural wealth, its philosophies, its entertainment, and its sexual license to seduce the people of God away from faithful worship. The spirit of Balaam is alive and well, counseling the world on how to trip up the church. Our task is to wage holy war against these principalities and powers. We are to pull down strongholds, take every thought captive to obey Christ, and plunder Hell for the glory of God.
And there are spoils in this war. Every time a soul is converted, it is plunder taken from the kingdom of darkness. Every person brought out of the idolatry of secularism or paganism and into the covenant community is a captive who has been set free. They are like the virgins of Midian, spared from the judgment that is coming on the world, and incorporated into the household of God. They are transferred from the manifest of the damned to the manifest of the redeemed.
This passage forces us to take God's holiness seriously. It forces us to see that sin has consequences, and that rebellion against God invites judgment. It reminds us that we are in a real war with real stakes. But it also shows us that God is a God who preserves a remnant. He is a God who shows mercy in the midst of wrath. And He is a God who is gathering a people for Himself, taking them from every tribe and tongue and nation, plundering the kingdom of the enemy to populate the kingdom of His dear Son. Our job is to be faithful soldiers in that war, knowing that the ultimate victory has already been secured by the blood of the Lamb.