Summary:
</font>
- The Midianites were known to engage in kidnapping and international slave trading, as well as raiding and pillage of sedentary peoples/villages.</font>
- The Moabites, who start the chain of events leading to Numbers 31, are under no danger or threat from Israel, but nonetheless begin unprovoked attempts to vanquish the unsuspecting Israelites</font>
- After the Mesopotamian diviner/sorcerer/prophet Balaam fails to curse Israel, he nevertheless advises the Midianite leadership on how to overcome Israel—by a sexual deception of a massive scale.</font>
- Moab transports women into the area en masse, and Midian moves into the territory east of Shittim, to begin this initiative. Some 6,000-12,000 married women aggressively offer sex to the Israelite men (most of whom are married), and after having sex/adultery, convince then to participate in further acts (involving both sex and disloyalty to the Lord).</font>
- Israel ‘falls for it’, and likely makes a ‘covenant’ with a Canaanite fertility god of vegetation (Baal Peor), and are judged by God (at least 24,000 Israelites die of a plague, most of which are males)</font>
- The Moabite and Midianite women retreat out of the area, having successfully used their sex as a weapon (with full knowledge, consent, support, and encouragement from their husbands, fathers, and civic leaders).</font>
- For this atrocity, God orders Israel to attack this specific group of Midianites (not the Moabites) and eliminate them.</font>
- The Israelite force of 12,000 men travel east/southeast to where the Midianite sub-group is camping, and engage in combat. (They are NOT instructed to hunt “all the Midianites in the world down and kill them”—just this group that did the treachery at Baal Peor.) They kill almost all of the males in this battle, but return to the Israelite camp with the herds and property of the Midianites, as well as with the women and (mostly girl) children.</font>
- Moses is shocked to find out that they spared the very women who used the sex-weapon against them, and even brought these women back to the Israelite camp! He orders them to execute the women, who had been involved in the treachery (but only the Midianite women—the Moabite women are spared), and any remaining males among the children.</font>
- The remaining young girls—with an average age of 5 years—were spared and distributed throughout the people, into families. They would eventually be assimilated into Israel families, but from this moment on, they would care for them, feed them, train them, etc. for family life in Palestine.</font>
- The 32,000 young girls could be assimilated into Israel, largely because of the death of the 24,000 adult Israelites.</font>
- The judgment for the atrocity at Baal Peor fell both on Israel and Midian—both would have lost around 24,000 adult members of the population, and the consequences on the Midianite children (especially the boys) would have been a direct result of the choices of their parents and leaders.</font>
<snip>
This action/atrocity by the Midianites is an intensely sordid and depressing tale, of greater scale than even that of Sodom and Gomorrah, and of greater anti-Hebrew malice and calculating treachery than even that of the Amalekites…The removal of this exact sub-culture (without impacting the Moabites or the rest of the Midianites—for good or ill), while mercifully sparing a very large number of innocent young girls, yet without sparing the guilty Israelites, seems neither cruel nor unfair nor unwarranted, given the horrendously dehumanizing character of this crime, and given the unavoidable consequences of conflict upon children in the ancient world…
