Biblion Bible Commentary
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Midian, and the Counsel of Balaam
Numbers 31:1-54
1 Yahweh spoke to Moses, saying, · WEB
The campaign against Midian is the hardest passage in the book, and it closes with an army that lost nobody bringing an offering for its own soul.
The order is given and Moses' own death is attached to it: avenge the children of Israel on the Midianites. Afterward you shall be gathered to your people Numbers 31:2. This is his last commission.
What is being avenged is named later in the chapter, and it is the reason the campaign exists. The Midianite women caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against Yahweh in the matter of Peor Numbers 31:16.
So this is the answer to chapter 25. Twenty-four thousand Israelites died in that plague, and the strategy behind it is traced here to the prophet who could not curse them — and Balaam himself is killed in the fighting Numbers 31:8.
The orders Moses gives after the battle are the hardest verses in the book Numbers 31:17, and nothing is gained by softening them or by hurrying past. What can be said is what the text itself supplies and no more: this is a punitive campaign against a specific people for a specific act of religious sabotage, ordered once, and the book records it as history rather than as a pattern to be repeated. The restatement of the law in Deuteronomy legislates a general law of war that is nothing like it, requiring terms of peace to be offered before any siege Deuteronomy 20:10.
The last section of the chapter is unexpected and it is what the passage is remembered for by anyone who reads to the end.
The officers come to Moses with a report: your servants have taken the sum of the men of war who are under our command, and there lacks not one man of us Numbers 31:49.
Not one casualty. In a war of that scale, the count comes back complete.
And what they do about it is the striking part. They bring the gold they took — armlets, bracelets, signet rings, earrings, necklaces — as an offering, to make atonement for our souls before Yahweh Numbers 31:50.
Men who suffered no losses and had every reason to celebrate bring an atonement offering instead. Nothing required it. They had been through something that left them needing to be covered, and they said so, and the plunder went to the sanctuary rather than into their households.
The division of the spoil beforehand had followed the same instinct — half to the soldiers, half to the congregation who stayed home, with a levy from each for the Lord and the Levites Numbers 31:27–30. Those who fought do not keep everything, and those who did not fight are not left out.
held with reason What this mark means