Numbers 31:13

"And Moses, and Eleazar the priest, and all the princes of the congregation, went forth to meet them without the camp. And Moses was wroth with the officers of the host, the captains of thousands and the captains of hundreds, who came from the service of the war. And Moses said unto them, Have ye saved all the women alive? Behold, these caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against Jehovah in the matter of Peor, and so the plague was among the congregation of Jehovah. Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women-children, that have not known man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves. And encamp ye without the camp seven days: whosoever hath killed any person, and whosoever hath touched any slain, purify yourselves on the third day and on the seventh day, ye and your captives. And as to every garment, and all that is made of skin, and all work of goats' hair, and all things made of wood, ye shall purify yourselves."

Moses' outrage because the soldiers had brought the vast company of women (along with their children) with the purpose of bringing them into the camp of Israel is easily understood. To have permitted this would have been an unqualified disaster for Israel. Therefore, Moses ordered all except the virgins to be slain at once. Whitelaw, usually a very dependable scholar, was especially troubled by this, commenting on the "necessity of the inspecting of the women by the soldiers which this order required" in order to separate the virgins from others, calling it "odious."[17] However, it would appear that the great scholar just let his imagination get away from him. The determination of who were and who were not virgins presented no problem at all, and certainly did not involve any "examination" by the soldiers. They merely killed all the female children old enough to have had sex relations with men.[18]

"Have ye saved all the women alive ...?" (Numbers 31:15). This is actually more clearly understood if the punctuation is changed. Orlinsky suggested that it should be made an exclamation, "Ye have saved all the women alive!"[19]

The ceremony of purification mentioned in Numbers 31:20 is fully elaborated in Numbers 19.

We hold no agreement whatever with those scholars who speak of the "immorality" of God's actions here. In the very nature of things, if Israel was to be given the land of Canaan, Canaan's populations being forced off their lands, and all their religious institutions destroyed, there was simply no other way to accomplish it. Owens seemed to believe that the present morality of the human race is far superior to "this vestige of ancient Semitic religion that remains chaff amidst the wheat of ancient Israel's faith."[20] However, we do not believe that human morality is in any manner "above" what is written here. The godless humanism which widely prevails on earth today is actually a deification of humanity, with the axiom that nothing that any man could do is a just reason why society should take his life. This "religion," and that is what it is, rejects capital punishment, and does not even allow that God Himself has the right to judge and destroy either men or nations. The doom of any society stupid enough to adopt such a religion is certain. Dummelow pointed out that God did not fail to give specific and adequate reasons for the slaughter commanded in the O.T. (See Numbers 25:16-18; 33:55; Deuteronomy 20:17,18; and Joshua 23:12).[21] "Refusal to reckon with the prerogative of a Righteous Sovereign (God) to judge sin (and execute His wrath upon it) reduces Him to something less than sinful man."[22]

The remainder of this chapter deals with division of the booty, an extensive enumeration of numbers and amounts of the prey and of the spoils, and the devotion of certain small fractions of the enormous booty to the tabernacle and to the Levites. No special interest focuses upon the balance of the chapter.