Destruction of the Midianites
After the terrible devastation at Shittim, the Lord wasn’t done with the Midianites, the ones who had—through their deceptions—brought such suffering to His people. Justice was going to be done. This particular branch of the Midianites had given themselves completely over to idolatry and all its attendant evils. Like the Amorites, this clan of Midian had “filled up the cup of their iniquity.”—Ellen G. White, Review and Herald, May 2, 1893. And the Lord decreed their destruction.
Read Numbers 31, the story of the destruction of the Midianites. What are some of the hard things in this account that make it difficult for us to understand today?
Killing all the people, even the children, is hard enough for us to understand. We just have to trust in the revelation we have of God as revealed to us through Jesus Christ, and accept that there are things we don’t understand from our perspective, things not revealed to us.
Many find Numbers 31:13–18 particularly disturbing, and understandably so. But we should keep a few things in mind. Many of these Midianite women were the ones directly involved in the deception that led to thousands upon thousands of deaths; hence, they were reaping the punishment for their sins. But what about the young girls, the virgins, who probably had done nothing?
Suppose the Lord said to just leave them be? These helpless young women would be left alone, with all their parents dead, their whole social structure destroyed. What could happen to them in the harsh and dangerous world at that time? This way, by being taken into the Israelite camp, these women not only would be protected from whatever dangers they would have faced had they been left alone; they also would be treated well by the Israelites. After all, Israelite law demanded that. Read Deuteronomy 21:10–14. How does this help us better understand what was going on with those women who were taken as prisoners by the Israelites? In what ways does this help us better understand Numbers 31?
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