kill every male among the
little ones, and every woman who has known a man. Moses’s command—one
should note that it is Moses’s, not God’s— to perpetrate this general massacre,
excluding only virgin females, is bloodcurdling, and the attempts of the
interpreters, traditional and modern, to “explain” it invariably lead to strained
apologetics. The practice of massacring most or all of a conquered population
was widespread in the ancient Near East (the Moabite Mesha stele records a
similar “ban” or ḥerem against a defeated enemy, using certain Semitic
terms cognate to ones that are employed here), but that is not exactly a
palliative. It is painfully evident that this is an instance in which the
biblical outlook sadly failed to transcend its historical contexts. Many
commentators have also puzzled over the fact that Moses, whose own wife is
Midianite, should now show such intransigence toward the Midianite population.
Either two conflicting traditions are present in these texts, or, if we try to
conceive this as a continuous story, Moses, after the Baal Peor episode, reacts
with particular fury against the Midianite women (not to speak of all the
males) because he himself is married to one of them and feels impelled to
demonstrate his unswerving dedication to protecting Israel from alien
seduction. But it must be conceded that the earlier picture of the Midianite
priest Jethro, Moses’s father-in-law, as a virtual monotheist and a benign
councillor of Israel does not accord with the image in these chapters of the
Midianite women enticing the Israelites to pagan excesses. (Robert Alter, The
Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 1:588-89)
