Matot: What about the Midianite genocide?

Parshat Matot describes a war against the Midianites that was initiated by God’s command in the previous parsha (Numbers 25:16-18), and which is repeated again in this parsha as well.

The prosecution of the war against the Midianites is related as follows:

However, when Moses goes out to greet the victorious Israelite forces, he is deeply angered to see that among the civilian captives are adult women.

This episode is stunning in that, at least at first sight, it seems to document the Israelites committing what we would today call genocide. After the Israelite army has killed all the Midianite men, destroyed all the Midianite villages, captured the civilian population, and looted all their possessions, in verse 31:17 Moses explicitly demands that the Israelite commanders murder all non-virgin Midianite women and all male children.
How are we to regard this turn of events? Should we be horrified at what Moses has just asked his military commanders to do? Does our moral intuition give us a sense of revulsion when we read this passage or, at a minimum, grave disappointment that God’s greatest prophet has just ordered his followers to commit the severest moral crime, the murder of children?
In considering this, it’s important to note that what we’re seeing here is not just the sort of indifference, and sometimes depraved indifference, to civilian casualties that still occurs in war today. This is not a case of civilians being caught in the crossfire, “wrong place, wrong time,” or even of civilians being targeted for the purpose of terrorizing a population into submission. The Midianite war has already ended. The fighting is done. The civilian population has been taken captive. What we are talking about here, what Moses has ordered, is the wholesale slaughter of captive non-combatants including children.
For those of us who would like to see the Torah as a source of moral guidance, this is a problem. If the Torah is a good teaching, then it should be “good” in a moral sense. Killing children is the opposite of moral good, so it should certainly bother us to see such a vile practice endorsed by the Torah. And we should be troubled as well by how we conceptualize God in the face of something like this. Can we admire, let alone worship, a deity that orders the killing of innocent women and children? Doesn’t it make us wonder for a minute whether God is the good guy or the bad guy? The questions raised by this narrative are something we should wrestle with if we wish to view the Torah as an instrument of moral instruction.

This is, of course, not the only instance where the Torah calls for the murder of innocent civilians. The laws of war in Deuteronomy 20, for example, appear to prescribe complete extermination of the indigenous peoples of Canaan, and one might infer the same for the nation of Amalek (Deuteronomy 25:19). But these special cases are more “theoretical,” let’s say. As to Moses’ review of his scorched-earth military victories against the two Transjordanian Amorite kings in Deuteronomy (2:32-3:7), where he states that “we annihilated every town — men, women, and children — leaving no survivor” (2:34), this perhaps should not be taken at face value, since no massacre of women and children was reported at the time these events occurred (Numbers 21), and we find subsequently that Amorites still remained to be conquered in the Transjordan (Numbers 32:39) and the Reubenites and Gadites are still afraid of the “inhabitants of the land” (32:17).

Although it does state in Numbers 21 regarding the battle against King Og that the Israelites fought him until “no survivor was left to him”, this could easily be an idiomatic reference to a decisive military victory on the field of battle.

This is not to say that these passages are not morally troubling and worthy of discussion in their own right, but they do not have the viscerality, immediacy, and pungency of our passage here in which Moses demands, “Now kill all the male children and non-virgin women.”
So how do we address the apparent immorality in the Midianite War narrative? A first approach is, I think, to question whether we should take the narrative literally. For example, while we do see Moses unequivocally command the massacre of civilians (31:17), we do not read that God Himself ordered this massacre, nor do we see any confirmation that the massacre was ultimately carried out by the military leaders. The persistence of Midian as a kingdom powerful enough to subjugate Israel generations later in the time of Gideon (Judges 6) lends credence to the suspicion that Midian was not in fact eradicated as the events in our parsha suggest.

We can also point to certain anomalies in the text that might be taken to indicate that not everything here is what it seems, such as the disappearance of the recently-appointed Joshua from a narrative in which he should have been central, or the fact that the Midianites are curiously being held accountable for the sins of the Israelites and Moabites with Baal Peor (Numbers 25), or that Balaam is indicted for events at Peor in which he never made an appearance, or again that Balaam happens to be hanging out with the Midianites to begin with, or that neither the Midianite war nor the massacre is mentioned in Deuteronomy’s synopsis of the period (Deuteronomy 2-3), or that the five Midianite kings are represented as Amorite princes in Joshua 13:21, or that God’s initial command to attack the Midianites is followed not by the prosecution of this war, but instead first by a census, then the ascent of Moses to Mount Avarim, then the investiture of Joshua, and then a quite lengthy lecture on calendrical sacrifices and vows.
We might even wonder whether Moses could have so casually issued a command that would entail wiping out the family of his wife and father-in-law, who were Midianites themselves, as well as a people who had given him shelter and safe haven years before. And in the ensuing passages detailing how the spoils of war were divided (31:25-47), the somewhat awkward note in 31:35 that the human prisoners were just the virgin girls does not disguise the fact that the rest of this discussion generically refers to “human captives,” suggesting a wider prisoner pool more in line with the huge numbers provided there.

In any case, if we could convince ourselves based on any of these observations that the events of the Midianite War are more legendary than historical, and that the genocide did not happen as described, would this attenuate some of the moral dilemma?
Perhaps it would, but in a way this is also besides the point. Whether or not events transpired historically the way they are presented here, the text itself does not raise any moral objections over the proposed massacre, and it seems that the text we have wants us to believe that the massacre was in fact carried out as Moses commanded. The Torah is teaching us that the genocide occurred, and that Moses ordered it. What do we do with that?

It seems we have a few options. One is the idea that the Midianites were simply so very, very evil that they deserved this punishment. However, it was not the Midianites but the Moabite women (25:1) who precipitated the apostasy at Baal Peor:

Even putting this aside, the appeal to the great evilness of the Midianites is still very unsatisfying. The Midianite infants and children could not have been responsible for causing the Israelites to sin, and in any case the blame surely lies primarily with those Israelites (25:3) who decided to worship Baal Peor, and for which they were already severely punished by sword and plague.

Why would Moses apply collective punishment upon Midianite children for the sins of others?
Another approach might be to say simply that this is how warfare was conducted in the ancient Near East. If it was indeed a barbaric era, perhaps “kill everyone, take everything” was the only rule of war, and what Moses commanded was simply consistent with the time and place. This wouldn’t necessarily make it moral, but at least we might then say that he couldn’t have known better. However, the idea that slaughter of innocents was normal practice runs against the whole thrust of this narrative, which is that the Midianites were receiving “special treatment” for the evil they (or the Moabites) had done. The slaughter that Moses is demanding his generals commit is not normal warfare. “Normal” would have been what the generals did originally by capturing the civilians, which is also consistent with the laws of war that Deuteronomy 20 lays out for non-Canaanite nations.

But this is precisely why Moses was so furious at them: They did “normal” when they were supposed to do “extreme.” Moses has to reiterate for them why this case demanded special brutality (31:16).

So the evidence is that the slaughter demanded by Moses was exceptional, not normal.
But if this was indeed such an exceptional situation, then perhaps this provides our answer. Normally, killing innocent children would be deeply immoral, but in this case, because (we assume) God specifically commanded the killing of children, this makes it moral — but only in this special instance. However, this is still problematic, because the minimum thing we require of a moral system is consistency. If it is flatly immoral to kill innocent children on Tuesday, it cannot be morally acceptable to kill innocent children on Wednesday. If one insists that any command is moral merely in virtue of being a command from God, then one gives up systematic morality entirely in favor of “divine command theory”. Far from the moral absolutism that many wish to find in the Bible, this yields the most radical moral relativism: If God says “Love your neighbor,” then that is moral. If God says, “Eat your neighbor,” then that too is moral. If God says, “Don’t steal,” then that is moral. If God says, “Steal whatever you can whenever you can,” then that too is moral. Any action, as well as its opposite, is moral if God says so.
Needless to say, this is not the way most of us conceive of morality. To solve our dilemma by accepting that the murder of innocent children is moral because “God said so” is to erase one problem by creating a far greater one.
But where does that leave us with respect to the Midianite massacre? Do we just wave it away as another one of those unsavory Biblical curiosities? Do we regard it as legendary and polemical rather than historical? Do we bite the bullet and concede that God isn’t a moral being and doesn’t behave according to moral principles, and accept along with that all that is entailed by worshiping and obeying an amoral God?
I don’t have an answer to these questions, but to my mind, the best resolution here — at least the best theologically, to salvage the concept of a good God — may be to place the blame squarely on Moses. Moses in this parsha is at the end of his tenure as God’s chief representative, and he has long ago worn out his welcome with the people. If he ever felt any real kinship with the Israelite masses, which is somewhat dubious, he has by now come to view them as an annoyance at best, and an adversary at worst. In the entire Book of Numbers, Moses has not had a positive thing to say to the Israelites. The only good word the Israelites have heard in recent memory has come out of the mouth of Balaam. Moses’ mounting annoyance with his Israelite flock has already caused him to make one misinterpretation of God’s Will, serious enough cost him the privilege of entering the Land of Canaan, and Moses is now being rocked by a sequence of challenges to his authority, such as the slander of Aaron and Miriam (12:2), the unauthorized attack on Canaan (14:40), the Korah rebellion (16:1), the vigilante action of Pinchas (25:7-8), and soon the defection of the Reubenites and Gadites (32:1), not to mention the near continuous agitation against him over the lack of food and water.
It gets worse. God has condemned a generation of Israelites to die in the wilderness, undercutting the promise of Exodus 6 and all of Moses’ labors to bring them to Canaan, and in so doing also fully validating the accusations against Moses brought by his worst detractors, that “you brought us from a land flowing with milk and honey to have us die the wilderness” (Numbers 16:13).

Turns out that was true. They all died. Moses’ sister has died. His brother has died. Now, God warns Moses that he too will die in the wilderness upon the conclusion of the Midianite War. Things are not going well for Moses, to say the least. Perhaps, as in the case where he mistakenly hits the rock to bring forth water (20:11), Moses has again allowed his vexation to influence his judgment, and misunderstands God’s call for vengeance on Midian as requiring something far more severe than it actually does.
The fact is that the Israelite army had already waged the war on the Midianites in accordance with God’s wishes, “as the Lord had commanded Moses” (31:7).

They had satisfied God’s call for vengeance. But perhaps Moses’ boiling frustration over the Israelites’ persistent recalcitrance — frustration which had now cost him his own chance to enter Canaan — caused him to see failure in the Israelites’ actions where he should have seen success. To Moses’ agitated mind, whatever the Israelite commanders had done, it must have been inadequate. If they had captured, then they should have slain. If they had slain, they should have slain more. Moses ordered the massacre not because it was God’s wish, but because he could not conceive that what the Israelites had done on their own might have already been sufficient. It had to be wrong, as it always was. And if it was wrong, then it had to be quickly corrected. But in this case the generals were not wrong; it was Moses who erred.
Is blaming Moses’ deteriorating mental state a satisfactory approach to ameliorating the moral dilemma of the Midianite massacre? I am not sure myself. There is no direct support from the text, no suggestion that Moses did anything wrong. But there is also no direct evidence that God commanded the massacre or that the generals in fact carried it out, which leaves Moses holding the bag, as it were. In this vein, it is interesting that when Moses rebukes his military leaders for failing to kill the Midianite women, he does not say, “You violated God’s command.” There was no such command. Rather, Moses gives his own rationale for why the massacre should be carried out (31:16). This suggests that it is all on Moses.

Chazal noticed something else unusual about this narrative. In the resumption of legal communication (31:21), it is Eleazar the priest and not Moses who speaks the law.

Reish Lakish (Pesachim 66b) and Rabbi Pinchas (Pirkei d’Rabbi Eliezer 47:11) conclude from this that Moses lost his prophetic ability and/or his wisdom at the moment that he gave himself over to anger. Similarly, Rabbi Eleazar (Sifrei Bamidbar 157:9) identifies Moses’ fury at his military commanders in 31:14 as one of three instances where Moses’ anger brought him into error.

This supports the idea that Moses was not in a healthy frame of mind and was not in fact speaking prophetically when he called for the massacre of women and children. It seems this order came from a distressed and angry human being, not from God.
Decide for yourself whether you find this convincing or not. But perhaps the real question is this: Which is the better of the two evils, that an elderly and bitter Moses erroneously assumed that God desired the murder of women and children, or that a good God did indeed desire the murder of innocent women and children? If we have a choice to make here, I think we are better off saying that Moses made the call.