I am asked to explain the account in the thirty-first chapter of Numbers of the slaughter of the married women and the boys taken captive when the men of Midian had been put to death.

      Such a slaughter, if effected at the command of any human being without express authority from God, would be a crime of the deepest dye; but if commanded of God, it would be a matter of solemn duty. Of course, all infidels must denounce it for they deny the divine [339] inspiration of Moses; but equally as a matter of course, all believers must say it was right because commanded of God.

      But infidels turn upon us at this point with the assertion that a just God could not have commanded such a deed. Whether he could or not, depends on circumstances. We may confidently affirm that whatever God would himself do in the line of morals, he might, with propriety, command men to do. But he destroyed the antediluvians--men, women and children. He did the same to the people of Sodom, the infants among whom were as guiltless as those among the Midianites. He also destroys by pestilence many thousands of innocents every year; and nobody but ranting atheists stop to criticize him for doing so. In the case before us, the women put to death were the vile creatures who had been sent by their husbands and fathers to tempt the men of Israel to commit adultery with them in their idolatrous rites. They had already caused the death of twenty-four thousand men, and if they had been spared and turned loose in the camp, there is no telling how many more would have been ruined forever by their sluttish habits. As for the boys, it was God's judgment that they had better be cut off in childhood than to live and propagate their kind. Some tribes of men reach a point in depravity when the good of the world requires their extermination. God alone knows when this point is reached, and consequently he alone can rightly issue the decree of extermination; but to deny him the right to do so would be to demand his resignation of his throne. Undoubtedly, then, he saw that the time had come for the extermination of this tribe of Midianites, and hence the slaughter of the boys. It was different with the female children. If taken into the [340] families of the Israelites as servants, brought up under the restraints of the law, and then intermarried with the sons of Israel, they could be themselves redeemed, and their posterity could be restrained. These considerations are obvious, and they are sufficient to justify God in ordering the slaughter. All these considerations are applicable to similar acts of divine judgment recorded in other parts of the Scriptures.

[SEBC 339-341]