Day 49. Numbers 31-33

Again in chapter 31 of Numbers we have another example of the kind of total war of conquest the Israelites will wage in their conquest of Canaan. The intention is nothing short of genocide. When the triumphant Israelite warriors bring back the women and children of the slain Midianites, Moses, aware of the corrupting influence these captives will have upon the people, orders all the women who are not virgins and all the male children killed. Only virgins and female children are spared, in order to be given to Israelite men in what we would call "rape-marriages." We may be horrified by a story like this, but sadly we have not passed this stage in the moral development of our species. This is exactly the sort of thing that has happened in our own time in places like Bosnia and Darfur—rape being used as a weapon to demoralize and exterminate an enemy people.
We are not likely to see narratives like this as neither heroic nor particularly interesting. But they demonstrate the LORD's call to his people to follow him "unreservedly" (32:11). When the tribes of Reuben and Gad want to remain on the far side of Jordan with their herds and their little ones, the Lord is angry with them (32:10) because they have been influenced by other, lesser considerations rather than giving him the uncompromising obedience he demands. They are distracted from their true purpose.
The call to unreserved obedience is a theme that we will see running through all of scripture. Sin is doing less than that call requires, and sin has consequences. In the conquest of Canaan, the Lord demands that the Israelites drive out the inhabitants of the land completely, and he delivers a dire a warning about what anything less than total compliance will mean. He says, "If you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you, then those whom you let remain shall be as barbs in your eyes and thorns in your sides; they shall trouble you in the land where you are settling. And I will do to you as I thought to do to them" (33:55-56).
There is a thinly veiled threat in that last verse that will be played out later. Obedience brings blessing, but anything less than total obedience will have tragic consequences—this we will see played out in our continuing reading.