2. Afterward you shall be gathered to your kin. In the rather intermittent narrative progress of the later chapters of Numbers, this military campaign against the Midianites, with the invocation of Moses’s imminent death, should properly come after (or just before) God tells Moses of his impending demise in chapter 27 and after the Israelite involvement with the seductive Midianite women reported in chapter 25.

3. Send forth a vanguard. The verbal root ḥ-l-ts can mean “to pull out” or “to gird.” Either sense might lead to the specialized noun used in military contexts, ḥaluts, “vanguard.” Here the root occurs strictly as a verb, but the likely meaning is that the men should constitute a vanguard.

to exact the LORD’s vengeance from Midian. Rashi wonders why the Moabites, who after all were the ones who engaged Balaam to curse Israel, are not mentioned. His answer is that the Moabites acted out of fear of Israel, whereas the Midianites took up a quarrel that was not theirs. It may be more likely that the writer has in mind Midian’s enticing the Israelites to join in pagan orgies in the Baal Peor incident, as Moses’s angry words in verse 16 suggest.

4. to the army. Throughout this episode, this term could also be interpreted to mean “for military service.”

6. them and Phinehas son of Eleazar the priest. One of several apparent discrepancies between this story and the antecedent narrative is that a priest is sent out as a frontline chaplain but there is no mention of a field commander, and certainly not of Joshua.

the sacred vessels and the trumpets for blasting. It is not clear which sacred vessels are to be brought, though it was common to bring instruments of divination, such as the Urim and Thummim, to the battlefield to guide tactical decisions. Some medieval commentators, with the Ark Narrative in 1 Samuel in mind, propose that the Ark was taken on the campaign. The trumpets for blasting would be used to muster the troops.

8. besides their slain men. The “slain” (ḥalalim) is the term for those fallen in battle. These kings were then killed after being taken captive.

Balaam son of Beor they killed. Here Balaam, in contrast to his performance in the Oracles narrative, appears as a negative figure, evidently assumed to have instigated the actions of the Midianite women (verse 16).

17. 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.

18. all the little ones of the women. This phrase is a literal representation of the Hebrew, which sounds equally odd. The obvious sense is: all the young females not yet nubile. This leads Rashi and others to infer that sexually mature virgins were included in the massacre, though that inference seems to be contradicted by the emphasis on “the women who have not known lying with a male.”

19. you shall cleanse yourself. The instructions here are in strict keeping with the regulations in chapter 19 regarding purification from ritual contamination imparted by contact with a corpse.

23. everything that can come into fire. That is, everything that can be passed through fire without being destroyed. This seems to have been viewed as the preferred process of purification.

Only in riddance water shall it be cleansed. The repetition of “only” (ʾakh) from the previous sentence is a bit confusing. If the text is dependable, the sense is that after having been passed through fire, the fireproof substances are to be washed in the specially prepared “riddance water” (chapter 19) to complete the process of purification. Other substances must simply be cleansed with water.

28. one living creature. The Hebrew ʾeḥad nefesh is peculiar on two counts: the number precedes the noun instead of following it as it ordinarily does, and the number is masculine whereas nefesh is feminine. There are, however, instances in which numbers precede nouns, and the use of the masculine number here may be influenced by the phrase for “one part of fifty” (verse 30), which equally reverses the usual order of number and noun: ʾeḥad ʾaḥuz.

32. six hundred seventy-five thousand. The approximate correspondence to the number of adult male Israelites in the wilderness is obvious. The numbers are schematic and patently exaggerated, as are other details of the defeat of the Midianites (most extravagantly, the report in verse 49 that the Israelites did not suffer a single casualty).

50. armband and bracelet, ring, earring, and pendant. Despoiling the defeated enemy of jewelry was a standard practice and is alluded to elsewhere as an expected procedure (compare David’s elegy over Saul and Jonathan: “O daughters of Israel, weep over Saul, / who clothed you in scarlet and bangles, / who studded your garments with jewelry of gold” [2 Samuel 1:24]). Of the items mentioned here, armbands and rings (that is, signet rings) could be worn by either sex, but the bracelets, earrings, and pendants are women’s ornaments. The exact meaning of kumaz, the term translated as “pendant,” is not entirely certain. Rashi imagines it is “an image of the vagina,” which is perhaps fanciful but not completely off the mark, since ancient pendants have been found in this general region showing erotic female figures.

52. all the gold of the donation. As in the case of the Israelite donations for the making of the Tabernacle, the sundry gold ornaments are to be melted down and then refashioned as sacred vessels.

53. But the men of the ranks. More literally, “the men of the army.” The form of the verb here clearly suggests contrast: the ordinary soldiers, in contrast to the officers, kept what they had taken as booty, the entire donation being made up by the officers.