The Bible’s Most Hideous War Crime

I wonder how professional theologians and pious Christians can explain this away:

Zitat

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Here is most hideous war crime in a Bible filled with them. As with the story of Dinah, it is sexual misbehavior that spurs the ugliest, evilest biblical vengeance. At the start of the chapter, God tells Moses he must complete one more task before he dies: taking vengeance against the Midianites. Why? For the fairly piddling crime described in Chapter 25. God was threatening punishment for Israelites who’d been whoring with Moabite women. At that very moment, an Israelite walked by the Tent of Meeting with his Midianite girlfriend. Phineas speared the couple to death. God, delighted by Phineas’ zealotry, stops the plague he had sent against the Israelites as punishment for their lechery. Even so, 24,000 Israelites die. For reasons I can’t understand, God and Moses hold the entire Midianite nation responsible for this mess, and they want payback. If you ask me—and Moses didn’t–the Bible is willfully ignoring the obvious point. It was the Moabite women, not the Midianite women, who did the dreadful whoring that provoked God’s rage and the plague. Going after the Midianites to punish a Moabite crime is as nonsensical as the United States invading Iraq to teach al-Qaida a lesson. (Oh, wait. We did that.)

Moses dispatches his army, which quickly kills the five Midianite kings and slaughters all the Midianite men. (This is not the war crime, but rather everyday policy.) The Israelites capture all the Midianite women and children and march them back to camp. Moses is furious that the Midianite women have been spared. (This chapter also fails to mention that Moses himself is married to a Midianite woman!) Moses orders his troops to execute all the Midianite boys and all the Midianite females except for the virgins. Isn’t this a kind of sick, grotesquely disproportionate atrocity? It’s collective punishment of a most repellent sort—and all to take revenge for the one bad date between an Israelite and a Midianite girl! Numbers informs us, with its usual fondness for precision, that 32,000 virgin females survive the mass execution (and were then enslaved, incidentally). By my rough estimate, this means the Israelites killed more than 60,000 captive, defenseless women and boys.

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https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2006...-war-crime.html

How can anybody explain this?

I still wonder