Why Did the Priests Want to Kill All the Midianites?

In Numbers 25:17 it says ‘Despise the Midianites and kill them.’

That is odd… Didn’t Jethro the high priest of Midian help the Israelites in the desert, and before that give Moses refuge at a hard time in his life? This sounds downright ungrateful!

The Priest tells us why though, it is because they suborned the Israelites to idolatry, specifically to the Baal of Peor, and that is bad news. But since this war against the Midianites is a literary invention, we must ask why the priests took such a disliking to Midian, given the previous amicable relationship.

It’s worse than it seems. The Midianites did not actually suborn the Israelites to idolatry according to the beginning of the story, it was the Moabites. And we can understand the Moabites, they had been trying to get rid of Israel since Numbers 22 when they hired Balaam to curse them.

It’s only after the nubile Moabite women seduce young Israelite lads at a Baal Bacchanalia, that we even hear about the Midianites.

When the Midianites do come, it is rather racy. Apparently, a Midianite princess and a Simeonite noble are doing the ‘in flagrante delicto’ thing outside their tent for all to see. Phineas, Aaron’s grandson, pushes the gawkers aside, and kills them both by piercing them with a spear, and then God stops smiting Israel. You don’t have to be Freudian to read things into that.

For some reason this episode is associated with Baal Peor, but it is not clear how. Princess Kozbi of Midian didn’t seduce all of Israel’s young men on her own. She seduced only one guy, and he had something to do with it as well, presumably.

So, again, we ask the question, why did the Priest have it in for the Midianites?

To understand why we have to go back to when things were all hunky dory, and Jethro High Priest of Midian and Moses were partying in the shadow of Mount Sinan (I am not just being glib, they were actually partying).

Allow me to quote rather liberally from my previously written article, Moses the Midianite on thetorah.com.

After the Israelites cry out in suffering, God decides to send a savior to bring them out of Egypt. God commissions of Moses for this mission when Moses is shepherding the flock of Jethro, the priest of Midian, near Horeb, God’s Mountain:

^{Exod 3:1} Now Moses, tending the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian, drove the flock into the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God.

But how did Moses get to Midian? The Torah explains this at length in the previous chapter:

Pharaoh decrees that all Israelite baby boys must be thrown into the Nile, leading Moses’ mother, a Levite woman married to a Levite man, to hide him in a basket in the Nile. Pharaoh’s daughter finds baby Moses in the basket and adopts him. When Moses grows up, he kills an Egyptian taskmaster, who was beating an Israelite slave. Moses soon learns from some Israelites that people know of the killing. When Pharoah tries to kill him, Moses is forced to escape to Midian, where he saves the seven daughters of Reuel, a local priest, from some shepherds who were harassing them at the well. Reuel invites Moses to his home, and gives him his daughter, Zipporah, as a wife, and they have a son named Gershom.

While this backstory explains how the Moses, an Israelite from the family of Levi, ends up in Midian married to a foreign woman when God first speaks with him, it is actually discordant with the call narrative in the next chapter on several points.