Twelve Thousand Marched on Midian With Pinchas

Twenty-four thousand graves were still fresh at Shittim when the muster went out. The plague had come through the camp after the Midianite women came through the tents, and the dead had been buried by their own brothers.

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A Thousand From Every Tribe

Moses did not raise a mob. He took a thousand men from each tribe and no more, so that the count came out even at twelve thousand, and he sent them out with Pinchas.

Pinchas did not walk behind them carrying a horn. He walked in the count. The man who had put a spear through a couple in a tent and stopped the dying was numbered with the rest of the soldiers, as though zeal had enlisted like everybody else and drew the same rations.

They went out ordered, tribe beside tribe, the way a flock stands when a shepherd has counted it that morning.

The graves at Shittim were behind them. Most of these men had a brother or a cousin under that ground, dead of a plague that had started inside a tent, and they were marching back toward the tents.

Arm Before Head

Every man of them put the arm strap on first.

It is a small sequence and easy to reverse in a hurry, and they were arming for a war. Not one of them crowned his head before he had bound his arm. Moses would say later that this was why he could praise them, and why they came up off that field without a body to carry home.

Twelve thousand pairs of hands, wound, knotted, then the spear.

They Went In Two at a Time

When the Midianite army broke and the camp lay open, the soldiers went into the women's dwellings to take the spoil. They went in pairs, never alone. One man smeared soot across the woman's face. The other stripped the rings from her ears and the bracelets off her wrists and dropped them in a sack.

The women fought them over it. "Are we not creations of the Holy One, that you should do this to us?"

The answer came back flat. "Is it not enough for you that our own people were punished because of you?"

Nobody in that room was pretending the war was about grazing land. The soot and the stripped gold were a confession of what these men knew about themselves, written on somebody else's face.

Not a Man Missing

They came back and counted. The officers stood in front of Moses and reported that not a man was missing from among them, and they did not only mean the dead. Not one soldier had been suspected of touching a captive.

Then they set down the gold. Anklets, bracelets, signet rings, earrings, the whole take from the tents, heaped on the ground in front of the old man. We have brought an offering for the Lord, they said.

Moses Asked What the Gold Was For

Moses looked at the heap and then at the officers and told them their two statements were fighting each other.

You say not one man is missing, he said, not in death and not in sin. And then you bring me an offering. If none of you sinned, what is this for?

They answered him. We went in two at a time. One of us blackened her face and one of us took her jewelry. Is it possible that the inclination was not moved at all? For that moving, we bring an offering.

It was a confession of something no witness could have testified to and no court could have charged. They had done nothing. They had wanted to, for the length of a breath, standing over a woman with soot on their fingers, and they had walked out of the tent and gone on wanting to, and they would not come home with that unpaid.

Moses began to praise them where he stood. Even the emptiest man among you, he said, is packed with good deeds the way a split pomegranate is packed with seed.

They took the land of Midian afterward and kept it. The ridge where the war ended was left standing as a memorial the other nations could see from a long way off, and what these men carried down from it was not only plunder.

The gold stayed where they had set it down. A heap of what they had taken from Midian, and a receipt for what they had wanted and had not touched.