Numbers 31:18
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| Overview - Numbers 31 | |
| 1 | The Midianites are spoiled, and Balaam slain. |
| 13 | Moses is wroth with the officers, for saving the women alive. |
| 19 | How the soldiers, with their captives and spoil, are to be purified. |
| 25 | The proportion in which the prey is to be divided. |
| 48 | The voluntary oblation unto the treasury of the Lord. |
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Numbers 31:18 (King James Version)
But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.
- keep alive for yourselves
- It has been groundlessly asserted, that Moses here authorised the Israelites to make concubines of the whole number of female children; and an insidious objection against his writings has been grounded upon this monstrous supposition. But the whole tenor of the law, and especially a statute recorded in Deuteronomy 21:10-14 ,proves most decisively to the contrary. They were merely permitted to possess them as female slaves, educating them in their families, and employing them as domestics; for the laws concerning fornication, concubinage, and marriage, were in full force, and prohibited an Israelite even from marrying a captive, without delays and previous formalities; and if he afterwards divorced her, he was to set here at liberty, "because he had humbled her."
- Leviticus 25:44 ; Deuteronomy 20:14 ; 21:10-14 2 Chronicles 28:8-10 ; Isaiah 14:2