I want to move past this particular topic as it is a bit of a rabbit trail… one last observation and I will move on to other topics, else we need to start a separate thread.
I would observe that anything “sexual” in nature in Numbers 31 is a result of assumptions and imagination one brings to the text. The girls are to be “kept for yourselves.” That could mean lots of things, but one thing pretty obvious it does not mean is “for immediate sexual use.”
Clearly, if the only girls left alive were those who had not reached sexual maturity (“not known a man by lying with him”) we are talking about a group of female children that even the pagan Midianites recognized were too young for sex. If so, then to answer Christy’s question (“What do you think virgins taken as plunder were used for?”)… servant girls, I would imagine in all likelihood. Certainly not for sex, at least not anytime soon after said conquest.
Christy’s and others language, whether intentional or not, seems to portray a situation wherein each of these children (which includes the infants and toddlers) was immediately used for sex… perhaps within days carted off to some man’s house after an immediate marriage ceremony and had conjugal sex forced on them against their will, the tears of losing their father and mother not yet dry.
For the vast majority of these survivors, we would be talking about marriages (assuming they married) only after years of holding some entirely different status, of having had years to assimilate and adapt to their new culture and go through a process of betrothal perhaps not dissimilar to any other young Hebrew maiden or at least a Hebrew household servant girl. I have no idea what that specific status was. I would imagine as household servants for those children old enough, for the much younger, perhaps cared for within individual households. But the one thing they were not immediately going to be was wives - They were simply too young for that. whatever “kept for yourselves” meant, the one thing it could not mean was “for immediate marriages” or “for immediate sexual purposes.” Interpreting Numbers 31 in the darkest and most uncharitable way, one could at most say that sexual use of these girls may have been the long-term objective.
But even on this most uncharitable reading… keeping a 3 year old girl alive even on the sole expectation that, when she is old enough, she may be a good marriage prospect for an Israelite man someday… does not fit within my definition of ”rape.”
If we insist on critiquing the entirety of Israel’s marriage customs, especially involving captive women, as institutionalized rape, I am not interested in arguing that point further, as to my reading it requires far too many assumptions and uncharitable interpretations and unwarranted comparisons with other worst-case practices, and seems to me quite ethnocentric. But if one wants to so understand it as such, then by all means please feel free, I will not argue that point here.
I will observe, though, that the one time that such purported institutionalized rape did not occur was in the immediate aftermath of Midian’s conquest as recorded in Numbers 31. All the women old enough to have had such supposed institutionalized rape forced on them had been killed. If such purported institutionalized rape did ever happen to the Midianite girls, it would not happen until quite some time - years in most cases - after the events recorded in Numbers 31.
Thus I maintain that “rape” by any conceivable definition can simply not be found in Numbers 31 on any fair reading. What they did was bring home a train of captive children.
And to borrow from Herodotus, “So much for Numbers 31.”