This week’s parashah is a double portion, Matot–Masei. My focus today is on a story from the first of these, Parashat Matot, which opens with one of the most unsettling moments in the Torah: God commands Moses to “avenge the Israelite people on the Midianites” (Num 31:2). The ensuing war is brutal. The Israelite army kills every Midianite male, along with the women who had “known a man,” sparing only the young girls who had not. Balaam, the very prophet who, just chapters earlier, could only utter blessings over Israel, is also put to the sword. Read at face value, the text seems to present Midian as an unambiguously evil nation, worthy of total destruction.

And yet, elsewhere in the Torah, a Midianite is one of the most beloved figures in Moses’ life: Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law, a priest of Midian, who welcomes the fugitive Moses into his home, gives him his daughter Zipporah in marriage, and later offers wise counsel that shapes the entire Israelite judicial system (Exod 2–3; 18). Jethro is not merely tolerated; he is honored. He recognizes God’s greatness, brings offerings, and eats with the elders “before God” (Exod 18:12). How can the same ethnic label, Midianite, be associated with both Jethro’s generosity and wisdom, and with the deadly threat described in Numbers 31?

The tension is not a bug in the Torah; it is a feature. The Torah is teaching us that identity labels like “Midianite” cannot be reduced to a single moral story. Being a Midianite does not mean one is evil. What matters is not ethnicity, but covenantal........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)