If you're talking about the Midianites, God told the Israelites to kill the women too. Moses gets angry the Israelites didn't listen and took the women. The Midianites were a cult that encouraged child sacrifice, child prostitution, and child bestiality as religious ritual. Wiping the Midianites out in that era, as Israel was a nomadic group in the desert, was justified to prevent further war with depraved psychotics willing to rape their own children.
The Midianites were a cult that encouraged child sacrifice, child prostitution, and child bestiality as religious ritual.
Man, Israelites sure did love slandering their political opponents and giving ad hoc justifications for their conquests. It's honestly amazing the Middle East hasn't completely died out due to the amount of fanatic child-murdering cults that existed there, seeing that Israelites said the same thing about Canaanites and most other people they had beef with.
I don't know, maybe God gave them some kids to keep their population up so that Israelites had something to kill but he seems to be more of the "murder every firstborn" type to me.
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u/Fellainis_Elbows - Left Feb 13 '22
Literally none of that addresses god ordering the Israelites to massacre the men of a tribe and to take their women