There are lop-sided victories, and then there are unanimous victories. The two are not the same.
Consider this. As I write this, we are in the middle of March Madness. In this tournament, we have already seen one of the most one-sided basketball games in NCAA tournament history, as the University of Florida defeated Prairie View A&M by 59 points.
(Apologies to anyone who picked Prairie View to go all the way. I’m all for dark horses, but that one was rough).
114-55. That was the final score on that one.
But imagine if the score had been 114-0? How hard would that have been to take? Even if the score had been 114-2, at least you could pillow your head knowing you dropped one bucket before you were completely annihilated on national television.
There’s a psychological difference between a dominant win and blanking the other team, yet that’s exactly what happened between Israel and Midian. According to Numbers 31:49, Israel didn’t lose a single man in the battle. Not. One.
It’s not like the numbers weren’t there. Israel sent twelve thousand men into battle against an enemy that coughed up nearly 900,000 animals and lost 32,000 women to Israelite captivity. A force with that many resources had to have quite an army to sustain them.
That points to either one of two things: Either the Israelites got really, really lucky in catching Midian off-guard, or God was definitively on their side.
I think the latter is in play. God wanted “full vengeance” for Israel after what Balaam did to His people, and this type of victory was it.
But what’s equally interesting in this section of Scripture (Numbers 31:48-54) is the soldier’s reaction. Upon hearing that they didn’t lose a single person in the conflict, they immediately gathered up an offering to God from their own personal spoils.
The final count on that offering? 16,750 shekels, or $27 million in today’s money. If you divide that by the number of soldiers (12,000), you get an offering of $2,250 per man. That means that each man’s individual portion was arguably much higher.
The Battle of Midianites was a resounding success, but it’s made even more so when you consider the tiny nuances that Numbers 31 brings out. Israel didn’t just defeat Midian, they made sure Midian would take a long look before interacting with the Israelites again.