Numbers 31:17-18 has Moses order the killing of all Midianites except virgin girls, who are kept; Deuteronomy 20:10-18 commands total destruction (herem) of Canaanite cities.

This is honestly among the hardest texts in the Old Testament, and serious Christian scholars disagree on the best resolution — that disagreement itself should be stated up front rather than papered over. Several load-bearing points converge to reframe, though not fully dissolve, the difficulty. First, the Midianite campaign in Numbers 31 follows directly from Numbers 25, where Midianite women had specifically drawn Israelite men into Baal-Peor idolatry and cultic sex-worship that triggered a plague killing 24,000 — the text presents this as a targeted judicial action tied to that specific event, not a general template for warfare. Second, the fate of retained female captives is governed by the separate law in Deuteronomy 21:10-14, which is a real, substantive restriction relative to standard ANE conquest norms: a captive taken as a wife required a month of mourning and adjustment before consummation, could not be sold as property, and if the husband later disliked her he had to release her free rather than treat her as chattel. Paul Copan argues this compares favorably to unrestricted battlefield rape and enslavement typical of the period. Third, regarding Deuteronomy 20's herem clauses, a significant body of OT scholarship (Kenneth Kitchen, Richard Hess) reads the 'utterly destroy' language as conventional ANE hyperbolic conquest rhetoric — comparable to the Moabite Mesha Stele's boasts of having 'utterly destroyed' Israelite towns whose populations plainly continued to exist — noting that Joshua itself narrates Canaanites still present in the land after the supposed total destruction (Josh 13:1, 23:12-13; Judg 1), which is internally inconsistent if read as literal extermination and supports a hyperbolic/limited-military-defeat reading over strict genocide. This remains genuinely contested among faithful scholars, and the concession should stand: this is not an easy text.

Scripture frames the Canaanite conquest as a delayed judicial act against specific societies steeped in child sacrifice to Molech and ritualized cultic sex practices (Lev 18:24-25, Deut 9:4-5, 12:29-31), explicitly deferred for centuries because 'the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete' (Gen 15:16) — not arbitrary ethnic violence — and Israel is repeatedly warned it will face the identical judgment if it adopts those practices, which it later does, in the exile.