After the war against Midian, the commanders of thousands and hundreds counted their men. Finding no one missing, they donated the gold objects they had plundered to atone for the surviving warriors (Numbers 31).
This recalls the half-shekel contribution (Exodus 30:11–16). In both cases soldiers were counted, and the money served as remembrance and atonement for Israel before the LORD.
Unlike the half-shekel, however, the Midian-war contribution followed the postwar count rather than forming part of the prewar count. Why was no contribution taken before the war?
Counting can create a need for atonement. When a person’s head is lifted, when he is numbered and his remembrance raised, he is also examined in the higher worlds and must bring atonement against possible accusations (see also “Why Does a Census Lead to a Plague?”).
As with the half-shekel census, the soldiers were counted before fighting Midian. But that count differed fundamentally from both the half-shekel census and the postwar count.
The latter two use the expression “lifting the head”: “When thou takest the sum of the children of Israel, according to their number” (Exodus 30:12), for the half-shekel, and after the war, “Thy servants have taken the sum of the men of war that are under our charge, and there lacketh not one man of us” (Numbers 31:49). This expression does not appear in the prewar count.
The prewar count filled quotas of one thousand men per tribe: “So there were delivered, out of the thousands of Israel, a thousand of every tribe, twelve thousand armed for war.” (Numbers 31:5). In filling quotas, the individual has no significance and there is no “lifting the head,” so no atonement is needed. Afterward, the commanders counted to know how many survived. This was a “lifting the head” count in which each individual survivor mattered.
The count revealed that miraculously no one was missing. The commanders therefore saw a need to atone for those counted, lest payment be exacted from them later.
With the half-shekel, each warrior personally supplied atonement, since each was expressed as an individual within the whole: each gave his own half-shekel, building the people from its constituent individuals. In Midian’s war, although the postwar count lifted each individual’s head, the warriors had originally been supplied as tribal quotas, a collective, rather than as individuals. The subsequent atonement was therefore given by the commanders for everyone, rather than individually. Though counted, the individual remained defined through belonging to the whole, and atonement likewise remained collective.
