Misinterpretations often depict this verse as endorsing genocide, pedophilia, or mass sexual enslavement by God, stripping it of context: Midian had aggressively deceived Israel into Baal worship and fornication (Numbers 25), warranting judgment like other Canaanite nations; virgins were spared mercifully to avoid death, not for exploitation, with Deuteronomy 21 mandating marriage and rights for captive women, not rape or slavery, while the text shows no sexual use but purification rites, twisting holy war into modern atrocities.
Numbers 31:35
King James Version (1769)
35 And thirty and two thousand persons in all, of women that had not known man by lying with him.
Numbers 31:35 records the count of 32,000 virgin women among the Midianite captives taken by Israel after God's commanded war against Midian for their role in seducing Israelites into idolatry and immorality, which caused a plague killing 24,000. This detail emphasizes divine justice distinguishing the innocent virgins, who were spared and integrated into Israel under protective laws, from those complicit in sin, illustrating God's holiness, mercy toward the blameless, and the principle of corporate accountability tempered by individual purity.