Numbers 31:18
but spare for yourselves every girl who has never had relations with a man.
But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.
But all the girls, who have not known man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.
But all the women-children, that have not known man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.
Related passages
From the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge, grouped by the word they explain.
- keep alive for yourselves
- It has been groundlessly asserted, that Moses here authorised the Israelites to make concubines of the whole number of female children; and an insidious objection against his writings has been grounded upon this monstrous supposition. But the whole tenor of the law, and especially a statute recorded in De 21:10-14, proves most decisively to the contrary. They were merely permitted to possess them as female slaves, educating them in their families, and employing them as domestics; for the laws concerning fornication, concubinage, and marriage, were in full force, and prohibited an Israelite even from marrying a captive, without delays and previous formalities; and if he afterwards divorced her, he was to set here at liberty, "because he had humbled her."
- Leviticus 25:44; Deuteronomy 20:14; Deuteronomy 21:10–14; 2 Chronicles 28:8–10; Isaiah 14:2