"13 Moses and Eleazar the priest and all the chiefs of the congregation went to meet them outside the camp. 14 And Moses was angry with the officers of the army, the commanders of thousands and the commanders of hundreds, who had come from service in the war. 15 Moses said to them, “Have you let all the women live? 16 Behold, these, on Balaam's advice, caused the people of Israel to act treacherously against the Lord in the incident of Peor, and so the plague came among the congregation of the Lord. 17 Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man by lying with him. 18 But all the young girls who have not known man by lying with him keep alive for yourselves. 19 Encamp outside the camp seven days. Whoever of you has killed any person and whoever has touched any slain, purify yourselves and your captives on the third day and on the seventh day. 20 You shall purify every garment, every article of skin, all work of goats' hair, and every article of wood."
Numbers 31:13-20
There are no courts of law as such in Moses' day. But justice was administered for all that, and was through Moses, the Godappointed leader of the people. It was never a case of taking the law into his own hands, for he habitually acted as the Lord's representative and spokesman. Pretty grim justice, we might say? Yes, perhaps. But what has already been said about the heathen nations helps to explain why it was so necessary. Furthermore, we need to bear in mind that Israel was in a particular situation. They were an emergent people, in the sense that they were about to come into their own as the people of God, with a destiny, with a calling, in the world. And always, in emergent nations, one finds a certain stringency in their discipline that is not found in more static or degenerating situations. Thus, in Exodus 22 we see the death penalty exacted for crimes other than murder. This has been mirrored in modern situations also, as for example in Russia and China, where the death penalty has been known to be exacted for things like industrial sabotage. It is, it seems, essential for the very existence of a new emergent community that discipline be harsh and stringent. One thinks in this connection of the extremely severe judgment that fell on Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5, when the purity of the Church required the death of these two whose continued existence could have threatened its very life. And so it was here also. Issues were clearly being seen as black and white. The sentence had to be executed on Midian.