One of P.G. Wodehouse’s characters says this, apparently quoting some religious hymn. The full quote is,
“See the troops of Midean, how they prowl and prowl around. Christian, up and smite them!”
All of which sounds a little militaristic for a hymn. Does anyone know who the Troops of Midean were, and what episode the song presumably refers to?
Well, Gideon led an army against the Midianites in Judges, so maybe it was referring to that.
In Numbers, chapter 30, there is mention of the Midianites. The people of Israel went to war with them at God’s command, killed all the adult men, and captured all the women and children. At Moses’ order, all the prisoners were murdered except for the virgin girls.
God had supposedly ordered the war after a Levite prince named Zimri had brought a Midianite princess named Cozbi home to his family. That would seem rather innocuous, considering Moses himself was married to a Midianite, but Phinehas son of Aaron took a dim view of marriage outside the faith and promptly murdered both Cozbi and Zimri. God was so pleased by Phinehas’ action that He ended a plague that He had inflicted on the Jews as punishment for worshiping Moabite gods, and made Phinehas’ bloodline priests in perpetuity. (This whole part occurs in Numbers 25.
There are many brutal, shocking, and sordid stories in the Old Testament, but for me the tale of the Midianites in Numbers holds a unique horror, even to the point of morbid fascination. It’s like Romeo and Juliet, if it had been written by St. Jerome instead of Shakespeare.
I love the Internet. “troops of Midian”
http://www.stpetersnottingham.org/hymns/midian.htm
Apparently, though, Moses sent his wife back to her father. Anybody know why he did this?
Um, he was going back to Egypt, where he was wanted for murder, to go head-to-head with Pharaoh, and tell him, among other things, that his God said he was doomed, “let my people go,” etc. I don’t think I’d want my wife and children along, either. Also, there might have been the thought that as Midianites it wasn’t really their fight.
Anyway, after the Children of Israel had escaped from Egypt and Moses’ father-in-law saw that his daughter’s husband evidently was on the winnning team after all, he brought them all back and they were reunited in the desert.
I should have realized that the writer of the hymn was referring to the Midian conflict only in a symbolic sense. Instead, I imagined an actual armed conflict involving Christians and Midianites, which would have been impossible since in Apostolic times there were certainly no Christian armies.
No Christian armies?! Then what about “Onward Christan Soldiers”?