Commentary for Numbers 31:32

ויהי המלקוח יתר הבז AND THE PREY, OVER AND ABOVE THE BOOTY … WAS [SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND etc.] — Because they had not been commanded (v. 28) to levy a tribute from the movables but only from the מלקוח (the men and cattle; cf. Rashi on v. 11) it (Scripture) writes this expression: ויהי המלקוח, that which came under the law of being divided (v. 27) and which also came under the law of tribute — which was over and above (יתר) the booty of the movables, אשר בזזו עם הצבא איש לו WHICH THE MEN OF THE HOST HAD PLUNDERED, EACH FOR HIMSELF, and which did not come under the law of being divided, — the number of sheep was etc. (i.e. צאן at the beginning of the second half of the verse means: the number of sheep).

יתר הבז אשר בזזו, for the property which was part of the houses, i.e. chattels the soldiers had taken for themselves.

-43. ויהי המלקח, "The prey amounted to, etc." The lengthy description and the repetitive numbers in this whole sequence need analysis. Who amongst us cannot figure out what half of a total of 675.000 sheep amounts to? We can also figure out for ourselves what the מכס, the 2 pro mil tax given to the Temple-Treasury amounted to. Nachmanides wrote that the Torah wanted to inform us that not one of these animals had died since its capture until the distribution of the prey. I do not agree that the fact that the flocks did not diminish in the brief interval since the battle was something miraculous, at least not to the extent that we have to read about it every year, 3.700 years later.

ויהי המלקוח יתר הבז, “after deducting the inert objects captured and the amounts the soldiers had consumed, the remainder of the animal loot amounted to, etc.” the reason the Torah gives us all these numbers is to enable us to picture the vastness of this victory, an amount of loot not paralleled elsewhere. The Torah mentions the מכס, tribute or tithe, given to the Levites separately as even this was a substantial amount. Our author understands the word מכס as being similar to חלק, share, as in Exodus 12,4 תכסו על השה "You shall participate in the lamb".

V. 32. יתר הבז (vergl. V. 53). אנשי הצבא בוזו איש לו. Die leblosen Wertsachen, die jedem, der sie genommen hatte, verblieben, heißen בן. Die hier zur Verteilung kommende מלקוח war das über diese בו hinausgehende. Es war derjenige Teil der Beute, der außer dem vorhanden war, was nicht zur Verteilung kam.

יתר הבז, “the excess of the loot;” this refers to what the soldiers had consumed prior to returning to camp.

I believe that the reason that the Torah tells us what half the total of these flocks amounted to was to teach us that the calculation of the tax was based on the 500th animal being the tax rather than the 501st. This is the reason the Torah had to repeat this calculation in each instance. In other words, the tax amounted to one in 499 and not as we might have thought one in 500.

The reason the Torah had to tell us how much the half which constitued the congregation's share consisted of was to prevent us from making another mistake. Unless the Torah had written matters as it did, we would have concluded that the tax was taken off the top before there was any division of the prey between the soldiers on the one hand and the people on the other hand. In view of the numbers recorded here it becomes clear that the soldiers paid their part of the tax from their collective share of the prey whereas the people paid their part from the total allocated to them as their share. The fact that the Torah only lists half of the total when describing the share of the people proves that the people and the soldiers each paid the tax separately from their respective shares; otherwise the people could not have received 36.000 heads of cattle, for instance.