Numbers 31:17-24: in context

This is the aftermath of the war against Midian, the campaign ordered because Midianite women had drawn Israel into the worship at Peor and a plague that killed twenty-four thousand. The soldiers have come back with the women and children as captives, and Moses is furious, because those women were the ones from Peor. His order is one of the hardest things in the Bible to read. Kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has slept with a man; keep alive for yourselves only the girls who have not. There is no way to soften it, and the text does not try. It is a command to put children and women to the sword.

What sits right next to it is stranger still. The very next lines are about ritual purity. Because the soldiers and their captives have touched the dead, they must stay outside the camp seven days and purify themselves on the third day and the seventh; every garment and skin and piece of wood must be cleansed, and the metal passed through fire. The chapter moves without a break from ordering death to worrying about the defilement of touching the dead. It records a people scrupulous about contact with a corpse in the same breath as it records them making corpses. This is the Bible, and it is what it is; it does not clean the scene up for us.

The passage is careful about ritual defilement in the same moment it deals out death. Where am I fastidious about the small contaminations, while my hands are busy with something far worse?