After the war with Midian, no man who had killed could walk straight back into camp.
"And do ye abide without the camp seven days: whosoever hath killed any person, and whosoever hath touched any slain, purify both yourselves and your captives on the third day, and on the seventh day." (Numbers 31:19)
That is a law about uncleanness, and nobody should turn it into a therapy manual. But read what it assumes. God had ordered that war, and the men who fought it still stopped for seven days at the edge of the camp. A man who had killed was not waved back in to his wife and children as if nothing had happened.
Now look at how we have brought our own men home. After World War II and Korea it usually took weeks to get a soldier discharged and carried home, much of it on a ship full of men who had seen what he had seen. From Vietnam he often came back in two days, by himself, on an airplane.
A veteran named Michael Petersen told his story to an Air Force base newspaper in 2015. He came home beside men who had been killing on jungle patrol two days before. They landed at Travis and changed out of their jungle fatigues. At four in the morning he walked out of the building and took a cab to the San Francisco airport. Nobody asked any of them how they were.
Elijah put four hundred and fifty men to the sword at the brook Kishon. Then a queen swore to have him dead by the next day, and the same man ran for his life, sat down under a juniper tree, and asked God to let him die. God did not answer him with a sermon.
"And as he lay and slept under a juniper tree, behold, then an angel touched him, and said unto him, Arise and eat. And he looked, and, behold, there was a cake baken on the coals, and a cruse of water at his head. And he did eat and drink, and laid him down again." (1 Kings 19:5-6)
