25:1 3 When 4 Israel lived in Shittim, the people began to commit sexual immorality 5 with the daughters of Moab. 25:2 These women invited 6 the people to the sacrifices of their gods; then the people ate and bowed down to their gods. 7 25:3 When Israel joined themselves to Baal-peor, 8 the anger of the Lord flared up against Israel.
25:4 The Lord said to Moses, “Arrest all the leaders 9 of the people, and hang them up 10 before the Lord in broad daylight, 11 so that the fierce anger of the Lord may be turned away from Israel.” 25:5 So Moses said to the judges of Israel, “Each of you must execute those of his men 12 who were joined to Baal-peor.”
25:6 Just then 13 one of the Israelites came and brought to his brothers 14 a Midianite woman in the plain view of Moses and of 15 the whole community of the Israelites, while they 16 were weeping at the entrance of the tent of meeting. 25:7 When Phinehas son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest, saw it, 17 he got up from among the assembly, took a javelin in his hand, 25:8 and went after the Israelite man into the tent 18 and thrust through the Israelite man and into the woman’s abdomen. 19 So the plague was stopped from the Israelites. 20
106:29 They made the Lord angry 26 by their actions,
and a plague broke out among them.
106:30 Phinehas took a stand and intervened, 27
and the plague subsided.
106:31 This brought him a reward,
an eternal gift. 28
106:32 They made him angry by the waters of Meribah,
and Moses suffered 29 because of them,
106:33 for they aroused 30 his temper, 31
and he spoke rashly. 32
1 tn Heb “our souls.”
2 tn The Israelites’ opinion about the manna was clear enough – “worthless.” The word used is קְלֹקֵל (qÿloqel, “good for nothing, worthless, miserable”).
3 sn Chapter 25 tells of Israel’s sins on the steppes of Moab, and God’s punishment. In the overall plan of the book, here we have another possible threat to God’s program, although here it comes from within the camp (Balaam was the threat from without). If the Moabites could not defeat them one way, they would try another. The chapter has three parts: fornication (vv. 1-3), God’s punishment (vv. 4-9), and aftermath (vv. 10-18). See further G. E. Mendenhall, The Tenth Generation, 105-21; and S. C. Reif, “What Enraged Phinehas? A Study of Numbers 25:8,” JBL 90 (1971): 200-206.
4 tn This first preterite is subordinated to the next as a temporal clause; it is not giving a parallel action, but the setting for the event.
5 sn The account apparently means that the men were having sex with the Moabite women. Why the men submitted to such a temptation at this point is hard to say. It may be that as military heroes the men took liberties with the women of occupied territories.
6 tn The verb simply says “they called,” but it is a feminine plural. And so the women who engaged in immoral acts with Hebrew men invited them to their temple ritual.
7 sn What Israel experienced here was some of the debased ritual practices of the Canaanite people. The act of prostrating themselves before the pagan deities was probably participation in a fertility ritual, nothing short of cultic prostitution. This was a blatant disregard of the covenant and the Law. If something were not done, the nation would have destroyed itself.
8 tn The verb is “yoked” to Baal-peor. The word is unusual, and may suggest the physical, ritual participation described below. It certainly shows that they acknowledge the reality of the local god.
9 sn The meaning must be the leaders behind the apostasy, for they would now be arrested. They were responsible for the tribes’ conformity to the Law, but here they had not only failed in their duty, but had participated. The leaders were executed; the rest of the guilty died by the plague.
10 sn The leaders who were guilty were commanded by God to be publicly exposed by hanging, probably a reference to impaling, but possibly some other form of harsh punishment. The point was that the swaying of their executed bodies would be a startling warning for any who so blatantly set the Law aside and indulged in apostasy through pagan sexual orgies.
11 tn Heb “in the sun.” This means in broad daylight.
12 tn Heb “slay – a man his men.” The imperative is plural, and so “man” is to be taken collectively as “each of you men.”
13 tn The verse begins with the deictic particle וְהִנֵּה (vÿhinneh), pointing out the action that was taking place. It stresses the immediacy of the action to the reader.
14 tn Or “to his family”; or “to his clan.”
15 tn Heb “before the eyes of Moses and before the eyes of.”
16 tn The vav (ו) at the beginning of the clause is a disjunctive because it is prefixed to the nonverbal form. In this context it is best interpreted as a circumstantial clause, stressing that this happened “while” people were weeping over the sin.
17 tn The first clause is subordinated to the second because both begin with the preterite verbal form, and there is clearly a logical and/or chronological sequence involved.
18 tn The word קֻבָּה (qubbah) seems to refer to the innermost part of the family tent. Some suggest it was in the tabernacle area, but that is unlikely. S. C. Reif argues for a private tent shrine (“What Enraged Phinehas? A Study of Numbers 25:8,” JBL 90 [1971]: 200-206).
19 tn Heb “and he thrust the two of them the Israelite man and the woman to her belly [lower abdomen].” Reif notes the similarity of the word with the previous “inner tent,” and suggests that it means Phinehas stabbed her in her shrine tent, where she was being set up as some sort of priestess or cult leader. Phinehas put a quick end to their sexual immorality while they were in the act.
20 sn Phinehas saw all this as part of the pagan sexual ritual that was defiling the camp. He had seen that the
21 tn Heb “the
22 tn Heb “the mouth of the Lord your God,” that is, against the commandment that he had spoken.
23 tn Heb “the
24 tn Heb “stiffness of neck” (cf. KJV, NAB, NIV). See note on the word “stubborn” in Deut 9:6.
25 tn Heb “How much more after my death?” The Hebrew text has a sarcastic rhetorical question here; the translation seeks to bring out the force of the question.
26 tn Heb “They made angry [him].” The pronominal suffix is omitted here, but does appear in a few medieval Hebrew
27 sn The intervention of Phinehas is recounted in Num 25:7-8.
28 tn Heb “and it was reckoned to him for righteousness, to a generation and a generation forever.” The verb חָשַׁב (khashav, “to reckon”) is collocated with צְדָקָה (tsÿdaqah, “righteousness”) only in Ps 106:31 and Gen 15:6, where God rewards Abram’s faith with a land grant.
29 tn Heb “there was harm to Moses.”
30 tn The Hebrew text vocalizes the form as הִמְרוּ (himru), a Hiphil from מָרָה (marah, “to behave rebelliously”), but the verb fits better with the object (“his spirit”) if it is revocalized as הֵמֵרוּ (hemeru), a Hiphil from מָרַר (marar, “to be bitter”). The Israelites “embittered” Moses’ “spirit” in the sense that they aroused his temper with their complaints.
31 tn Heb “his spirit.”
32 tn The Hebrew text adds “with his lips,” but this has not been included in the translation for stylistic reasons.
33 tn Grk “And for.” Because of the difference between Greek style, which often begins sentences or clauses with “and,” and English style, which generally does not, καί (kai) has not been translated here.
34 tn For this verb, see BDAG 1017 s.v. τροποφορέω (cf. also Deut 1:31; Exod 16:35; Num 14:34).
35 tn Or “desert.”