Numbers 25:5

25:5 So Moses said to the judges of Israel, “Each of you must execute those of his men ¹  who were joined to Baal-peor.”

Numbers 25:11

25:11 “Phinehas son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest, has turned my anger away from the Israelites, when he manifested such zeal ²  for my sake among them, so that I did not consume the Israelites in my zeal. ³ 

Psalms 106:29-31

106:29 They made the Lord angry ⁴  by their actions,

and a plague broke out among them.

106:30 Phinehas took a stand and intervened, ⁵ 

and the plague subsided.

106:31 This brought him a reward,

an eternal gift. ⁶ 

¹ tn Heb “slay – a man his men.” The imperative is plural, and so “man” is to be taken collectively as “each of you men.”

² tn Heb “he was zealous with my zeal.” The repetition of forms for “zeal” in the line stresses the passion of Phinehas. The word “zeal” means a passionate intensity to protect or preserve divine or social institutions.

³ tn The word for “zeal” now occurs a third time. While some English versions translate this word here as “jealousy” (KJV, ASV, NASB, NRSV), it carries the force of God’s passionate determination to defend his rights and what is right about the covenant and the community and parallels the “zeal” that Phinehas had just demonstrated.

⁴ tn Heb “They made angry [him].” The pronominal suffix is omitted here, but does appear in a few medieval Hebrew mss. Perhaps it was accidentally left off, an original וַיַּכְעִיסוּהוּ (vayyakh’isuhu) being misread as וַיַּכְעִיסוּ (vayyakh’isu). In the translation the referent of the pronominal suffix (the Lord) has been specified for clarity to avoid confusion with Baal of Peor (mentioned in the previous verse).

⁵ sn The intervention of Phinehas is recounted in Num 25:7-8.

⁶ 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.