Numbers 25:1-9

Israel’s Sin with the Moabite Women

25:1 ¹ When ²  Israel lived in Shittim, the people began to commit sexual immorality ³  with the daughters of Moab. 25:2 These women invited ⁴  the people to the sacrifices of their gods; then the people ate and bowed down to their gods. ⁵  25:3 When Israel joined themselves to Baal-peor, ⁶  the anger of the Lord flared up against Israel.

God’s Punishment

25:4 The Lord said to Moses, “Arrest all the leaders ⁷  of the people, and hang them up ⁸  before the Lord in broad daylight, ⁹  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 ¹⁰  who were joined to Baal-peor.”

25:6 Just then ¹¹  one of the Israelites came and brought to his brothers ¹²  a Midianite woman in the plain view of Moses and of ¹³  the whole community of the Israelites, while they ¹⁴  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, ¹⁵  he got up from among the assembly, took a javelin in his hand, 25:8 and went after the Israelite man into the tent ¹⁶  and thrust through the Israelite man and into the woman’s abdomen. ¹⁷  So the plague was stopped from the Israelites. ¹⁸  25:9 Those that died in the plague were 24,000.

Numbers 31:16

31:16 Look, these people through the counsel of Balaam caused the Israelites to act treacherously against the Lord in the matter of Peor – which resulted in the plague among the community of the Lord!

Joshua 22:17

22:17 The sin we committed at Peor was bad enough. To this very day we have not purified ourselves; it even brought a plague on the community of the Lord. ¹⁹ 

Psalms 106:28-29

106:28 They worshiped ²⁰  Baal of Peor,

and ate sacrifices offered to the dead. ²¹ 

106:29 They made the Lord angry ²²  by their actions,

and a plague broke out among them.

Hosea 9:10

9:10 When I found Israel, it was like finding grapes in the wilderness.

I viewed your ancestors ²³  like an early fig on a fig tree in its first season.

Then they came to Baal-Peor and they dedicated themselves to shame –

they became as detestable as what they loved.

[25:1]  ¹ 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.

[25:1]  ² 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.

[25:1]  ³ 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.

[25:2]  ⁴ 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.

[25:2]  ⁵ 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.

[25:3]  ⁶ 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.

[25:4]  ⁷ 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.

[25:4]  ⁸ 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.

[25:4]  ⁹ tn Heb “in the sun.” This means in broad daylight.

[25:5]  ¹⁰ tn Heb “slay – a man his men.” The imperative is plural, and so “man” is to be taken collectively as “each of you men.”

[25:6]  ¹¹ 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.

[25:6]  ¹² tn Or “to his family”; or “to his clan.”

[25:6]  ¹³ tn Heb “before the eyes of Moses and before the eyes of.”

[25:6]  ¹⁴ 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.

[25:7]  ¹⁵ 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.

[25:8]  ¹⁶ 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).

[25:8]  ¹⁷ 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.

[25:8]  ¹⁸ sn Phinehas saw all this as part of the pagan sexual ritual that was defiling the camp. He had seen that the Lord himself had had the guilty put to death. And there was already some plague breaking out in the camp that had to be stopped. And so in his zeal he dramatically put an end to this incident, that served to stop the rest and end the plague.

[22:17]  ¹⁹ tn Heb “Was the sin of Peor too insignificant for us, from which we have not made purification to this day? And there was a plague in the assembly of the Lord.”

[106:28]  ²⁰ tn Heb “joined themselves to.”

[106:28]  ²¹ tn Here “the dead” may refer to deceased ancestors (see Deut 26:14). Another option is to understand the term as a derogatory reference to the various deities which the Israelites worshiped at Peor along with Baal (see Num 25:2 and L. C. Allen, Psalms 101-150 [WBC], 49).

[106:29]  ²² 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).

[9:10]  ²³ tn Heb “fathers”; a number of more recent English versions use the more general “ancestors” here.