Bilangan 25:2-4

25:2 These women invited ¹  the people to the sacrifices of their gods; then the people ate and bowed down to their gods. ²  25:3 When Israel joined themselves to Baal-peor, ³  the anger of the Lord flared up against Israel.

God’s Punishment

25:4 The Lord said to Moses, “Arrest all the leaders ⁴  of the people, and hang them up ⁵  before the Lord in broad daylight, ⁶  so that the fierce anger of the Lord may be turned away from Israel.”

Bilangan 25:7-8

25:7 When Phinehas son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest, saw it, ⁷  he got up from among the assembly, took a javelin in his hand, 25:8 and went after the Israelite man into the tent ⁸  and thrust through the Israelite man and into the woman’s abdomen. ⁹  So the plague was stopped from the Israelites. ¹⁰ 

[25:2]  ¹ 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]  ² 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]  ³ 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.

[25:3]  sn The evidence indicates that Moab was part of the very corrupt Canaanite world, a world that was given over to the fertility ritual of the times.

[25:4]  ⁴ 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]  ⁵ 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]  ⁶ tn Heb “in the sun.” This means in broad daylight.

[25:7]  ⁷ 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]  ⁸ 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]  ⁹ 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]  ¹⁰ 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.