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216  forty-one Pinchas, Zimri and the Channels of Divine Will Parashat Pinchas (Numbers 25:10–30:1) Steven Greenberg After forty years of circling the desert, the Israelites are a stone’s throw from Jericho. They arrive at the Transjordan and are thrown together with their future neighbors, the Midianites and the Moabites. Social introduction leads to shared celebration and, very quickly we are told, to sex with the local women and idolatrous rites with their pagan god, Baal of Peor. This is the setting that introduces us to a bold and potentially rebellious prince of Israel and a zealous priest who acts on his impulses. The story actually begins in the previous week’s portion and then introduces the portion of Pinchas. Here is the text: and the people began to go whoring with the daughters of Moab and they called the people to the sacrifices of their gods and the people ate and bowed down to their gods. And the people attached themselves to the Baal of Peor so the wrath of God flared up against Israel: The Lord said to Moses, “Take the chiefs of the people and impale them before the Lord in broad daylight, so that the Lord’s wrath may turn away from Israel.” Moses said to the officials of Israel: “Let each man kill those of his men who yoked themselves to the Baal of Peor!” Just then, a man of the Children of Israel had come and brought near to his kinsmen a certain woman of Midian before the eyes of Moses and before the eyes of the whole community of the Children of Israel while they were all weeping at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting. When Pinchas, son of Elazar son of Aaron the priest, saw this, he left the assembly and, taking a spear in his hand, he followed the Israelite into the chamber and stabbed both of them, the Israelite and the woman, through the belly and the plague against the Israelites was checked. . . . And the Lord spoke to Moses saying, Pinchas, son of Eleazar son of Aaron the Kohen , turned back my wrath from upon the children of Israel, when he zealously avenged me among them, so I did not consume the Children of Israel in my vengeance. There say: Behold! I give him my covenant of peace. The name of the Israelite who was killed, the one who was killed with the Midianite woman, was Zimri son of Salu, chieftain of a Simeonite ancestral house. The name of the Midianite woman who was killed was Cozbi daughter of Zur. (Num. 25:1–8a, 10–15) Parashat Pinchas 217 Phineas, or Pinchas in Hebrew, is the Bible’s most celebrated zealot. After the violent event he is awarded, with a certain irony, a “covenant of peace.” Despite the Bible’s praises of Pinchas’s vigilante initiative that practically assuaged God’s anger, however, the successive traditions of interpretation of these passages are ambivalent about him. Moreover, the occasion of this encounter between a public sexual menace and his vigilante assailant leads not only to discussions of how far one may take the law into one’s own hands but also to a very surprising Hasidic portrayal of sexual desire. First, from Pinchas’s perspective, what did he see? He saw the Israelites for the second time succumbing to idolatry in a dangerous repetition of the episode of the golden calf. The last time such an outbreak occurred was just after the revelation of Torah, and now it was reoccurring just before their entry into the promised land. In response, a plague begins, and to make matters worse, in a public display of rebellion, a prince of Israel, Zimri, takes a princess of Midian, Cozbi, into a marital tent and perhaps, as some suggest, into the Tent of Meeting itself and begins to have sex with her. Pinchas, embodying divine wrath, enters the tent and impales them both and, in doing so, stops the plague. Among the ancient and medieval interpretations of this story, one finds praise of Pinchas’s daring alongside a deep suspicion of vigilante justice. No doubt worried by the dangerous precedent the text sets, the rabbis insist on the most narrow frame for this sort of action. Not anyone can take such extralegal initiative. Only a person of the purest motives might be trusted to act outside the system. Moreover, the zealous can respond only in flagrante delicto, literally “while the fire...

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