Phinehas

Berwick:          Everyone says you’re the best. Without you, I’ll get hung for this.

Sherlock:         No, no, no, Mr. Berwick, not at all. Hanged, yes.

Sherlock S1 E3, ‘The Great Game’ (2010)

 

A rather PG illumination from the Alba Bible, a translation of the Hebrew Bible into Castilian made in Toledo in the fifteenth century, depicting the episode I’m about to discuss. Thanks to Scott Nevins Memorial on Wikimedia Commons.

All right, folks, grab a Bible; open it to Numbers 25; read the whole thing.¹ (Potentially have a quick glance at the previous chapters to remind yourself of the context as well.)

I’m serious. You don’t even need to fetch a physical copy of the text; you can just bring it up in a new tab. There’s a link in the last footnote. So read it, and come back to me when you’ve finished.

***

All done? Good. What do you make of it?

Well, you’ll probably have gathered that I’m about to tell you what I make of it, so send up a quick prayer for discernment and get ready to do some weighing of my words against what you can actually see in scripture. Fair warning that this is going to be pretty heavy going if you’re not all that into Hebrew linguistics. Allons-y…

So here’s where we join the story: Israel is encamped in the plains of Moab. King Balak of Moab saw what Israel did to Sihon, king of the Amorites, and his people (hint: they defeated them in battle and dispossessed them), and thought, yikes, I need to get me some sort of supernatural help against these people. So he commissioned the seer Balaam son of Beor to curse the Israelites for him.² Trouble was, Balaam couldn’t curse the Israelites, because his whole modus operandi was to curse people in the name of their God, and the God of Israel didn’t have anything against his people. So Balaam ended up blessing the Israelites three times instead. (It’s hilarious. You should 100% read that bit too if you haven’t before.) Anyway, Balaam presumably felt a bit bad that he’d literally done the opposite of what Balak asked him, because a few chapters later, we find out that he’s the one who advised Balak to do what he did next – check out Numbers 31:16 (the same is confirmed again in Revelation 2:14). Like, look, Balak, I can’t curse these guys, because their God has nothing but favour for them; if you want them to be cursed, you’re gonna have to get them to bring that curse on themselves by disobeying his laws. Now, from what I know of this God of theirs, he’s really not keen on his people worshipping any other gods, or having sex with random foreigners who worship other gods, so your best bet is to send in some of your women, to seduce their men and invite them to sacrifices to your gods. That should definitely put the people under a curse.

And what do you know, the plan worked like an absolute charm. The Israelites started going off with these Moabite and Midianite women and participating in sacrifices to their gods – specifically, the local version of Baal, Baal of Peor. In this way, Israel bound itself to Baal of Peor, and God’s anger, as was only right, flared. He spoke to Moses: take the chiefs of the people and hang them in the sun before the LORD, and thus avert divine wrath from the people as a whole.

A brief word of context before we continue: you may or may not know that Hebrew, like all Semitic languages, works according to a system of triliteral (three-letter) verbal roots; from one particular sequence of three letters are formed a whole range of verbs, nouns, and adjectives that pertain to one idea or semantic field. The root מלך (mlk), for instance, contains the idea of being king, and by changing the vowels with which you connect those three consonants, and adding various prefixes and suffixes, you can form words like מֶלֶך (melekh) “king”, מַלְכָּה (malkāh) “queen”, מַלְכוּת (malǝkhūth) “kingdom”, מָלַךְ (mālakh) “he was king”, יִמְלֹךְ (yimlōkh) “he will be king”, מֹלֵךְ (mōlēkh) “(one) being king” – you get the idea. Sometimes the thread of imagination that connects words formed from the same root can be pretty tenuous; sometimes it’s not even at all apparent what that thread of imagination is – but all the same, by using a word from a particular root, you can, to a greater or lesser degree, tap into the semantic field with which that word is associated.

Back to those first few verses of Numbers 25, the word translated “hang” there is derived from the root יקע (yqʿ), which is a bit of a weird one. For the form in which it appears in this instance, my Hebrew dictionary gives the definition as “of some solemn form of execution, but mng. uncertain”; it cites translations of the word into other languages with terms meaning “impale”, “expose”, or “crucify”.³ Hmm. Can we gather any firmer indications of the word’s meaning from evidence found within the scriptures? Why yes, yes we can. Check out 2 Samuel 21:12-13, which uses another Hebrew root, תלה (tlh) – or, variantly, תלא (tlʾ) – as a synonym for יקע: “And David went and took the bones of Saul and the bones of Jonathan his son from the citizens of Jabesh-Gilead who had stolen them from the square of Beth-Shan, where the Philistines had hanged (תלה) them in the day of the Philistines’ striking Saul down on Gilboa. And he brought up from there the bones of Saul and the bones of Jonathan his son; and they collected the bones of the hanged (יקע).” So יקע and תלה are clearly both accurate ways of describing what the Philistines did to Saul and Jonathan. It’s worth mentioning that for them at least, this wasn’t a means of execution – Jonathan was killed in battle, Saul fell on his own sword (check 1 Samuel 31) – but rather the means by which their bodies were made a spectacle of after they were already dead. And that was achieved by hanging them up, possibly by piercing them with something (like pinning a notice to a display-board), as we can infer from the following. 1 Samuel 31 says they struck (תקע, tqʿ) Saul’s body to the wall; the same word is used most commonly for blowing a trumpet, though also, among other things, for pitching a tent (Genesis 31:25), stabbing a guy in the guts (Judges 3:21), or fastening hair to a loom with a weaving-pin (Judges 16:14) – so you can gather the kind of thrusting-through action that it denotes. Other uses of the root תלה also give us clues as to the process being described: you can תלה a vessel on a peg (Ezekiel 15:3); a shield on a wall (Ezekiel 27:11); the earth on nothingness, if you happen to be God (Job 26:7) – or, most commonly, a person on a tree. תלה, therefore, clearly means “hang” in its straightforward sense of “suspend”. In some instances it seems as if it might refer to a means of execution – be that hanging or crucifixion or impalement or whatever else – but in others, like the one mentioned above, it definitely refers to something done to the bodies after they’re already dead.

 

Hanging vessels on pegs has been standard practice in many human cultures, hence the English word cupboard. Yep, it used to refer to a board with pegs on it, not an enclosed set of shelves.

So the order that God gives to Moses in Numbers 25 doesn’t necessarily involve “hanging” the chiefs of the people in the way we’d probably assume, like, with a rope round the neck to kill them. Rather, it involves suspending them, quite likely already having been killed, and quite likely that by piercing them through with something. Why does God tell Moses to do that? Take a look at Deuteronomy 21:22-23: “And when there is in a man a sin of the judgement of death, and he is killed, and you hang (תלה) him on a tree, his body shall not remain on the tree, for you shall certainly bury him on that (same) day, for a hanged man (תלה) is a curse of God, and you shall not defile your land, which the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance.” A hanged man is a curse of God – so if you hang someone, you make him a curse. Back in Numbers 25, the people have placed themselves under God’s curse by disobeying him, but what God is saying to Moses is, carry out the curse on the leaders who instigated this, and that will suffice to remove it from the rest of the people. (The specification to hang them “in the sun” presumably means, as per Deuteronomy, that they are only to hang there during daylight hours, and to be taken down and buried before nightfall.) So Moses passes on the order to the judges of Israel: each of you kill those under his responsibility who have participated in the sin of worshipping Baal of Peor.

We don’t actually find out whether this order was ever in fact carried out, though, because the narrative shifts. While Moses and the people are gathered in the entrance to the Tabernacle, mourning over the sin that’s been committed among them, a bloke called Zimri brings this Midianite woman called Cozbi into their sight – and off the two of them pop into some kind of “tent” or “chamber”. More on that particular word in a moment, but in the context it seems pretty clear what they’re up to. Right in front of the Tabernacle. Yikes. And so Phinehas, grandson of Aaron, grabs a spear and goes after them and skewers them both on it. (And again, the fact that he was able to thrust both of them through with a single stab is strongly suggestive of what it was they were doing.)

Verse 8 is very interesting, because it contains two different but similar-looking hapax legomena (that is, words that only occur once in a corpus, in this case the entire Hebrew Bible). One of them is the word for “tent” or “chamber”, קֻבָּה (qubbāh). The other is the word for the woman’s “belly”, קֹבָה (qōvāh). Neither is necessary for the verse to make sense: “and he went after the man of Israel, and he pierced both of them, the man of Israel and the woman, and the plague was restrained from upon the children of Israel” actually kind of works better purely from a narrative-flow point of view. What do these two weird words actually add to the proceedings? Why bother including them at all? And on top of that, why opt for such obscure terminology, when Hebrew has perfectly good, normal words for “tent” and “belly” that would be more than happy to do the job?

I think the answer to these questions can be found by considering the words’ roots. qubbāh derives from the root קבב (qbb), which means “curse”. It’s not a very common root in scripture; indeed, verbal conjugations of it only occur in chapters 22-24 of the book of Numbers – the Balaam episode, directly before the bit we’re currently discussing. Interesting. qōvāh, meanwhile, probably derives from the root נקב (nqb)⁴ – which also means “curse”, though among other things. The most basic meaning of the verbal root is “pierce” or “bore through”, whence an idea of being hollowed out, which accounts for most of the nouns (nearly all hapax legomena) that derive from this root: נֶקֶב (neqev) “bezel”, מַקֶּבֶת (maqqeveth) “hole (in a rock)”, קֵבָה (qēvāh) “stomach”.⁵ The second meaning is “specify (by name)”, which is a fairly clear leap of logic – like English “pin down”. The third meaning is then “blaspheme” or “curse” – again, a pretty straightforward leap of logic from the second.⁶

In their meaning “curse”, קבב and נקב are synonyms. Check out Numbers 23:8: “How can I curse (נקב) whom God has not cursed (קבב)? How can I denounce (זעם, zʿm) whom God has not denounced (זעם again)?” It’s a nice example of Hebrew-poetry parallelling, where each half of the verse repeats the same idea in different words, and the fact that in the second half, it’s the same word twice over, tells us that קבב and נקב likewise mean the same thing.⁷

So what does all this mean for our two weird little hapax legomena in Numbers 25:8? Well, I think what they’re designed to achieve is to get the reader to see Phinehas’ actions in terms of the idea of curse. In the Hebrew, the same preposition directly precedes each of the two words, though it tends to be translated “into” before qubbāh and “through” before qēvāh, and as I said, neither word is necessary for the structure, sense, or fundamental gist of the verse, so it’s essentially as if the author has just chucked the phrase “for a curse-y thing” into the verse, twice. Scholarly debate over these two words seems, from the rough impression I get, to have largely focussed on what specific, technical meaning they might carry; I suspect that the meaning in each case is pretty mundane, but that the author chose to include these obscure words in his account of the matter to put the reader in mind of cursing; to cast Phinehas’ actions as the carrying out of the curse on Zimri and Cozbi.

Because by stabbing the couple, Phinehas neutralised the effects of the curse. He stopped the plague; he successfully averted God’s wrath from Israel. In fact, God consequently gives him a glowing commendation and a hefty promise of favour: “Phinehas, son of Eleazar, son of Aaron the priest, turned my wrath from upon the children of Israel, in his being zealous with my zeal in their midst, and I did not put an end to the children of Israel in my zeal. Therefore say: I am giving him my covenant of peace, and it shall be for him and for his seed after him an age-long covenannt of priesthood, because he was zealous for his God and made atonement for the people of Israel.” Which is all a bit weird, really, isn’t it, because that isn’t actually what God asked to be done. He asked for the chiefs of the people to be suspended before him. But Phinehas went and stabbed one pair of illicit lovers, and apparently that did the trick. More than that, Phinehas in this manner proved his credentials as Good At Being A Priest, and won the right to the priesthood for himself and his line. What was it about his actions that made him a good priest? He was zealous for God, and, crucially, he made atonement for the people. The word translated “make atonement” in English versions comes from a root whose basic meaning is “cover”. On the Day of Atonement, the High Priest covers the ark with blood, and so covers over the sins of the people. Indeed, covering over the sins of the people is kind of the High Priest’s main job, so of course Phinehas’ doing so proved his suitability for the role. But why did it work? Why did stabbing Zimri and Cozbi work to cover the people’s sins, avert God’s wrath, remove the curse from them?

 

A replica of the High Priest’s outfit, made for the Tabernacle replica at BYU, apparently, which I assume stands for Brigham Young University. So that’s the getup Phinehas won for himself. Thanks to Ben P L on Wikimedia commons; usual conditions (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en) apply.

Well, why does anything work to avert God’s wrath? Because it somehow functions as a type of the cross, the one occasion when God’s wrath was really, truly turned away, and the sins of those he chose really, truly covered – for it is impossible, as we know, for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins (that’s Hebrews 10:4 if you weren’t sure). Consider the nature of Jesus’ crucifixion: he was suspended, by being pierced through with nails – exactly the kind of punishment that God prescribed for the chiefs of the people who yoked themselves to Baal of Peor (though they, mercifully enough, would probably have been dead beforehand). And after he died, he was stabbed with a spear. Blood and water, remember?

When God commanded that the chiefs of the people be suspended, he was commanding – not that Israel could have known it at the time – that a type of the cross be carried out. What Phinehas did was carry out a different type of the cross. He foreshadowed not so much Jesus’ being suspended as his being pierced – indeed, the root used for “pierce” in Numbers 25:8 is דקר (dqr), which also shows up in one of our favourite Jesus-y bits, Zechariah 12:10: “and they shall look on me, whom they have pierced” (as quoted in John’s account of the crucifixion, at 19:37) – and that satisfied God enough to stop the plague. And again, carrying out types of the cross is literally a priest’s main job, because every sacrifice is a type of the cross. That’s why they work. Phinehas showed that he was capable of such things, and that he had a zeal for God’s holiness, and so that he’d make a really good priest.

I suspect – can’t prove, but suspect – that Paul may have had this episode at least slightly in mind when he wrote the following section of the letter to the Galatians: “For as many as are of works of law, are under a curse; for it is written, Cursed is everyone who does not abide by all these things written in the book of the law, to do them. And that by law, nobody is justified before God, is apparent, because The righteous one shall live by faith. And the law is not from faith, but The one who does the things shall live by them. Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, becoming a curse on our behalf, because it is written, Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree, so that the blessing of Abraham might come in Christ Jesus to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.” In Numbers 25, Israel put themselves under a curse by disobeying the law God had given them (incomplete as it may have been at that stage). In order to be redeemed, they needed someone to become a curse on their behalf. God prescribed that the chiefs of the people be given over to that fate, but Phinehas – acting with God’s zeal, under divine inspiration – enacted an alternative, in carrying out the curse on Zimri and Cozbi. One blow was struck instead of many. One man made atonement for the people, and inherited a perpetual priesthood as a result. Phinehas is definitely a type of Jesus here – but whereas Phinehas killed a couple for their own sin, Jesus was himself killed for other people’s sins. The type, like every type, was imperfect; it didn’t actually take away anyone’s sins. It just bore enough resemblance to the cross to do for the time being.

Jesus is our greater, better Phinehas. We have all put ourselves under a curse by failing to do what God wants, but in Jesus, that curse is carried out on one instead of many. Jesus was more zealous with God’s zeal than anyone ever has been, and what that led him to do was to become a curse on our behalf. He was suspended and he was pierced, and he turned God’s wrath from upon us and covered over our sins with his own blood. And now we stand before God not according to law, whereby all are under a curse, but according to faith in him. A few verses earlier in Galatians than the passage I quoted, Paul’s talking about Abraham, and how he “believed God, and it was counted to him for righteousness”. Guess who the only other individual in the whole of scripture who has something counted to him for righteousness is? Psalm 106:30-31 says this: “And Phinehas stood up and intervened, and the plague was restrained. And it was counted to him for righteousness, from generation to generation forever.” Wow. That’s a pretty big deal, huh? Carrying out a type of the cross was counted to Phinehas for righteousness. But when Jesus went through the real thing, it was counted to us for righteousness.

I’ll wrap this up now, because this post is stupidly long and I’m amazed you’ve stuck with it so far as to be reading this now. But hey, don’t just shut the tab and go on scrolling Facebook. First take a moment to marvel that the Son of God became a curse for us – that God the Father chose to avert his righteous wrath from us by offering up his Son to bear it instead, to be hanged and pierced so that one blow might be struck instead of many. Phinehas proved he was a good priest, but Jesus is the best priest, because at the cross he made complete and permanent atonement for his people. He intervened, and the plague we deserved was restrained, and it was counted to us for righteousness.

Footnotes

¹ Here it is: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=numbers+25&version=ESVUK.

² Extrabiblically, the same figure – Balaam son of Beor, the seer – is attested in an inscription from Deir Alla, which I think is pretty cool: https://www.livius.org/sources/content/deir-alla-inscription/.

³ The dictionary in question is the legendary Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon, which, though dated, is still pretty blooming excellent. Available free at various Internet locations including this one: http://tmcdaniel.palmerseminary.edu/BDB.pdf.

⁴ Some scholars think it also derives from קבב, or even is actually the same word qubbāh again. I think they’re wrong, because I take the Masoretic pointing seriously as good evidence for the correct way to read the text, and according to the Masoretic pointing, the bet in qōvāh is not doubled. But even if they were right, it wouldn’t negate my point.

⁵ Some scholars think that qōvāh is actually the same word as qēvāh. Again, I think they’re wrong, because the Masoretic pointing doesn’t allow for it, but even if they were right, it certainly wouldn’t negate my point.

⁶ For this paragraph I consulted both BDB and the greatest book in the world after the Bible, Benjamin Davidson’s Analytical Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon. If you read any Hebrew at all and you don’t have a copy, get one. Again, you can get it free online at various locations including this one, https://ia800905.us.archive.org/25/items/analyticalhebrew00daviuoft/analyticalhebrew00daviuoft.pdf, but get a physical copy if you can.

⁷ Here’s another fun fact that I decided it was confusing to include in the main text: as you can also probably tell, the two roots are also pretty similar in terms of the consonants they contain; in fact, they deducibly derive from the same biliteral proto-root. Back before the dawn of writing, Semitic languages used two-letter roots, but then proto-Semitic speakers realised that there weren’t enough two-letter combinations to convey as many ideas as they wanted to, and so they switched to using triliteral ones. To get their new three-letter roots, they filled out old two-letter roots with extra letters: adding an N to the beginning of the root and repeating its second letter are both totally standard ways of achieving this, so we can infer that קבב and נקב both come from a theoretical biliteral root קב.