Pinchas (son of Eleazar)

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Pinchas ben Eleazar ( Hebrew פִּינְחָס, from Egypt. p3 nḥśj "the dark-skinned one"), son of Eleazar , belonged to the tribe of Levi and to the rightful line of the Israelite high priests , the Aaronides ( Ex 6.25  EU ). He is not to be confused with Pinchas , the son of Eli .

The biblical story of Pinchas, the zealot

Pinchas killed the Israelite Zimri and his Midianite playmate Kosbi during an act of love in order to appease YHWH's anger at idolatry ( Num. 25 : 1-9  EU ). According to the biblical description, the Israelites committed this in Moab when they indulged in interreligious marriages and syncretism . Biblical historiography rated this as an apostasy from God and thus as a breach of the First Commandment .

During a stay at Shittim in the Jordan Valley near Jericho - the then area of ​​the Moabites , one of the peoples who lived in Canaan before Israel - the Israelites began to whore with the daughters of the Moabites (v. 1). These women led the men to sacrifice and worship their gods. Is called Baal -Peor , a male fertility gods Canaan.

This turning to strange gods aroused YHWH's anger, who demanded the execution of all those “superiors” who were guilty of idolatry. What is apparently meant - analogous to the story of the "Golden Calf" ( Ex 32.27  EU ) - the priests who are made responsible for the apostasy of the people.

After the religious leaders were killed as ordered, the congregation of Israel gathered in front of the tabernacle was mourned . In this situation an Israelite dared to bring his foreign wife, a Midianite woman , with him in front of the people. This aroused the zeal of Pinchas, who went after the man and pierced the couple in his own house with a spear: then the plague ceased among the children of Israel (v. 8).

Pinchas is praised in the text for his deed, since he averted the plague that threatened to destroy all of Israel. As a reward, the grandchildren of the chief priest received the promise of YHWH:

"See, I give him my covenant of peace, which is to give him and his descendants the eternal priesthood, because he was jealous for his God and made atonement for the children of Israel."

The following verses name the murdered people: The man was Zimri , a leader of the "Simeonites", an Israelite tribe that traced back to Simeon (one of the twelve sons of Jacob ); the woman was Kosbi , daughter of a clan chief among the Midianites. The closing verse reaffirms YHWH's command to take vengeance on them for the underhand ruse with which they led Israel to apostate from their God.

This vengeance is then described in Num 31  EU : There Pinchas appears as a priestly companion of the entire army of Israel of 12,000 men. The execution of the "ban" on the Midianites is then described: According to this, the Israelites killed all their able-bodied men, stole their cattle, their women and children and burned their cities (v. 9f.), As was the law of the time. In addition, Moses demanded that all boys and women who were already married be killed because they were responsible for the idolatry of Baal-Peor and the plague that followed. Then a report is given of the regular distribution of the prey.

Historical background

For modern ears, history is a barely veiled, massive justification for murdering people of different faiths. Pinchas is presented as a model of "zeal" for the true God precisely because of his deed. His act is only the prelude to the genocide against an entire neighboring people. That is why the priesthood descended from him will be endowed with divine blessings "forever".

The historical circumstances of this story are in the dark. It contains a number of inconsistencies:

  • In Num 25.4  EU states, Moses was to the "heads of the people" - that is probably the leader - executed. Thereupon (verse 5) Moses instructs the “judges” - including representatives - to punish all guilty parties. According to verse 1, the whole people would actually be affected. From verse 8 onwards there is also talk of a "plague". From the following census in Num 26.64  EU it follows for the literary context of the number book that with this plague, as announced, the last members of the desert generation died.
  • The Moabites at the beginning are no longer mentioned, but at the end equated with the Midianites as admirers of the "Baal-Peor". This is likely a secondary literary revision as the Moabites originally settled the fertile Jordan Valley while the Midianites settled the Sinai desert.
  • The Deuteronomic Law ( Dtn 20.10–15  EU ), contrary to the older version ( Num 3.6  EU ), expressly limits the ban order to men capable of military service, excludes women and requires prior peace negotiations. Apparently these laws were still unknown in the priestly tradition to which the Pinchas text can be assigned, or there was no agreement on their application. The more rigorous interpretation would have been based on a direct command from Moses.

Israel's relationship with the Midianites was originally close and amicable according to the Bible: They saved Moses from dying of thirst after his flight from Egypt ( Ex 2.16ff  EU ). He then married a Midianite woman - the daughter of the Midianite priest. In his country, on the Midianite mountain of God , he got to know the true God of Israel, the liberator from slavery ( Ex 3  EU ). According to the cult ideas of the Pinchaser story, Moses would have been guilty of idolatry and should have been killed accordingly.

The Baal-Peor mentioned, on the other hand, gives an indication of the actual background: It lies at a later time when the syncretism between the YHWH cult and the Baal cult in the already populated land of Canaan actually became a problem for the religious identity of Israel. This was the case after the collapse of the Davidic empire in the northern Reich of Israel. Mixing with the foreign women stands for the coexistence with the Canaanites and the identification of their gods with Israel's God, which was common at the time. Apparently a certain direction of the priests, who traced themselves back to Aaron, could only see an existential threat to all of Israel, which demanded a radical solution.

This could refer to the circle of prophets around Elijah and Elisha , who enforced the separation between YHWH and Baal under the Omrids (from 878 BC). Because there, too, a foreign woman, the Phoenician Queen Jezebel , wife of King Ahab , is held responsible for idolatry.

Pinchas became the type of “jealousy” for the true God: Later the Maccabees and Zealots also invoked him in their struggles for liberation against foreign cults and foreign oppression . Even Jesus of Nazareth was placed in this tradition by the early Christians because of his temple cleansing:

"His disciples remembered that it was written ( Ps 69.10  EU ): 'The zeal for my house has eaten me up.'"

In contrast to that of Pinchas, however, this zeal was not in a murderous context, but was intended to reduce the separation between Israelites and foreigners, which the Jerusalem sacrifice cult established, by chasing away the victim traffickers - that is, those who supported the descendants of Pinchas in the "eternal" The continuation of the sacrificial cult helped - symbolically just pick up.

See also

literature

  • Manfred Görg: Art. Pinhas. In: New Bible Lexicon. Volume III, 2001, pp. 151-152.
  • Martin Hengel : The Zealots. 2nd edition, Brill, Leiden / Cologne 1976, pp. 153-181.
  • Hanns-Martin Lutz, Hermann Timm and Eike Christian Hirsch (editors): Old Testament. Introductions, texts, comments. R. Piper Verlag, 1980, ISBN 3-492-02317-7 .
  • Jan Jaynes Quesada: Body Piercing: The Issue of Priestly Control over Acceptable Family Structure in the Book of Numbers. In: Biblical Interpretation. Volume 10, 2002, pp. 24-35.
  • Ronald Lee Rushing: Phinehas' Covenant of Peace. Diss., Dallas 1988.
  • Johannes Thon: Phinehas ben Eleazar. The Levitical priest at the end of the Torah (= work on the Bible and its history, volume 20). Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, Leipzig 2006, ISBN 3-374-02383-5 .

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