Pinḥas פנחס
Parashat Pinḥas begins by completing the episode which began in Parashat Balak: Pinhas had ended the plague that was devastating the Israelites while they were seduced into idolatry by the Moabite and Midianite women. Pinhas’ reward for his zealotry was a “covenant of peace” (Num. 25:12) and “lasting priesthood” (25:13).
The parasha then moves on to the second census in the book, this time of the new generation that would enter the land. There then follow two narratives, one about the daughters of Tzlofhad and God’s positive reply to their request for a share in the land, the second about Moses’ request that God appoint a successor. The parasha ends with two chapters about the sacrifices to be brought at different times, daily, weekly, monthly, and on festivals.
The first of the essays looks at Judaism’s understanding of the zealot, typified by Pinhas and in a later age by the prophet Elijah. The second analyses why the act of a zealot cannot serve as the basis for a general rule of conduct. The third is about an unusual feature of the Torah text at the beginning of chapter 26, immediately prior to the census. It contains a piska be’emtza pasuk, a chapter break in the middle of a sentence. I argue that this is a kind of audible silence in the narrative, marking a point at which words fail. The fourth asks whether a positive message may be inferred from the fact that Moses was unable to hand on his leadership role to either of his sons. The fifth suggests some of the leadership lessons to be learned from the narrative in which Joshua is chosen as Moses’ successor. The sixth analyses an apparently redundant text from which, I argue, an important leadership principle can be inferred.
The Zealot
With Pinhas, a new type of character entered the world of Israel: the zealot. “Pinhas son of Eleazar, son of Aaron, the priest, has turned My anger away from the Israelites by being zealous with My zeal in their midst so that I did not put an end to them in My zeal” (Num. 25:11). He was followed, many centuries later, by the one other figure in Tanakh described as a zealot, the prophet Elijah. Asked by God on Mount Horeb, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” Elijah replied, “I have been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty” (I Kings 19:14). In fact, tradition associates these two men: “Pinhas is Elijah,” say the sages.1Yalkut Shimoni I:771.
Pinhas, says a Targum, “became an angel who lives forever and will be the harbinger of redemption at the End of Days.”2Targum Yonatan to Num. 25:12.
What is fascinating is how Judaism – both biblical and post-biblical – dealt with the idea of the zealot. Recall the two contexts. First was that of Pinhas. Having failed to curse the Israelites, Balaam eventually devised a strategy that succeeded. He persuaded the Moabite women to seduce Israelite men and then lure them into idolatry.3See Num. 31:16.
This evoked intense divine anger, and a plague broke out among the Israelites.
To make matters worse, Zimri, a leader of the tribe of Simeon, brought a Midianite woman into the camp where they flagrantly and publicly engaged in intimacy. This was an extraordinary breakdown of order within the camp. God had already told Moses to punish the leaders of the people in full view of the nation as a whole to restore order. In light of this, Zimri’s defiance was one of the most blatant in the Torah, comparable to that of Datan and Aviram at the time of the Korah rebellion. Only radical action could save the people at that moment.
That is what Pinhas did. Sensing that Moses felt powerless – he had himself married a Midianite woman4According to the sages (Sanhedrin 82a), it was this fact, that Moses had married a Midianite woman, that caused him to forget the law that Pinhas remembered. – Pinhas seized the initiative and stabbed and killed both Zimri and the woman, Cozbi. This stopped the plague, brought by divine anger, in which 24,000 Israelites had already died. The text makes clear what might have happened otherwise. God told Moses, “Pinhas son of Eleazar, son of Aaron, the priest, has turned My anger away from the Israelites by being zealous with My zeal in their midst so that I did not put an end to them in My zeal” (Num. 25:11). Pinhas, in other words, saved the people from destruction.
The story of Elijah is set many centuries later. It begins with the accession of Ahab to the throne of the northern kingdom, Israel. The king had married Jezebel, daughter of the king of Sidon, and under her influence introduced Baal worship into the kingdom, building a pagan temple and erecting a pole in Samaria honouring the Ugaritic mother goddess Asherah. Jezebel, meanwhile, was organising a programme of killing the prophets of the Lord (I Kings 18). The Bible says of Ahab that “he did more evil in the eyes of the Lord than any of those before him” (16:30).
Elijah announced that there would be a drought to punish the king and the Baal-worshipping nation. Confronted by Ahab, Elijah challenged him to gather the 450 prophets of Baal to a test at Mount Carmel. When all were present, Elijah set out the terms of the test. They and he would prepare sacrifices and call on God. The one who sent fire from heaven would be demonstrated to have been the true God. The Baal prophets did so and called on their god, but nothing happened. In a rare show of scornful jesting – zealots are not often known for their sense of humour – Elijah told them to cry louder. Maybe, he said, Baal is busy or travelling or having a sleep. The false prophets worked themselves into a frenzy, gashing themselves until their blood flowed, but still nothing happened. Elijah then prepared his sacrifice and had the people douse it three times with water to make it harder to burn. He then called on God. Fire immediately descended from heaven, consuming the sacrifice. The people, awestruck, cried out, “The Lord – He is God! The Lord – He is God!” (I Kings 18:39), words we say nowadays at the climax of Ne’ila at the end of Yom Kippur. The people then killed the prophets of Baal. God had been vindicated, and idolatry shown to be a sham.
Pinhas and Elijah were religious heroes. They stepped into the breach at a time when the nation was facing religious and moral crisis and palpable divine anger. They acted while everyone else, at best, watched. They risked their lives by so doing. There can be little doubt that the mob might have turned against them and attacked them. Indeed, after the trial at Mount Carmel, Jezebel let it be known that she intended to have Elijah killed. Both men acted for the sake of God and the religious welfare of the nation. And God Himself is called “zealous” many times in the Torah. Zealousness must therefore be a virtue, or so it seems.
Yet the treatment of the two men in both the Written and Oral Torah is deeply ambivalent. God rewarded Pinhas by giving him “My covenant of peace” (Num. 25:12), intimating that God would ensure that he never again acted the part of a zealot. Indeed, some years later in the days of Joshua, he played a vital role as a diplomatic man of peace by averting a civil war between the rest of the Israelites and the two-and-a-half tribes – Reuben, Gad, and half of Menashe – who had settled to the east of the Jordan (Josh. 22).
As for Elijah, he was implicitly rebuked by God in one of the great scenes of the Bible. He had won the confrontation at Mount Carmel. But the story does not end there. Jezebel issued a warrant for his death. Elijah escaped to Mount Horeb. There he received a unique vision. He witnessed a whirlwind, then an earthquake, then a fire. But he was led to understand that God was not in these things. Then God spoke to him in a “still, small voice,” and told him to appoint Elisha as his successor (I Kings 19:9–16).
The episode is enigmatic, and made all the more so by a strange feature of the text. Immediately before the vision, God asked, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” and Elijah replied, “I am moved by zeal for the Lord, the God of Hosts” (I Kings 19:9–10). Immediately after the vision, God asked the same question, and Elijah gave the same answer (I Kings 19:13–14). A midrash turns the text into a dialogue:
Elijah: The Israelites have broken God’s covenant.
God: Is it then your covenant?
Elijah: They have torn down Your altars.
God: But were they your altars?
Elijah: They have put Your prophets to the sword.
God: But you are alive.
Elijah: I alone am left.
God: Instead of hurling accusations against Israel, should you not have pleaded their cause?5Song of Songs Rabba 1:6.
The meaning of the midrash is that God expects His prophets to be defenders, not accusers. The prophetic task of getting people to change is best done not through violent confrontation, but by gentleness and the word softly spoken. Elijah, by giving the same answer after the vision as he had done before it, showed that he had not understood that God was telling him to adopt the way of the “still, small voice” in the future. As a result, God then told him that someone else must take his place. Elijah must hand his mantle on to Elisha. We can now define both what is great about the zealot and what is intensely dangerous. The zealot acts the part of God. Rashi, commenting on the phrase, “Pinhas…has turned My anger away from the Israelites by being zealous with My zeal,” interprets this to mean that God was saying that Pinhas had “executed My vengeance and showed the anger I should have shown” (Rashi to Num. 25:11). He had done what normally only God would do. The zealot, on his own initiative, acts on behalf of God. But human beings are not God. They do not know what God knows. That is why, in the biblical age in general, people either awaited God’s instruction or availed themselves of the normal process of the law.
Pinhas and Elijah did not wait. In their view, the nation was facing an immediate crisis and they had to act firmly, decisively, and without mercy. They were heroes of the spiritual life. Yet both were implicitly reprimanded by God. God did not say that they were wrong to do what they did. To the contrary, God praised Pinhas and answered Elijah’s prayer. But He also made it clear that once was enough. Pinhas was now to take on the role of priesthood and the way of peace. Elijah was told that the time had come to appoint his successor.
In general we are commanded to “walk in God’s ways” and imitate His attributes. “Just as He is merciful and compassionate, so you be merciful and compassionate.”6Mekhilta, Parashat Beshallaḥ 3.
But note that the command specifies mercy and compassion. It does not include vengeance and punishment. God, who knows all, may execute sentence without a trial, but we, being human, may not. Punishment “by the hand of Heaven” does not operate on the same logic as punishment “by human hand.” There are forms of justice that are God’s domain, not ours.
There is, of course, an exception – namely, the law of rodef, the “pursuer.” If you see someone about to kill someone else, you may and should stop him, even, if there is no other alternative, at the cost of his life (Sanhedrin 73a). The rodef, by actively endangering the life of another, has to that extent forfeited his own right to life. The question is: Can there be a rodef vis-à-vis society as a whole? That, it seems, is how Pinhas regarded Zimri, and Elijah the prophets of Baal. They were actively endangering the nation. The danger posed by a rodef is immediate. It cannot be dealt with by normal processes of the law. That is why Pinhas and Elijah acted as they did.
Both were vindicated by God. But God also made it clear that they should never act that way again. The zealot who takes the law into his own hands is embarking on a course of action fraught with moral danger. Only the most holy may do so, only once in a lifetime, and only in the most dire circumstances: when the nation is at risk, when there is nothing else to be done and no one else to do it. As we will see in the next essay, the rabbis ruled that Pinhas’ act was a case of halakha ve’ein morin ken, meaning that it may have been within the law, but if someone were to ask whether he or she may act likewise, the answer would be no.
There were times when zealots saved the Jewish people. The most obvious example is the uprising of the Maccabees against the Seleucid Greeks in the war we commemorate on Ḥanukka. But there were other times when zealots did great harm. One such case was the assassination of Gedalia ben Ahikam, appointed by the Babylonians as governor of Judea after the destruction of the First Temple. Gedalia had begun the reconstruction of Jewish life after the catastrophe of conquest, but was regarded by some extremists as a traitor and a servant of Israel’s enemies. As a result of the assassination, many of the Jews still in Judea were forced to flee to Egypt, devastating Jewish life in what remained of the holy land.
A second disaster was the campaign of the Jewish zealots against the Romans in late Second Temple times. Just as the people had ignored the advice of the prophet Jeremiah in the sixth century BCE, so they ignored the advice of moderates like Rabban Yoḥanan b. Zakkai in the first century CE, and the result was the destruction of the Second Temple. Josephus, an eyewitness to the Roman siege of Jerusalem, tells us that the zealots spent much of their time attacking their fellow Jews, thus weakening the nation when strength was essential.
A third example, in our own times, was the assassination of the prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, by a zealot, Yigal Amir, who apparently believed that Rabin was a rodef who was endangering the nation by pursuing a peace process that might put Israel’s future safety at risk.
Not everyone is a Pinhas or an Elijah, and even Pinhas and Elijah were not allowed to repeat their zealous deeds. It is exceptionally dangerous to believe you have privileged access to the mind of God and that you have the right to act on His behalf. God is God and humans are all too human. That is why legal and political processes exist, and why the zealot, who circumvents both, is often more of a danger than the danger he claims to avert.
Not by accident did tradition fix the parasha break between Parashat Balak and Parashat Pinḥas at the most counterintuitive point, between Pinhas’ act (Num. 25:6–9) and the divine verdict on the act (Num. 25:10–15). The result is that we are forced to wait a week before hearing whether he did right or wrong. It is as if the sages wanted us to live with that ambiguity so that we would not too readily conclude that Pinhas was a hero. He was, but his act was fraught with moral hazard. How so is the subject of the next essay.