Numbers 25
About NumbersWritten by AI
Numbers takes its English name from the two counts of the people in chapters 1 and 26, but its Hebrew title, which means in the wilderness, fits it better. It picks up at Mount Sinai and follows Israel nearly forty years through the desert to the edge of the promised land. Tradition credits Moses with the book; many scholars think it was gathered and shaped over a longer time. Christians hold both views.
The big movement is a hard one. A generation that saw God rescue them from Egypt refuses to enter the land when they reach it, and they die in the wilderness. Their children, counted again at the end, stand ready to go in.
Watch how often the people complain and how often Moses prays for them. God is holy and judges sin, yet He keeps His promise. Even the hired prophet Balaam cannot curse them: “God is not a man, that He should lie.”
Before you read Numbers 25Written by AI
What Balaam could not do by cursing, Israel does to itself. At Shittim the men take part in sexual immorality with Moabite women and join the worship of Baal of Peor. A plague strikes. Phinehas, Aaron's grandson, acts with violent zeal to stop it, and God gives him a covenant of peace.
Moab Seduces Israel
While Israel was staying in Shittim, the men began to indulge in sexual immorality with the daughters of Moab, who also invited them to the sacrifices for their gods. And the people ate and bowed down to these gods. So Israel joined in worshiping Baal of Peor, and the anger of the LORD burned against them.
Then the LORD said to Moses, “Take all the leaders of the people and execute them in broad daylight before the LORD, so that His fierce anger may turn away from Israel.”
So Moses told the judges of Israel, “Each of you must kill all of his men who have joined in worshiping Baal of Peor.”
The Zeal of Phinehas
Just then an Israelite man brought to his family a Midianite woman in the sight of Moses and the whole congregation of Israel while they were weeping at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting. On seeing this, Phinehas son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest, got up from the assembly, took a spear in his hand, followed the Israelite into the tent, and drove the spear through both of them—through the Israelite and on through the belly of the woman.
So the plague against the Israelites was halted, but those who died in the plague numbered 24,000.
Then the LORD said to Moses, “Phinehas son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest, has turned My wrath away from the Israelites; for he was zealous for My sake among them, so that I did not consume the Israelites in My zeal. Declare, therefore, that I am granting him My covenant of peace. It will be a covenant of permanent priesthood for him and his descendants, because he was zealous for his God and made atonement for the Israelites.”
The name of the Israelite who was slain with the Midianite woman was Zimri son of Salu, the leader of a Simeonite family. And the name of the slain Midianite woman was Cozbi, the daughter of Zur, a tribal chief of a Midianite family.
And the LORD said to Moses, “Attack the Midianites and strike them dead. For they assailed you deceitfully when they seduced you in the matter of Peor and their sister Cozbi, the daughter of the Midianite leader, the woman who was killed on the day the plague came because of Peor.”