1. Shittim. The name means “acacias.” The full place-name, given in 33:49, is Abel-Shittim, which means “brook of the acacias.”

began to go whoring with the daughters of Moab. The sexual metaphor of “whoring” (verbal stem z-n-h) is regularly used in the Bible to represent Israel’s betrayal of cultic fidelity to its own God. This figurative usage leads Baruch Levine to argue that no actual sexual activity is involved in the present episode. That inference, however, is implausible because it offers no explanation of how or why it is the “daughters” (banot, “young women”) of Moab who lure the Israelite men to worship their god. Our story is rather an instance in which the literal sense of the verb “to whore” leads to the figurative sense. Rashi catches this double usage in the following vivid vignette: “When he was seized by his sexual impulse and said, ‘Submit to me,’ she would pull out an image of Peor from her lap and say to him, ‘Bow down to this.’”

2. they called. The verb here has the technical sense of “invited.”

3. And Israel clung to Baal Peor. There is no obvious link, beyond the trans-Jordanian setting, between this episode of cultic infidelity and the preceding tale of Balaam, and, indeed, the Baal Peor story seems clearly the product of another hand, or in fact, of other hands. The editorial decision, however, to insert this material here reflects the general predisposition of biblical literature to represent Israel dialectically. If in Balaam’s oracles Israel is a unique and indomitable nation, here it is pathetically vulnerable to the seductions of the surrounding pagan world. Perhaps most ironically apposite from Balaam’s oracles is the grand declaration that Israel is “a people that dwells apart.” Now, immediately after that oracle, the Israelites show how intertwined they can be with their pagan neighbors, both sexually and cultically. Baal is the Canaanite god of the fields: Baal Peor means the Baal who is venerated at Peor. (One wonders whether the story puns sexually on that place-name, which can be related to the Hebrew verb that means “to gape open.”) Jacob Milgrom notes that this is the first mention in the Bible of Baal, a deity whose worship became widespread only in the latter half of the second millennium B.C.E., and he also observes that the story reflects the fact that Israel has now come to the borders of Canaan, where it will be in contact with the Canaanite peoples.

4. impale them to the LORD before the sun. The clear implication of this grim command is that the public impaling of the Israelite leaders is conceived in quasiritual terms, “to the LORD,” as a kind of expiatory sacrifice or execution. In what follows, there is no report that this order of execution is carried out.

5. the judges of Israel. The Hebrew shoftim could mean “magistrates” or simply “leaders,” but in any case this has to be a group distinct from the “chiefs” (or “heads,” raʾshim) just mentioned.

Each of you kill his men who cling to Baal Peor. Moses seems to alter God’s instructions that the chiefs of the people be killed. Milgrom sees this as another instance of Moses’s acting as intercessor, in this case making only the malefactors the objects of the order of execution.

6. the Midianite woman. The story began with Moabite women, not Midianites, but this may reflect an assimilation of the two contiguous peoples rather than a confusion. In the story of Balaam, the Moabite delegation that comes to Balaam includes Midianite elders.

8. into the alcove . . . in her alcove. The Hebrew qubah is unique to this text, but it has been linked with the Arabic qubbe, which is a small tent of red leather used for cultic purposes, or, alternately, for conjugal purposes. (The English “alcove” actually derives from the Arabic al-qubbe.) The contention that the term refers here to the Tabernacle, and hence that a violation of the Israelite sanctum is at issue, is strained because the Tabernacle (mishkan) is nowhere else referred to as qubah. The second occurrence of qubah in this verse, if one follows the Masoretic vocalization, appears to be the same word, though it obviously puns on qebah, “belly.” One is warranted to understand the second “alcove” as a rather transparent euphemisim for the woman’s sexual part: she is stabbed in her “alcove.” Several of the medieval commentators follow this line of interpretation, invoking the principle of measure for measure.

and the scourge was held back. There was no previous mention of a scourge, and God’s orders to kill the Israelite chiefs might seem to exclude the use of a scourge as the agency of punishment. “The LORD’s flaring wrath,” (verse 4) however, may imply scourge, as it does in the parallel episode of the Golden Calf.

12. I hereby grant him My covenant of peace. Many understand the Hebrew briti shalom as “My covenant of friendship” (or “of fellowship”). In any event, there is some ironic dissonance between Phinehas’s bloody act of retribution and this covenant of shalom between his descendants and God. This is not the only instance in which members of the priestly caste figure as militant—indeed, military—champions of the LORD’s exclusive cult. Such militancy scarcely reflects the role of the priests in later Israelite history, though it may express an image of their stern authority that they sought to impress on the people.

14–15. Zimri son of Salu chieftain of the Simeonite father’s house . . . Cozbi daughter of Zur, who was chieftain of the leagues of fathers’ houses in Midian. The information about the name and lineage of the two culprits, given only at the end of the story, casts retrospective light on the implications of their act. This is not any “man of the Israelites,” as we might have thought, but a Simeonite prince, cohabiting with a Midianite princess. The targeting of the Israelite chiefs for execution is perhaps to be understood in this connection: the sexual conjunction of an Israelite prince and a Midianite princess is not merely an encounter of desire between two individuals but a treacherous model for the populace on both sides, an emblem of the religious and sexual amalgamation of the two peoples. Her name, whatever actual Midianite provenance it might have, clearly points to the Hebrew root k-z-b, “to deceive” or “to lie.” In all this, it is notable that Moses, who leaves the bloody work of execution to Phinehas, is himself married to the daughter of a Midianite priest, a figure who, far from promoting Baal, speaks of YHWH in virtually monotheistic terms. The Israelite attitude toward its neighbors appears to have oscillated over time and within different ideological groups between xenophobia, a fear of being drawn off its own spiritual path by its neighbors, and an openness to alliance and interchange with the surrounding peoples.