Numbers 25:1–3

Footnotes

1. 1 Chapter 25 tells of Israel’s sins on the steppes of Moab, and God’s punishment. In the overall plan of the book, here we have another possible threat to God’s program, although here it comes from within the camp (Balaam was the threat from without). If the Moabites could not defeat them one way, they would try another. The chapter has three parts: fornication (vv. 1–3), God’s punishment (vv. 4–9), and aftermath (vv. 10–18). See further G. E. Mendenhall, The Tenth Generation, 105–21; and S. C. Reif, “What Enraged Phinehas? A Study of Numbers 25:8,” 90 (1971): 200–206.
2. 2 This first preterite is subordinated to the next as a temporal clause; it is not giving a parallel action, but the setting for the event.
3. 3 The account apparently means that the men were having sex with the Moabite women. Why the men submitted to such a temptation at this point is hard to say. It may be that as military heroes the men took liberties with the women of occupied territories.
4. 4 The verb simply says “they called,” but it is a feminine plural. And so the women who engaged in immoral acts with Hebrew men invited them to their temple ritual.
5. 5 What Israel experienced here was some of the debased ritual practices of the Canaanite people. The act of prostrating themselves before the pagan deities was probably participation in a fertility ritual, nothing short of cultic prostitution. This was a blatant disregard of the covenant and the Law. If something were not done, the nation would have destroyed itself.
6. 6 The verb is “yoked” to Baal-peor. The word is unusual, and may suggest the physical, ritual participation described below. It certainly shows that they acknowledge the reality of the local god. The evidence indicates that Moab was part of the very corrupt Canaanite world, a world that was given over to the fertility ritual of the times.