Parshah Commentary

This week’s parshah opens in the aftermath of a shocking episode of violence: Pinchas, the grandson of the high priest Aaron, has summarily executed an Israelite man and a Midianite woman having sex. The pair, both of noble birth, had paraded before Moses and the broader Israeli community, brazenly declaring their promiscuous intentions. The murdered man, Zimri ben Salu, is the only Israelite offender whose name is recorded in relation to this incident, but the Torah tells us that he was just one of many men who had attached themselves to Baal Peor, a local Canaanite god, in a lustful frenzy for Moabite and Midianite women. This staggering social breakdown had prompted a deadly plague that felled tens of thousands of Israelites, until Pinchas’s intervention ended the maelstrom of sex, idolatry, and divine wrath.

The frenzy that culminated in Pinchas’s bloody action was a toxic stew brewed of several ingredients, but what ultimately drove Pinchas to plunge his spear into the offending couple was the blatant mingling of sex and idolatry. (The Talmud, in imagining how this linkage worked, describes Moabite women producing small idols from under their clothes at the height of an Israelite man’s arousal, demanding: “First, worship this!”). The story thus revolves around sexual desire for outsiders and ties that desire to exploitation, trickery, humiliation, false gods, and, finally, submission to the enemy Moabite and Midianite peoples. Israelite men who should have been proud warriors are instead dominated—yoked like oxen, as various commentators describe it—by foreign women and their gods. Pinchas is the valiant restorer of Israelite masculinity; with the vivid symbol of his spear through the lovers’ genitals, he brutally reinscribes Israelite male domination, as well as the domination of the Israelite’s conquering God. 

Until the past century, rabbinic Judaism, along with Jewish cultural tradition, tended to regard some aspects of this narrative as vestiges of a bygone age, relics that could be passed over or ignored. The God of conquest was, for a long time, abandoned in favor of God the merciful teacher; the ideal of masculine domination was discarded, and values of cleverness and subversion (based in the mythical underdog figures of Jacob and Joseph) became important ideals instead. But certain elements of our parshah persisted through the centuries in Jewish culture—namely, the association between love of foreign women and love of foreign gods.

This coupling echoes throughout biblical texts that use the Hebrew root “z-n-h” to refer to “whoring after” both women and foreign gods. It appears in the story of King Solomon, who eventually succumbs to idol worship under the sway of his foreign wives, and it is codified in the Second Temple-era principle of matrilineal descent (“partus sequitur ventrem”)—the precept that children of gentile mothers are themselves gentiles., We also see this tendency in contemporary American Jewish culture—for example, in the regrettable slogan “shiksas are for practice,” a phrase by which young Jewish men reenact the depravity of Zimri, who consorted with an outsider out of adolescent defiance instead of love and respect, thus succumbing to the idolatry of dehumanization.

This persistent identification of women and idolatry entails not simply a rejection of sexual relations with gentiles, but an abiding misogyny that tangles female sexuality with deceit, and a bifurcation of male sexual desire into licit and illicit, inside and outside, socially constructive and socially destructive. Prohibition turns the subject, as well as the object, of forbidden sexual desire into an empty husk—what Audre Lorde would call the victory of the pornographic over the erotic. A man’s desire for a woman becomes a symbol of either submission or rebellion instead of a moment of human connection. For Zimri, the Midianite princess is a vessel for his mutiny. Pinchas takes urgent action to disrupt this dynamic, but his methods are fatally flawed. By responding through violence, he reinforces the bifurcated dynamic, using the woman as a vessel, just as Zimri did, though for his authority and control rather than defiance. 

So where do we find ourselves in this story, if not in Zimri’s rebellion or in Pinchas’s zeal? We might find our answer in the reaction of Moses, who stood and cried while Zimri openly flaunted his leadership. Why did Moses not act—castigate the sinner, issue an order to have him stopped, physically bar his entry into the tent with the Midianite woman? A Rabbinic tradition, attempting to explain Moses’s inaction, tells of how Zimri confronted Moses: “Was not the woman you married herself a Midianite?” Moses had no response. Perhaps he felt personally implicated, but perhaps he had the advantage of a prophet’s perspective. He knew that anxiety around the seductive danger of the outsider was a creature of its time, an injunction born in the desert and meant to consolidate Israelite identity; it was, after all, until only recently that marrying an outsider was considered a benign choice. (Ironically, according to one tradition, Pinchas himself had a Midianite mother.) 

Moses may also have sensed that, in only a few generations, a Moabite woman named Ruth—who, the Talmud teaches, was descended from Balak, a king of Moab—would seduce an Israelite man, leading to the creation of the Davidic line. The presence of both Moabite and Midianite women in our broader story of Jewish history affirms the connection between the Torah’s heterogeneous beginnings (Moses with his Midianite family) and the promised redemption (the Messiah, the tradition goes, will be a descendent of King David, born of Moab). Rather than being compromised by his own hypocrisy, then, Moses may be disoriented by a kind of prophetic fugue state. He is facing an interregnum of indefinite duration, in which attraction to outsiders and connection across difference are seen as threatening. But, we might infer, he knows they have redemptive potential, and that redemption will only be possible when outsiders are welcomed as family.

As for us, we must count ourselves not among the descendants of Pinchas, vigilant in enforcing a warped erotic order, but as children of Ruth, set on healing and restoring it.

Avi Garelick is a researcher and organizer based in Washington Heights, New York.