This week’s annual cycle Torah reading is parsha “Pinchas,” Numbers 25:10-30:1) and it contains what is sometimes perhaps one of the most perplexing stories in the Torah, that of the cohen or priest Pinchas, who runs through two open idolators with a spear, and is awarded the eternal “Covenant of Peace (Shalom)” by YHVH Himself for the effort.
The Erev Shabbat reading:
The Sabbath Day midrash is all about the ‘apparent’ contradiction. Actually, contradictions, plural:
How can a man be given that eternal Covenant of Shalom for what some might call “murder”? And, given the context, and history, this is also a man who is often thought to be a “type and shadow” of the then-coming Messiah Himself. Can Pinchas somehow be a role model? And what are the parameters, the indications, for anyone else to do anything of the sort?
No wonder it’s been called “problematic.”
And yet the story is undeniable. The connections to the prophet Eliyahu, or Elijah, who was also notably “zealous” (the Hebrew word is the same, as Mark points out) for YHVH are dramatic, and referenced in both the haftorah selection, and even Paul’s commentary in Romans 11.
And Eliyahu, too, had a hand in the deaths of SO many pagan “priests of Baal.”
How do we connect these dots?
“Pinchas: Yahuah’s Covenant of Peace – at the Point of a Spear”
The combined two-part reading and Sabbath midrash:
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