THIS PARASHAH STARTS in a significant place: in the aftermath of the momentous events at Peor. One would think that the reward of Phinehas should have concluded the last parashah instead of starting a new one. But this new parashah is about the future; specifically, changes God makes for the future, changes that affect the priesthood, the government, and the women of Israel.
Concerning Phinehas. A more literal translation of v. 11 may make it easier to understand why Phinehas is rewarded for his violent act. Phinehas “was zealous for יהוה’s zeal.” Kinah (“zeal” or “jealousy”) is the furious sense of righteous indignation that one may feel when one has been betrayed by someone who owed one allegiance and fidelity.
A husband may feel “a fit of jealousy” (5:14), and Israel is warned many times that God is a “jealous God” (Exodus 20:5; 34:14; Deuteronomy 4:24; 5:9; Joshua 24:19) and that this “jealousy” may make God utterly destroy Israel if they abandon God (Deuteronomy 6:14–15). Now God’s wrath has been kindled and a plague is raging within the Israelite camp when Phinehas steps in to prevent God from wiping out all of Israel. Like Elijah, who is also “zealous for יהוה” (I Kings 19:10), Phinehas empathizes with God’s rage and acts it out. He acts with violence to stop violence, like setting a backfire to stop a wildfire.
Phinehas’s action works. But in the new world that this parashah is setting up, God does not want to perpetuate the cycle of violence. And so, even in the act of rewarding Phinehas, God establishes a new order by granting him a “covenant of peace” (shalom, not “friendship”) in 25:12. The eternal priesthood will create peace and reconciliation, not by killing evildoers but by the sacrificial system. Their violence is limited to killing an animal—the bloodshed confined to dashing the blood on the altar. Once again, a careful translation brings out the meaning: “he and his seed will have a covenant of eternal priesthood because he was zealous for his God, and he will make atonement for the Children of Israel” (25:13).
Phinehas has been much discussed in our tradition. Psalm 106:30 states only that Phinehas stood in prayer and thus stopped the plague. During the Maccabean period, Phinehas was the model for Mattathias, who also acted with zeal for God (I Maccabees 2:26, 50–64). Eventually, the Rabbis became uncomfortable with the idea of people taking the law into their own hands, and they transformed even the image of Phinehas into a calm presenter of legal argument. In their assessment of this parashah, although recognizing Phinehas’s pure motives, they frame his act as part of the past—never to be repeated—but rather to be replaced by the ordinary actions of priests.
In this parashah the priests figure also in the new role for the leader. Moses appoints Joshua his successor, but with a difference: Joshua will not have all of Moses’ powers. Instead, Joshua is a temporal ruler, neither priest nor prophet. But the priests, using the Urim and Thummim, will channel God’s commands (27:21).
Concerning the Daughters of Zelophehad. Part of this new world order involves the right of brotherless women to inherit their father’s land. This decision is similar to the ancient Greek rule of the epi-klara, who also inherits her father’s land and must marry her kin. Often we assume that this makes the women just a “place marker,” holding the empty place in the paternal succession; but the story of the Shunammite in II Kings 4 and 8 shows how important it is to a woman to hold land. The wealthy Shunammite becomes the prophet Elisha’s benefactor; when he offers a reward, she responds, “I live among my own kin” (II Kings 4:13). Unusually, she has not left her kin to live with her husband’s family. Alone among the childless women of the Bible, she is not actively seeking a child. (However, once she gives birth, she is fiercely protective of her son.) Later, Elisha warns her of famine; she leaves the land and returns seven years later to petition the king to give her back her property. She comes to cry for “her land and her field,” and the king instructs, “Return to her all that is hers.” In a comparable situation elsewhere in the Bible, the land Naomi seeks to sell is carefully called “the portion of field that belonged to our brother Elimelech” (Ruth 4:3), and the property is called “all that was Elimelech’s” (Ruth 4:8). The fact that the Shunammite’s land is hers and that she lives among her people suggests that she is a latter-day daughter of Zelophehad: she lives among her own kin, and her land belongs to her. And what a difference this makes: she is independent in her actions and not worried about her lack of children. The economic security of owning her own land gives her independence from her husband; she neither asks his permission to be Elisha’s patron nor to seek the prophet as a client. The Shunammite may be an example of how women act when the economic constraints of patriarchy are removed. This is why she is identified by place rather than by name or as “Mrs. Somebody.” Shunem is her village—the village of her father’s household and the village where she lives as an adult woman, the locale of the land that she owns. She is a woman of place and—by contrast—she shows how significant the lack of such place is to most women’s history.
The limitation of women’s property rights is the economic linchpin of patriarchal structure. The basic fact that women did not normally own land in ancient Israel made them economically dependent on men—first on their fathers, then on their husbands, and ultimately on their sons. But the daughters of Zelophehad—and the rule that they initiated—let some women escape this dependence.
—Tikva Frymer-Kensky