Numbers 25:11

Summary

The verse presents divine speech identifying Phinehas by his full genealogy (son of Eleazar, son of Aaron the priest) and stating that his action turned back God's rage from the Israelites. The verse explains this reversal through Phinehas's own "zeal," which paralleled God's "zeal," and concludes that this is why the Israelites were not destroyed.

Key words

• he.Shiv ("he has turned back", H7725I) — hiphil perfect, causative completed action; Phinehas is the causal agent who redirected the divine chamah.
• chamaTi ("my rage", H2534 with H9020 suffix) — construct noun with 1st person suffix, marking the rage as belonging to the speaker (God), not an abstract emotion.
• kan.'oO ("in his being zealous", H7065 with H9043 suffix) — piel infinitive with 3rd masculine suffix, expressing the manner/cause of the turning-back: "in his zealing."
• kin.'aTi ("my zeal", H7068 with H9020 suffix, appears twice, lines 20 and 32) — construct noun with 1st person suffix; the same root as line 17 but nominal, used first for Phinehas's zeal-object and then for God's own zeal.
• khiLiti ("I made an end of", H3615H) — piel perfect 1st person, negated by lo' ("not", H3808), expressing what did not happen to the Israelites.

What the text says

The Hebrew sentence structure places Phinehas's genealogical identification (words 1–7) as subject before the main verb heShiv (word 8), a hiphil perfect meaning "he has turned back" — a causative form indicating Phinehas actively redirected an existing state (the rage) rather than merely calming it. The object is chamaTi ("my rage", H2534), a noun in construct with the 1st person suffix, so the rage belongs grammatically to the speaker, God.

The causal clause beqan.'oO et qin'aTi betoKham (words 16–24) uses the same root qn' twice but in different grammatical forms: first as a piel infinitive with pronominal suffix (qan'o, "his zealing," word 17–18), referring to Phinehas's action, then as a construct noun with 1st person suffix (qin'aTi, "my zeal," words 20–21), referring to what Phinehas exercised or represented. The preposition be- (word 16) marking this clause indicates cause: "because of his zealing [with] my zeal." The final clause repeats the negation structure: lo' killiti ("I did not make an end of," words 26–27), a piel perfect of completed (non-)action, followed again by biqin'aTi ("in my zeal," word 32), closing the verse with the same term that opened the causal clause, forming a lexical frame around the concept of qin'ah ("zeal/jealousy", H7065/H7068).

Differences between versions

The LXX renders heShiv ("turned back") as κατέπαυσεν ("stopped, made cease"), a different verbal nuance than the causative "turning back" of the Hebrew hiphil. Where the Hebrew has two occurrences of the qn' root — Phinehas's qan'o (infinitive) and God's qin'ati (noun) — the LXX uses ζῆλος both times without the suffixed distinction, and its phrase ἐν τῷ τὸν ζῆλον ἐν αὐτοῖς is more compressed than the Hebrew's repeated construct chain. The Vulgate's zelo meo commotus est contra eos ("moved by my zeal against them") assigns the zeal explicitly to God as the moving cause of Phinehas, differing from the Hebrew syntax where Phinehas is the grammatical subject of the zealing (qan'o, "his zealing").