Numbers 25:10-13 New English Translation

The Aftermath

¹⁰The Lord spoke to Moses: ¹¹“Phinehas son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest, has turned my anger away from the Israelites, when he manifested such zeal^[a] for my sake among them, so that I did not consume the Israelites in my zeal.^[b] ¹²Therefore, announce:^[c] ‘I am going to give^[d] to him my covenant of peace.^[e] ¹³So it will be to him and his descendants after him a covenant of a permanent priesthood, because he has been zealous for his God,^[f] and has made atonement^[g] for the Israelites.’”

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Footnotes

Numbers 25:11 tn Heb “he was zealous with my zeal.” The repetition of forms for “zeal” in the line stresses the passion of Phinehas. The word “zeal” means a passionate intensity to protect or preserve divine or social institutions.
Numbers 25:11 tn The word for “zeal” now occurs a third time. While some English versions translate this word here as “jealousy” (KJV, ASV, NASB, NRSV), it carries the force of God’s passionate determination to defend his rights and what is right about the covenant and the community and parallels the “zeal” that Phinehas had just demonstrated.
Numbers 25:12 tn Heb “say.”
Numbers 25:12 tn Here too the grammar expresses an imminent future by using the particle הִנְנִי (hin^eni) before the participle נֹתֵן (noten)—“here I am giving,” or “I am about to give.”
Numbers 25:12 tn Or “my pledge of friendship” (NAB), or “my pact of friendship” (NJPS). This is the designation of the leadership of the priestly ministry. The terminology is used again in the rebuke of the priests in Mal 2.
Numbers 25:13 tn The motif is reiterated here. Phinehas was passionately determined to maintain the rights of his God by stopping the gross sinful perversions.
Numbers 25:13 sn The atonement that he made in this passage refers to the killing of the two obviously blatant sinners. By doing this he dispensed with any animal sacrifice, for the sinners themselves died. In Leviticus it was the life of the substitutionary animal that was taken in place of the sinners that made atonement. The point is that sin was punished by death, and so God was free to end the plague and pardon the people. God’s holiness and righteousness have always been every bit as important as God’s mercy and compassion, for without righteousness and holiness mercy and compassion mean nothing.

New English Translation (NET)