Pinchas: No One is Above the Law

This is the story of Pinchas.: God was very angry at the Israelites because they began to have relations with the Midianite women and worship the Midianite god. God sent a plague as punishment and ordered Moses to kill the leaders. Before Moses could act, Pinchas, a sanctuary guard, saw an Israelite man and a Midianite woman enter a tent together. He followed them, caught them in the act, and killed them both. God’s anger was appeased and the plague stopped.

This is a very disturbing story. Pinchas, who is neither a priest or a general, decides to take the law into his own hands and commit a double murder. Why? Because he thinks that God wants him to.

Luckily, Pinchas happens to be right. God rewards him with an eternal covenant of peace for what he did.

Unfortunately for all of us, Pinchas isn’t the only one who has committed murder in the name of God. Extremists of many religions, ours included, think that God wants them to kill the infidel. We all know the consequences.

Surely we don’t want to condone killing in the name of God. Neither did our rabbis.

Some of our rabbis were very critical of Pinhchas. They point out that Pinchas acted entirely on his own accord, entirely outside the law. He did not receive orders from Moses, God’s representative, or from anyone in authority. There was no trial. The accused didn’t have a chance to defend themselves. As a matter of fact, it is not clear that they were breaking any law at all, much less a law that demanded capital punishment.

Not only that, but Pinchas gave no warning. He didn’t say to the victims, Stop, or I’ll arrest you! He didn’t arrest them. He just killed them.

Our Jewish tradition is very clear about the importance of following the law. And Pinchas followed no law but his own. In the eyes of our tradition, of everything the Rabbis taught, Pinchas and people like him are a menace.

So why did God reward Pinchas with the eternal priesthood?

Distasteful and upsetting though it may be, Pinchas did in fact do the will of God, and saved the Israelites from God’s punishment.

But even though God praised Pinchas, we are not in a similar position. We cannot tell if someone is doing God’s will or not. If an alleged murderer is on trial and claims that he or she acted in the name of God, Jewish law doesn’t accept that as a defense.

Some of our rabbis said that for this very reason Moses and the elders were planning to excommunicate Pinchas, and that’s why God had to grant him a reward, to protect him from human justice.

Pinchas certainly has his defenders. A number of rabbis praise Pinchas for his zeal for God. They point out that he acted selflessly and out of pure motives in an emergency situation.

Others worry about the motive issue. They point out that what motivates a person is very hard to determine. For example, maybe Pinchas might have been motivated by a desire for fame or glory, or a desire to get a promotion. Even if he knew he was acting according to God’s will, he might still have killed for personal gain rather than purely for the love of God. The fact that God rewarded Pinchas tells us that his motives must have been pure, but we here on the ground couldn’t know that.

God is entitled to reward the zealot who defies the law out of the love of God, but we are not.

Our rabbis taught that if you want to know what God wants, you have to study not only the Torah, but the opinions of our scholars both ancient and modern. No zealot gets personal instructions from God to defy the law. No one is above the law.