The Kohen Who Never Died
Last week’s Torah reading ended with a certain Israelite hero slaying a flagrantly offending couple, thereby turning aside God’s wrath. The name of the hero is somewhat confusing. In English, it’s sometimes written as Phinehas, although Phineas used to be its regular spelling. In today’s Hebrew the name is usually pronounced Pinḥas, so that’s how I’ll spell it here. But I should add that it’s actually not a Hebrew name. Scholars aren’t sure of its etymology, but it is clearly of Egyptian origin; it seems to have been used to refer to the dark-skinned Nubians who dwelt in the south of Egypt, hence “southerner” or “dark-skinned one.”
This minor mystery is not the only one accompanying the story of Pinḥas. There is also the whole matter of the reward he received for his quick action. He was, this week’s reading reports, awarded a “covenant of eternal priesthood.” Being a priest (kohen in Hebrew) was certainly a great honor, but ancient interpreters were puzzled by this gift. After all, the Torah specifies that Pinḥas was Aaron’s grandson. Hadn’t the Torah already said that the descendants of Aaron would inherit the priesthood for all subsequent generations (Exod 28:1-4, 29:1-8, etc.)? If so, it would seem that God was rewarding Pinḥas by giving him something that was already his.
Some interpreters saw this “covenant of eternal priesthood” as referring not to the priesthood in general, but to the high priesthood; in other words, Pinḥas and his descendants would forever serve as high priests in the Temple. Ben Sira, a Jewish sage of the early second century BCE, thus wrote that God “established a law for him, a covenant of peace to uphold the sanctuary—that the high priesthood should be for him and his descendants forever” (Sir. 45:24 [Hebrew ms. B]).
But there was another possibility. Interpreters noticed that Pinḥas led an extraordinarily long life. Not only was he around after the death of Moses, but he is presented at the end of the book of Judges as still functioning as a priest in those days, standing before the ark of the covenant (Jud 20:28).
In fact, the Hebrew Bible contains no account of Pinḥas’ death. (The old Greek translation of the Bible does contain a brief notice of his passing in Joshua 24:33, but this seems to have been a later addition.) Not mentioning his death, interpreters reasoned, could hardly have been an accidental omission: surely the demise of such an honored figure, and someone who had survived so long since the days of Moses and Aaron, would have been marked with honored burial and an extended period of mourning, such as that decreed for his grandfather Aaron.
Interpreters thus came to the conclusion that Pinḥas didn’t die. At some point after his last appearance in the book of Judges, he must have ascended into heaven while he was still alive, just as Enoch and Elijah were said to have done. In other words, his “covenant of eternal priesthood” must have meant that he himself would be immortal, a priest for all eternity.
But if Pinḥas was eternal, why had he not been heard of since that fleeting mention of him in Jud 20:28?
Eventually, attention came to be focused on a later figure, a man who had been the fierce opponent of the corrupt King Ahab and Queen Jezebel: Elijah, Israel’s greatest northern prophet. For all his greatness, he had no last name: from his very first appearance in he was just “Elijah,” without the specification “son of X” (the equivalent of a last name in biblical times). Neither does the Bible contain an account of Elijah’s birth or childhood; he just shows up as a grown man. Could it be that this prophet was none other than Pinḥas redivivus? Pinḥas—the man who had been promised to be a priest forever—might simply have gone somewhere for a few centuries and then made his reappearance under a different name, a name that sounds like a holy man’s slogan (Elijah/Eliahu means “my God is the Lord”).
What is more, Pinḥas and Elijah shared a particular quality: they were both jealous (or “zealous”) for the Lord. In fact, the Bible uses nearly identical expressions for both men. God says of Pinḥas in Num 25:13 “because he has been zealous (qinnē) for his God,” and it is what Elijah says (twice!) about himself, “I have been extremely zealous/jealous (qanno qinnē’ti) for the Lord” (1 Kings 19:10, 14). Surely this could not be a coincidence!
So it was that midrash came to identify Pinḥas and Elijah as one and the same person, the kohen who never died. After he returned to earth for a time, Elijah/Pinḥas took up his place in heaven again; Elijah’s miraculous ascent into heaven on a fiery chariot is recounted 2 Kings 2.
And there, according to tradition, he remains to this day. When will he return to earth? The prophet Malachi reported God’s words on the subject: “For I will send to you the prophet Elijah, before the great and awesome day of the Lord. And he will return the mind of the fathers to their children, and the children’s minds back to their fathers” (Mal 3:12-14). To which Ben Sira added, “and he will reestablish the [lost] tribes of Israel” (Sir 48:11). In our own time?
Shabbat shalom!
