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According to the Hebrew Bible, Phinehas or Phineas (/ˈfɪniəs/; Hebrew: פִּינְחָס, Modern Pinəḥas Tiberian Pinchas) was a High Priest of Israel during The Exodus, the grandson of Aaron and son of Eleazar the High Priest (Exodus 6:25), who distinguished himself as a youth at Shittim by his zeal against the Heresy of Peor. He was displeased with the immorality with which the Moabites and Midianites had successfully tempted the people (Numbers 25:1-9) to worship Baal-peor, so he personally executed an Israelite man and a Midianite woman while they were together in the man's tent, running a spear or lance through the man and the belly of the woman and thus ending a plague said to have been sent by God to punish the Israelites for sexually intermingling with the Midianites. Phineas is commended for having stopped Israel's fall to idolatrous practices brought in by Midianite women, as well as for stopping the desecration of God's sanctuary. He is commemorated as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church on September 2.


The Oxford Guide to the Bible and Brown-Driver-Briggs' Hebrew and English Lexicon identify it as a variant of the Egyptian name Pa-nehasi. According to the former, "The Bible also uses Egyptian and Nubian names for the land and its people... For the Egyptians used to these color variations, the term for their southern neighbors was Nehesi, "southerner", which eventually also came to mean "the black" or "the Nubian". This Egyptian root (nhsj, with the preformative p' as a definite article) appears in Exodus 6.25 as the personal name of Aaron's grandson Phinehas (=pa-nehas)"[1] The Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament interprets the name to mean "the bronze-colored one".[2] Phinehas, like Moses and Nun lived in Egypt and their names were shared by the dominant culture there.

Hebrew audiences may have interpreted the meaning as a compound of Hebrew words: "peh" meaning mouth and "nhsh", a root which produces "nahash", which can mean "snake" or "omen". The root also yields "nehoshet" (copper), "nahush" (bronze) and "nehusha" (copper or bronze).[3]

Heresy of Peor[edit]




Later activities[edit]

Phinehas also led the Israelite army against the Midianites to avenge this occasion. Among those slain in the expedition were five Midianite kings and Balaam, son of Beor. According to the Israelite roll-calls, the Israelites did not lose a man in the expedition. (Numbers 31)




According to I Maccabees, he is an ancestor of Matitiyahu.

In Jewish culture[edit]




  3. ^ nahash


External links[edit]