Phinehas

According to the Hebrew Bible, Phinehas or Phineas (; , Phinees, ) was a priest during the Israelites' Exodus journey. The grandson of Aaron and son of Eleazar, the High Priests, he distinguished himself as a youth at Shittim with his zeal against the heresy of Peor. Displeased with the immorality with which the Moabites and Midianites had successfully tempted the Israelites to inter-marry and to worship Baal-peor, Phinehas personally executed an Israelite man and a Midianite woman while they were together in the man's tent, running a javelin or spear through the man and the belly of the woman, bringing to an end the plague sent by God to punish the Israelites for sexually intermingling with the Midianites. Phinehas is commended by God in Numbers 25:10–13, as well as King David in for having stopped Israel's fall into idolatrous practices brought in by Midianite women, as well as for stopping the desecration of God's sanctuary. After the entry to the land of Israel and the death of his father, he was appointed the third High Priest of Israel, and served at the sanctuary of Bethel. Name The name "Phinehas" probably comes from the Egyptian name Pa-nehasi (pꜣ-nḥsj). According to the Oxford Companion to the Bible, "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 Neḥesi, 'southerner', which eventually also came to mean 'the black' or 'the Nubian'. This Egyptian root (nḥsj, with the preformative pʾ as a definite article) appears in Exodus 6.25 as the personal name of Aaron's grandson, Phinehas (= Pa-neḥas)". The Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament interprets the name to mean "the bronze-colored one".