Today, I am reading and commenting on  Numbers 25-26.

Immediately after Balaam blessed the Israelites rather than curse them on behalf of Balak, the Moabite women began inviting Israelite men to join them in the worship of Baal of Peor.  This worship apparently involved sexual acts, and my reading of this passage leads me to believe that the Israelite men joined the worship of Baal in order to indulge in those sexual acts.  As a result of their worship of Baal of Peor, a plague broke out among the Israelites.  The plague led the Israelites to assemble before the tabernacle to call upon God for forgiveness and healing.  While they were so assembled a man from the tribe of Simeon brought a Midianite woman, to whom he was not married, passed the assembly and into his tent for sex.  This behavior indicated that those who were doing this had a brazen disregard for what others in the community thought of their behavior, or even for the consequences of their behavior for others.  When Aaron’s grandson killed this man and the woman he was dallying with, the passage tells us that the plague ended, but not before it killed 24,000 Israelites.   I had suggested that perhaps the plague which killed the ten unfaithful spies was a sexually transmitted disease.  In this passage I am confident that the plague mentioned was a sexually transmitted disease.

Now, this passage starts by telling us that the Moabite women invited the Israelite men to join their worship of Baal, but the woman who was killed at the end of the incident was a Midianite.  And, God told Moses they should treat the Midianites as enemies because of this incident.  I am unsure how we should interpret this.  However, the biblical references to the Midianites suggest that they were either a nomadic people, or a people who settled in among other peoples in the area, or perhaps both to varying degrees.  If that is correct, perhaps when opposition arose to Israelite men partaking in the worship of Baal Peor they stopped being able to go into Moabite towns to do so, but Midianite women came to them to continue the practice.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.