Numbers 25 famously tells the story of Pinchas who, in the midst of a divine plague sent to punish the Israelites for involving themselves with Midianite women and their gods, slaughtered Zimri and his Midianite paramour Kozbi, mid-coitus. It would be difficult to imagine this account becoming any more dramatic, violent or X-rated if today’s daf didn’t do just that. The rabbis describe Zimri and Kozbi’s affair with excruciating metaphor and imagery. They add gratuitous violence, like Zimri dragging Kozbi by her hair. And they heighten the sexual charge with Pinchas feigning interest in the debauchery and using the point of his spear to give the appearance of an erection.

But perhaps the most surprising moment in this expansion of the Pinchas narrative is a legal one. Zimri belligerently asks Moses why he should be prohibited from sex with a non-Jewish woman such as Kozbi when Moses himself is married to a non-Israelite woman:

Son of Amram, is this woman forbidden or permitted? And if you say that she is forbidden, as for the daughter of Yitro to whom you are married, who permitted her to you?

We might imagine Moses flustered by the audacity of this attack. Forty years ago he faced a similar rebel in Korach, but in a sense Korach’s challenge was the opposite. Korach claimed, “The whole community is holy” — and not just Moses. Zimri is saying, in effect: I am depraved, but so are you. He’s saying that while holding a woman by her hair, having already propositioned her in front of thousands of his fellow tribesmen. Moses is 119 years old, and is being asked to compare this violent sexual relationship to the loving marriage he has shared with Zipporah for decades. It’s not surprising that, in this account, he is at a loss to answer Zimri’s challenge.

The halakhah eluded Moses. The whole sanhedrin broke out into weeping, and so it is written: “while they were crying at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting.”

Instead, in the rabbis’ retelling, Moses’ great-nephew Pinchas is granted a vision which allows him to remind Moses of the law: A zealous citizen is permitted to carry out vigilante justice and kill the transgressors while they are in the act of intercourse with a foreign woman. But what if nobody does? After the fact, does the judicial system have authority to act? And what would the punishment be?

At this point we find an extraordinary moment of narrative symmetry. Just as Moses had forgotten the law in the case of an ongoing transgression, Rav, the leader of his generation in Babylon, forgets what he’s been taught about what to do if nobody steps forward to carry out the extrajudicial killing. His student, Rav Kahana, plays the role of Pinchas.

They read this verse to Rav Kahana in his dream: “Judah has dealt treacherously … and has engaged in intercourse with the daughter of a strange god.”

Once again, divine assistance is sent (this time to the rabbinic authorities) and instead of the leader of the generation, the recipient of the law is a devoted student. What is it about the case of a Jewish man sleeping with a non-Jewish woman that consistently stumps generational leaders, from the Bible to the Talmud? What does it mean that they repeatedly forget the law?

It appears that the rabbis of the Talmud are acutely aware of a striking fact about this prohibition against intercourse with a foreign woman: It’s difficult to find a source for it in the Torah. When Pinchas intervenes, he reminds Moses that this is “halakhah leMoshe misinai” (Rashi) — a law that was given to Moses verbally on Sinai, without any record in the written Torah. In fact, the only source the rabbis have for deriving this law is the story of Pinchas itself.

Similarly, even though Rav Kahana is able to provide Rav with a verse from the Prophets, allowing the teacher to recall a relevant midrashic interpretation of that verse, this midrash still doesn’t tell us what the punishment actually is — and notably, its source material is biblical, but not part of the legally superior chumash. In a telltale sign that the prohibition carries more emotional than legal weight for the rabbis, they make a series of homiletic warnings, invoking threats of irreligious children and comparisons to idolatry. Finally, they acknowledge that the prohibition is only a rabbinic one, and we learn that the Hasmonean authorities were the ones who introduced it. Not only that, they recognise the limitations of the vigilante approach demonstrated by Pinchas:

Concerning one who comes to consult with the court, the court does not instruct him that killing is permitted … and if Zimri had turned and killed Pinchas in self-defense, Zimri would not have been executed for killing him.

This seems to explain why Moses and Rav are both unusually quiet about the law; the prohibition itself is wrapped in ambiguity and mystery. As with several other Jewish taboos, sex with a non-Jew seems to be a far more pressing concern from a social perspective than from a legal one.

Read all of Sanhedrin 82 on Sefaria.

This piece originally appeared in a My Jewish Learning Daf Yomi email newsletter sent on March 9, 2025. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter, sign up here.