Is the iniquity of Peor too little for us? How natural the illustration in the mouth of the speaker! It was Phinehas who had avenged the iniquity of Peer, and arrested the judgment for that offence as it was about to fall.
How natural that the occurrence should be, as it were, branded upon his memory with a hot iron, and that the mention of it should spring at once to his lips when he saw his brethren, as he thought, upon the verge of a similar offence!
Peor is, of course, a contraction for Baal-Peor (Numbers 25:3). This god derives his name probably from Mount Peer, or "the cloven mountain" (Numbers 23:28). From which we are not cleansed until this day.
Here we have the expression of the feeling which was never removed until Christ came. It was not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats could take away sin. No ceremonial lustrations could "cleanse us from its guilt and power."
No destruction of the prime mover of the offence, though it may avert the wrath of God, can remove the moral reproach which lies upon the sinner. Not even the destruction of twenty-four thousand persons (Numbers 25:9) can purify Israel from the taint of pollution.
In the eyes of a sincere servant like Phinehas, the stigma rests upon Israel still, nor could anything avail to take it away. Truly, the law was, indeed, "our schoolmaster, to bring us to Christ." What Keil says of Calvin's explanation, that "the remembrance was not yet quite buried, nor the anger of God extinct," is unsatisfactory.
His own explanation, that "the heart of Israel still delighted in their sin," is even more so, since we have no evidence whatever that this was the case at the time of which we are speaking. We have here again to remark that the history in Numbers is here presupposed, and an allusion to an incident in Numbers is here placed in the mouth of one of the chief actors in it.
How natural, if the history be a veracious one! How marvellously ingenious, if it he not! The circumstance is mentioned again in Hosea, in the time of Jotham or Hezekiah, and again in Psalms 106:1-48; which would appear to have been written during the captivity.
Thus we have a chain of testimony concerning it which makes it difficult to assign a time for the invention of the story, if it be invented, since all references to it in Scripture are perfectly consistent with each other, and display none of the signs of gradual growth which we invariably find in the case of legends.
A plague. The original is noticeable, the plague; a natural mode of speech for one who well remembered it.