Moabite Women Seduce Israel into Worshiping Baal Peor

Balak, the king of Moab, fears the Israelites and hires Balaam son of Beor to curse them, but YHWH induces Balaam to bless the Israelites instead, and Balaam returns home (Num 22–24). Immediately afterward, we find the Israelites engaging in sexual relations with Moabite (and Midianite) women, who induce them to worship Baal-Peor:

^{במדבר כה:א} וַיֵּשֶׁב יִשְׂרָאֵל בַּשִּׁטִּים וַיָּחֶל הָעָם לִזְנוֹת אֶל בְּנוֹת מוֹאָב. ^כה:ב וַתִּקְרֶאןָ לָעָם לְזִבְחֵי אֱלֹהֵיהֶן וַיֹּאכַל הָעָם וַיִּשְׁתַּחֲוּוּ לֵאלֹהֵיהֶן.

^{Num 25:1} While Israel was staying at Shittim, the people began engaging in sexual relations with the women of Moab, ^25:2 who invited the people to the sacrifices for their god. The people partook of them and worshiped that god.^[1]

YHWH commands the Israelites to attack the Midianites in retaliation for the Peor incident (25:16–18). The depiction of this war portrays Moses as becoming angry with the Israelites for sparing the Midianite women, given they were the catalysts for the Israelite sin (ch. 31).^[2]

Balaam’s Plot

While Moses is rebuking the Israelites for sparing the women, we suddenly learn that it was Balaam, the prophet who refused to curse Israel, who was responsible for directing the Moabite/Midianite women to lead the Israelites astray. Alexander Rofé of Hebrew University argues that this section is an attempt to denigrate him:^[3]

‏‏^{במדבר לא:טו} וַיֹּאמֶר אֲלֵיהֶם מֹשֶׁה הַחִיִּיתֶם כָּל נְקֵבָה. ^לא:טז הֵן הֵנָּה הָיוּ לִבְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל בִּדְבַר בִּלְעָם לִמְסָר מַעַל בַּי־הוָה עַל דְּבַר פְּעוֹר וַתְּהִי הַמַּגֵּפָה בַּעֲדַת יְ־הוָה.

^{Num 31:15} Moses said to them, “You have spared every female! ^31:16 Yet they are the very ones who, at the bidding of Balaam, induced the Israelites to trespass against YHWH in the matter of Peor, so that YHWH’s community was struck by the plague.

Post-biblical tradition expands on Balaam’s connection to the Midianite women account by fashioning an earlier scene in which, before returning home, he devises a plan to have the women seduce the Israelites (e.g., Josephus, Antiquities 4.129–130).

Sex Workers?

Philo of Alexandria (ca. 20 B.C.E.–ca. 50 C.E.) depicts the foreign women not just as seducers but as sex workers, understanding the Hebrew root ז.נ.ה/י (Num 25:1)^[4]—a root denoting a variety of illicit sexual activities—as referring to prostitutes in particular:^[5]

^{Philo, Mos. 1.296-297} And there is nothing to which a man more easily falls a captive than women’s comeliness. If, then, you permit the fairest among them to prostitute themselves for hire, they will ensnare the younger of their enemies.^[6]

Philo depicts the apostasy as part of a larger plan. He even has Balaam instruct the women to withhold sexual intercourse until after the Israelites worship their deities:

^{Philo, Mos. 1.297–299} “But you must instruct them not to allow their wooers to enjoy their charms at once. For coyness titillates, and thereby makes the appetites more active, and inflames the passions. And, when their lust has them in its grip, there is nothing which they will shrink from doing or suffering.

Then, when the lover is in this condition, one of those who are arming to take their prey should say, with a saucy air: ‘You must not be permitted to enjoy my favors until you have left the ways of your fathers and become a convert to honoring what I honor. That your conversion is sincere will be clearly proved to me if you are willing to take part in the libations and sacrifices which we offer to idols of stone and wood and the other images.’

Then the lover, caught in the meshes of her multiform lures, her beauty and the enticements of her wheedling talk, will not gainsay her, but, with his reason trussed and pinioned, will subserve her orders to his sorrow, and be enrolled as a slave of passion.”^[7]

The Sifrei (ca. 3rd cent. C.E.), a Tannaitic midrash, uses social cues in its retelling that its Roman period readers would have understood as indicative of brothels. It describes the Ammonites—who do not appear in the biblical story at all^[8]—and Moabites setting up a marketplace near the Israelite camp:

^{ספרי במדבר קלא} באו וישבו להן בשטים, במקום הסוטות. באותה שעה עמדו עמונים ומואבים, ובנו להן קולין מבית הישימות ועד הר השלג. הושיבו שם נשים מוכרות כל מיני כיסנין. והיו ישראל אוכלין ושתויין.^[9]

^{Sifre Num §131} Now they [the Israelites] came and dwelt in Shittim—a place of straying women (sotot). At that time, the Ammonites and Moabites went and built for themselves enclosures from Beth Hayishimoth to the Snowy Mountain. They installed women there, selling various kinds of delicacies (kisnin), and the Israelites would eat and carouse.

The marketplace served as the forum for both retail trade and sex work in the Roman world, as R. Simeon ben Yohai’s complains of the Romans in the Talmud: תִּקְּנוּ שְׁוָוקִין — לְהוֹשִׁיב בָּהֶן זוֹנוֹת, “they established marketplaces to place prostitutes in them” (b. Sabb. 33b).^[10] The Roman male elite placed market vendors and sex workers on the same social level, as lower-class women who earned money and interacted with the public (cf. Petronius, Sat. 6–7; A.J. 3.276).^[11]

Moreover, the merchandise that the women sell in our story is possibly a further clue that they are sex-workers. The term כיסנין (kisnin), “delicacies,” is likely a corruption of a more obscure term ביסנין/בוסנין, from the Greek loan word bussina meaning “linen,” whose manufacture was linked to sexual impropriety in contemporaneous Jewish texts.^[12] Recently, Menachem Kahana in his commentary on Sifrei Bemidbar (ad loc.) has argued that “linen” is certainly the original reading, noting both manuscript traditions and other rabbinic texts that support it.^[13]

The Sifrei suggests that the men first shopped in the marketplace, then stopped to eat and drink, and finally were introduced to the women:

^{ספרי במדבר קלא} באותה שעה אדם יוצא לטייל, ומבקש ליקח לו חפץ מן הזקינה, והיתה מוכרת לו בשוה. וקטנה קורא ואומרת לו מבפנים "בוא וקח לך בפחות." והיה לוקח ממנה ביום ראשון וביום שיני.

^{Sifre Num §131} When one went for a walk in the market and wanted to buy something from an old lady, the latter would offer it at its true value. Then a girl would call him from inside and say: “Come and buy it for less.” So he would buy it from the girl. This happened on both the first and second time [he visited].

Attic (Greek) comedies and Roman comic poets stereotypically depict old women as “madams” for girls they kept indoors.^[14] For example, the poet Albius Tibullus’s (ca. 55–ca. 19 B.C.E.) first book of elegies, to a courtesan called Delia, notes:

^{Tibullus 1.6.57–64} It is thy [Delia’s] aged mother moves me; before her golden nature sinks my wrath. She brings me to thee in the dark, and in fear and trembling secretly and silently she joins our hands. Fast by the door at night she waits for me and knows afar the noise of my coming feet.^[15]

If an Israelite took the bait a third time, the girl would offer him wine, and he would end up seeking to hire her services:

^{ספרי במדבר קלא} ובשלישי אמרה לו: "היכנס לפנים וברור לך לעצמך, אי אתה בן בית?" והוא נכנס, והצרצור מלא יין אצלה מיין העמוני. ועדיין לא נאסר יינן שלגוים לישראל.

^{Sifre Num §131} On the third [occasion], she [the girl] said to him: “Come on in, choose something for yourself: you are at home here.” He went in and her pitcher of wine was full of Ammonite wine—the wine of gentiles not yet having been forbidden to the Israelites.

אמרה לו: "רצונך שתשתה יין?" והוא שותה והיה היין בוער בו. אמר לה: "הישמעי לי."

She said to him: “Would you like a glass of wine?” When he had drunk it, he became inflamed. He said to her: “Submit to me!”

The ignorance of the Israelite in the narrative, missing both clues to the women’s true purposes—her being a vendor selling linen in the market and the old lady standing at the door—heightens the contrast between the man’s original intentions and his ultimate fate, lacing the account with irony. Rather than purchasing luxurious attire, the Israelite ends up undressed before an idol so ludicrous that the prostitute carried it in her undergarments and worshipped it in a brothel:

^{ספרי במדבר קלא} והיא מוציאה טופוס שלפעור מתחת פסיקיא שלה. אמרה לו: "רצונך שאשמע לך? השתחוה לזה." אמר לה: "וכי לעבודה זרה אני משתחוה?" אמרה לו: "ומה עכבת לך? אינו אלא שתגלה עצמך לו!"...

^{Sifre Num §131} She then took the idol of Peor out of her breast band and said to him: “Do you want me to submit to you? Worship this!” He replied: “Am I going to bow down to an idol?!” She said to him: “What inhibits you? Do they ask any more from you than that you bare yourself?”…^[16]

By mocking Baal Peor, the narrative implicitly ridicules the Israelite who embraced its worship. He becomes both the subject and object of the girl’s sexual and cultic demands—despite his expectation that she would submit to him:

^{ספרי במדבר קלא} היה היין בוער בו. אמר לה: "הישמעי לי." אמרה לו: "רצונך שאשמע לך? הנזר מתורתו שלמשה," שנאמר (הושע ט:י): "והמה באו בעל פעור וינזרו לבשת."

^{Sifre Num §131} The wine further inflaming him, he insisted: “Submit to me!” She said to him: “Do you want me to submit to you? Deny the Torah of Moses!” As it is said (Hos 9:10): “They went in to Baal-Peor and consecrated themselves to a thing of shame.”

With the girl remaining dressed and untouched at the conclusion of the story, the Israelite becomes the butt of the joke.^[17]

Led into a Brothel: Petronius’ Satiricon

The plot outline—a naïve man being beguiled into a brothel by a madam/female vendor—resembles a passage in Petronius’ Satiricon (first century C.E.), a Latin work of fiction in which the narrator, Encolpius, details his exploits. Searching for his companion Ascyltos, Encolpius loses his way and asks directions from an “old woman selling farm vegetables [holus].” Taking up her offer to guide him home, he follows her:

^{Petronius, Sat. 7} Then when we came to an out of the way place, the witty old creature drew back a patchwork curtain and said: “This is where you should be staying.” I was just saying that I did not recognize the place when I noticed some men furtively working their way among the price tags and unclothed prostitutes. Slowly and indeed a bit too late I realized that I had been led into a brothel.^[18]

It is probable that the rabbis were familiar with the exegetical tradition that identifies the women as prostitutes, and they merged this tradition with a familiar Roman jest about young men “finding themselves” in a brothel. By incorporating the variation on a Roman joke into the plot, the midrash presents the Israelites as fools, and the message is clear: Only fools would abandon the God of Israel for idolatry.