Phinehas

I try to follow the Jewish Bible (Messianic) reading schedule. Even though I tend to fail so many times, I still try every year- for several years now.

The first five books of the Bible are divided into something like 54 sections and are read in a year. It is kind of like the one-year Bible, but not the entire Bible. Each section is a story such as "In the beginning" (about creation) and "Noah" (about the life of Noah). Phinehas is one of them.

Pinehas is Aaron's grandson. Eliazar is his dad. Phinehas' name means dark-skinned. This meaning caught my attention. As I researched, I found out that his mom was one of the daughters of Putiel (Exodus 6:25), which means 'contempt of God'. According to the dictionary.com, synonyms of contempt are:

contempt, disdain, scorn imply strong feelings of disapproval and aversion toward what seems base, mean, or worthless. contempt is disapproval tinged with disgust: to feel contempt for a weakling. disdain is a feeling that a person or thing is beneath one's dignity and unworthy of one's notice, respect, or concern: a disdain for crooked dealing. scorn denotes open or undisguised contempt often combined with derision

There was an interesting article on this portion, Phinehas. It says that Eliazar married to a non-Jew (gentile).... I don't mean to upset anyone, but it is a fact that the gentiles were looked down on. So I guess that if a person is described as "contempt", it means non-Jews to the Jews those days. The fact that the name of Phinehas' mother was written is interesting. There are tons of things the Hebrew readers can understand just by understanding certain words. This is one of the occasions. We can imagine a lot more things after we understand the meaning of certain words. I have to do some more research!