Numbers 25:10

"And Jehovah spake unto Moses, saying, Phinehas, the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest, hath turned my wrath away from the children of Israel, in that he was jealous with my jealousy among them, so that I consumed not the children of Israel in my jealousy. Wherefore say, Behold, I give unto him my covenant of peace: and it shall be unto him, and to his seed after him, the covenant of an everlasting priesthood; because he was jealous for his God, and made atonement for the children of Israel."

Many scholars have expressed a surprise approaching consternation that Almighty God would so reward a ruthless murderer, but they have merely misread the reason for God's reward of Phinehas. His zeal is what God commended and what he rewarded. We have exactly the counterpart of this in the N.T. in Jesus' parable of the Unjust Steward upon whom the Lord poured out the very highest of praises, not for his dishonesty, of course, but for the intelligence and zeal with which he handled his earthly affairs. We have the same kind of situation here. Somebody had to do something. Most of the incompetent judges had proved their inability to do anything, and as the heir apparent to the high priesthood, Phinehas took it upon himself to act in defense of the Word of God. The critical superstition to the effect that this was invented in later generations to defend the claim of the descendants of Phinehas to the office of High Priest is unprovable, without foundation, and required by no intelligent reason whatever. As a matter of fact, beginning with Ely, the descendants of Eleazar were high priests until the times of Solomon who took the office away from Eleazar's descendants in the person of Abiathar and gave it to Zadock of the line of Phinehas where it continued throughout the history of Israel.