You have seen for yourselves what the Lord did with regard to the Baal of Peor, how the Lord your God destroyed from among you everyone who followed the Baal of Peor,
I said to their children in the wilderness, “Do not follow the statutes of your parents, nor observe their ordinances, nor defile yourselves with their idols.
Like grapes in the wilderness, I found Israel. Like the first fruit on the fig tree, in its first season, I saw your ancestors. But they came to Baal-peor and consecrated themselves to a thing of shame and became detestable like the thing they loved.
These women here, on Balaam’s advice, made the Israelites act treacherously against the Lord in the affair of Peor, so that the plague came among the congregation of the Lord.
Have we not had enough of the sin at Peor, from which even yet we have not cleansed ourselves and for which a plague came upon the congregation of the Lord,