JEALOUS, zealous — an adjective used in the Hebrew Bible ONLY of God. The root is about ardour and about a claim that will not be shared, and modern English 'jealous' has drifted toward pettiness in a way the Hebrew has not. 'Impassioned' and 'zealous' are both defensible renderings; nothing on this shelf tries them. ⭐ Numbers 25:11-13 is where the root leaves God and lands on a man. The adjective stays God-only, but the NOUN and the VERB are used three times in three verses of Phinehas — he was zealous with MY zeal, a cognate accusative the ASV alone keeps exactly — and the logic is that his qin'ah pre-empted God's, so that Israel was not consumed. ⚠ Do not confuse the noun qin'ah with qinah, a LAMENT: a different word, differently spelled in Hebrew, with its own entry. ⭐ The adjective itself returns at Deuteronomy 4:24 (already on these pages), where it closes the chapter’s anti-image argument — ‘for Jehovah your God is a devouring fire, a jealous God’ — the same phrase that will close the covenant remade after the golden calf at Exodus 34:14: ‘Jehovah, whose NAME is Jealous, is a jealous God.’ Again inside the very legal text Deuteronomy 4 was paraphrasing when it first quoted the phrase: Deuteronomy 5:8 (already on these pages), the same adjective inside the Ten Words themselves. ⭐ Verified against the whole archived Hebrew Bible, the exact two-word phrase el qanna stands in FIVE verses and no more — Exodus 20:4, Exodus 34:14, Deuteronomy 4:24, Deuteronomy 5:8 and Deuteronomy 6:15 — and with Deuteronomy 6 all five are on these pages. (A second spelling, el qanno, accounts for two more: Joshua 24:19, not yet on these pages, and Nahum 1:2, which is.) ⚠ Deuteronomy 6:15 is the only one of the five that puts the ADJECTIVE first, 'for a jealous God is Jehovah your God in your midst'; the other four name Jehovah first and add the epithet after. ⚠ An earlier version of this entry, and of Deuteronomy 5's own note, called 5:8 the phrase's THIRD appearance. It is the fourth: Exodus 20:4 had shipped long before, and this entry has been anchored there the whole time. → first discussed at Exod 20:4