Phinehas (Hebrew: פִּינְחָס, Modern Pinəḥas Tiberian Pinchas) was a High Priest of Israel in the wilderness, the grandson of Aaron, and son of Eleazar the High Priest (Exodus 6:25), who distinguished himself as a youth at Shittim by his zeal against the Heresy of Peor: the immorality with which the Moabites and Midianites had successfully tempted the people (Numbers 25:1-9) to worship Baal-peor where Phineas personally executed an Israelite man and a Midianite woman while they were together in the man's tent, running a spear or lance through the man and the belly of the woman ending a plague said to have been sent by God to punish the Israelites for sexually intermingling with the Midianites. Phineas is commended for having stopped Israel's fall to idolatrous practices brought in by Midianite women, as well as for stopping the desecration of God's sanctuary. He is commemorated as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church on September 2.

The Oxford Guide to the Bible and Brown-Driver-Briggs' Hebrew and English Lexicon identify it as a variant of the Egyptian name Pa-nehasi. According to the former, "The Bible also uses Egyptian and Nubian names for the land and its people... For the Egyptians used to these color variations, the term for their southern neighbors was Nehesi, "southerner", which eventually also came to mean "the black" or "the Nubian". This Egyptian root (nhsj, with the preformative p' as a definite article) appears in Exodus 6.25 as the personal name of Aaron's grandson Phinehas (=pa-nehas)"The Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament interprets the name to mean "the bronze-colored one". Phinehas, like Moses and Nun lived in Egypt and their names were shared by the dominant culture there.