The Story of Balaam
22:2 to 24:25
After the death of the Exodus generation and the birth of the wilderness generation, God confirmed the divine commitment to bless Isra’el through some of the most lavish words of blessing and promise in the entire Torah. Moreover, ADONAI speaks these words of blessing and promise not through an Israelite, but through an Aramean sorcerer! As Hobab had joined YHVH in guiding Isra’el (to see link click Bn – Leaving Sinai: Hobab the Midianite), so Balaam the sorcerer was used by God to bless Isra’el.
Four main characters are at work in this enigmatic story.
The first main character is Balaam, a Gentile, and master sorcerer, who lived in Pethor, four hundred miles north of Mo’ab on the banks of the Euphrates River in Babylon (Numbers 22:5 and Deuteronomy 23:4). He had a reputation as a sorcerer and traveled extensively throughout the Near East to curse military enemies for money. He was a kind of unattached hired gun, a mercenary, but his only weapons were words that had the power to curse or to bless.450 He was not a good “prophet” who went bad, or a bad “prophet” trying to be good. He was altogether outside Isra’el’s prophetic tradition, but he must have thought that ADONAI Elohim, the God of Isra’el was like any other deity he could manipulate with his black magic. But he found out differently.451 On His way to Jerusalem, Yeshua sent out seventy messengers, two by two ahead of Him, to all the towns in order to give people opportunities to accept the Good News. After completing the ministry entrusted to them, they returned to Him with joy and said: Lord, even the demons submit to us in Your name (see the commentary on The Life of Christ Gv – Jesus Sends Out the Seventy). Therefore, just because the demon possessed Balaam submitted to the will of ADONAI, did not mean he was a righteous man; but like a demon, would have carried out his own wicked desires if only he had been left alone to do so. In other words, had it not been for the intervention of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Balaam surely would have put a curse on Isra’el.
The second main character is Balak. Mo’ab was the nation that shared a border with Canaan on the eastern edge of the Promised Land. Balak, the king of Mo’ab, was merely a vassal king, ruling a puppet government under Sihon, king of the Amorites (see Dk – The Defeat of Sihon of Heshbon). The Israelites had crushed the Amorites in battle, so Balak reasoned correctly that Mo’ab would be no match militarily. So, having no faith in his own army, Balak decided to turn to a non-military means of attacking Isra’el. As a result, he tried to hire the sorcerer Balaam to put a curse on the Israelites.
The third main character is ADONAI, who has several different names in this text, a reflection of various early and later traditions that were brought together to form the story. He is called God (Hebrew: Elohim) in 22:9; ADONAI (Hebrew: YHVH) in 22:13; Elyon (Hebrew: Almighty) in 24:16; Almighty (Hebrew: Shaddai) in 24:16. While King Balak thinks he has found a way to curse Isra’el and thus shape the course of Isra’el history, God emerges as the one character who truly has the power and will to ensure Isra’el’s ultimate destiny. ADONAI determines that destiny to be one of blessing rather than a curse.
The fourth main character are those who had no active role at all in the drama. Throughout the story Balaam, the people of Isra’el were passively camped in the plains of Mo’ab beyond the Jordan River, opposite Jericho (22:1). There was an invisible war going on, and the Israelites were completely oblivious to the intense life and death struggle going on between Balak’s desire to curse Isra’el and God’s commitment to bless them. Another character was Balaam’s donkey who has a brief speaking part in 22:28-30.
The Balaam cycle in Numbers 22:2 to 24:25 falls into three large sections: First, Numbers 22:2-40, Balaam’s three encounters with God as King Balak calls Balaam to curse Isra’el; second, Numbers 22:41 to 24:14 describe Balaam’s three attempts to curse Isra’el foiled by three blessings of Balaam, who could only say what ADONAI had put in his mouth; and third, Numbers 24:15-19, Balaam’s fourth and climactic far eschatological blessing beyond the present generation of Israelites.452
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