Numbers 22:7-20
Asking again for a better answer
The first delegation is refused plainly. A larger one arrives with more honour and more money, and he invites them to stay the night while he asks again.
People of the Bible
Balaam
Hired to curse a nation, blessed it four times instead, and then found a way to damage it anyway.
Balaam is a diviner from the Euphrates with a reputation: whoever he blesses is blessed. The king of Moab sends money and sends it twice, and Balaam keeps asking God for a different answer to the same question. On the road his donkey sees what he does not and refuses to move three times, and he beats it until it speaks. Standing over the camp he opens his mouth four times to curse and blessing comes out every time, including a line about a star coming out of Jacob. Then he goes home. What happens next is not in his oracles.
Scroll down to the storyThe movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of Balaam
- 01
- 02
Numbers 22:21-35
The donkey that saw the angel
Three times the animal turns aside, three times he strikes it. When it finally speaks the question it asks is what he has done to deserve this, and only then are his eyes opened.
- 03
Numbers 23:1-24:9
Four altars, four blessings
Balak moves him from ridge to ridge so he will see less of the camp and say something worse, and each time the words come out the other way. How shall I curse whom God has not cursed.
- 04
Numbers 24:15-19
A star out of Jacob
The last oracle looks past the present camp to a ruler still to come. It is the high point of everything he ever said and the last good thing recorded about him.
- 05
Numbers 31:8, 16
The counsel at Peor
He dies by the sword in a battle against Midian, and one verse later Moses names him as the one whose advice put the women in the camp. The curse he could not say, he arranged.
Why it matters
Balaam is the case of a man who says every correct thing and is still counted among the worst names in Scripture. His poetry is genuine prophecy and is quoted for centuries. But Numbers 31 says the women who drew Israel into Peor did it on his advice, and Peter, Jude and Revelation all use his name as shorthand for selling out for money. The book puts both in, the oracle and the counsel, and does not reconcile them for us.
2 songs
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
