God Compared Balaam's Seven Altars to a Fraudulent Scale

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Seven Altars on the High Ground

Balaam had the altars built to his own specification. Seven of them, on a ridge with the Israelite camp spread out below. Seven bulls. Seven rams. One of each burning on every altar, so that seven columns of fat smoke went up off that hilltop at once.

He told Balak to stay with the offerings. Then he walked away from the fires by himself, out to where the ground went quiet, to see whether anything would come and meet him.

Something came.

The Money-Changer and the Head of the Market

"You evil man. What are you doing?"

Balaam did not answer the question. He answered with his invoice. "I have prepared the seven altars, and I have offered a ram and a bull on each altar."

He was a money-changer with a fraudulent scale.

Picture the man. He sits in the market with his weights, and the weights are wrong, and every customer who comes to his table walks away short. The head of the marketplace comes through on his rounds and sees it in a second, the way a man who does this for a living always sees it.

"What is this? You are inflating the weights. You are lying with them."

And the money-changer does not deny anything. He says, "I already sent a gift to your house."

That was the seven altars. That was fourteen animals burned on a ridge by a man who had come up the ridge to curse a nation for a fee, and who thought the smoke would settle the account before the audit started.

"Better a meal of greens where there is love," came the answer, "than a fattened ox with hatred in it. Better the flat bread and the bitter herbs Israel ate in Egypt than your bulls, offered with hands full of hate."

The Word Went In Like a Nail

Then God put a word in Balaam's mouth.

Not laid it on his tongue. Put it in, the way a bit goes into a horse. It twisted the mouth and it pierced it, the way a nail is driven through a board, and the man who had spent his life selling the contents of his own mouth to the highest bidder discovered that his mouth now belonged to someone else. Rabbi Eliezer said an angel did the speaking. Rabbi Joshua said it was God, with no angel in between.

Balaam walked back down.

Balak was standing exactly where he had been left, beside his burnt offerings, and all the ministers of Moab were standing with him, waiting to hear a nation destroyed.

"How shall I curse whom God has not cursed? How shall I denounce whom God has not denounced?"

He had come from Aram, from the eastern hills, and he said so out loud in front of the whole delegation, and the sentence had a second meaning packed into it that only he could hear. I was one of the high ones. Balak has brought me down. Brought me down the way the dead are brought down, into the pit.

The Man Who Toured With Robbers

There was a man who used to walk with the king.

One day, walking, he saw robbers on the road, and he peeled off and went with them and toured around in their company for a while. When he had finished with the robbers he came back and took his place at the king's side as though the road had never forked.

The king said: "Go and walk with the ones you toured with. You do not walk with me again."

Balaam had been tied to the holy spirit. He hired himself to Balak, and the spirit went, and what he had left was what he had started with before any of it, the trade of a fortune-teller reading omens for money. When the sword found him years later, on the field with the kings of Midian, the record did not call him a prophet. It called him Balaam son of Beor, the diviner.

The Butcher Petting the King's Cow

The oracle ended with a wish that has been read at funerals ever since. Let me die the death of the upright, and let my end be like his.

There was a butcher who came to the yard to slaughter a cow, and the cow belonged to the king. He had the knife out when he noticed the king watching him from the window.

So he dropped the knife in the straw. He put both hands on the animal and rubbed it down, along the neck, over the flank, the way a man does with a beast he intends to keep. He filled the feeding trough to the top. And he said, loudly enough to carry, "Let my life be forfeit for coming here to slaughter it. But look. Look how I have fed it."

Balaam stood on the ridge with his hands still smelling of the offerings, in front of a king who had paid him and a nation he had been paid to destroy, and blessed them, and asked to die like one of them.