Balaam Told Pharaoh to Drown the Babies

Before Balaam was the prophet hired to curse Israel at the edge of Canaan, he was a counselor to a court. Before he stood on the hilltop overlooking the Israelite camp with blessing after blessing pouring from his unwilling mouth, he was the man who suggested that Pharaoh drown the babies.

This is the detail that the plain text of Exodus does not supply. It tells us that Pharaoh commanded the killing of the male children of Israel, but it does not name the advisor behind the order. The midrashic tradition, preserved across multiple layers of the 2,672 texts in the Ginzberg collection and synthesized by Louis Ginzberg in Legends of the Jews from Talmudic and midrashic sources, supplies the name.

It was Balaam.

Pharaoh's court, according to this tradition, had convened to address the question of the Israelites. Three advisors offered three strategies. Jethro, the Midianite priest who would later become Moses's father-in-law, counseled against harming them and fled the court when he saw which way things would go. Job said nothing, and the tradition is not gentle about his silence. Balaam gave the counsel that was accepted.

His advice, as recorded in Legends of the Jews, was not simply cruel. It was calculated. It was built on a theological argument. The reasoning went like this: God had sworn to Noah after the flood, in the covenant sealed with a rainbow, never again to destroy the world with water (Genesis 9:11-17). Drowning the Israelite boys would therefore be safe for Egypt. God had already sworn He would not bring a flood. Egypt could use water against the Israelites without risking divine retaliation, because God had taken that punishment off the table himself.

Balaam had found, or so he believed, a loophole in the divine architecture of history.

The sages who preserved this tradition were not willing to let the argument stand unchallenged, and they dismantled it with surgical precision. God had sworn not to bring a flood upon humankind. Nothing in that oath prevented humankind from bringing itself into a flood. The Egyptians could drown Israelite children in the Nile without triggering the covenant's protection, because the covenant said nothing about what men do to other men with water. It only bound what God would do from above.

The loophole was real. And it was, as loopholes tend to be, a trap.

The second tradition, recorded in Legends of the Jews, fills in the decade of horror that followed. Pharaoh was suffering from a disease, a condition the text calls leprosy, that no physician in Egypt could cure. Someone told him that bathing in the blood of Israelite children might bring relief. For ten years, Ginzberg records, this continued. The infants died and Pharaoh did not improve. The leprosy did not recede. Instead, it transformed into something worse, into agonizing boils that spread across his body while the graves of the children filled up outside Goshen.

None of this made Pharaoh more merciful. When he heard that the Israelites in Goshen were, despite their forced labor, managing to endure, he was furious. He demanded his chariot so he could go and oversee the oppression personally. He was so weakened he could not mount his horse without being hoisted up. He rode toward Goshen anyway. The horse stumbled in a narrow pass, the chariot overturned, and Pharaoh was crushed beneath the wreckage. His servants carried what was left of him back to Egypt on a litter.

Legends of the Jews does not soften the scene. "The king's flesh was torn from him, for this thing was from the Lord."

What the tradition is building toward, across both layers of the story, is the principle the rabbis called middah k'neged middah: measure for measure. The punishment mirrors the crime with an exactness that is not accidental but structural, woven into the moral fabric of the world. Pharaoh drowned the male children of Israel in the Nile. The Egyptian army was swallowed by the Red Sea. (Exodus 15:4-5) The method of the cruelty became the method of the reckoning.

But the tradition wants to say something even sharper. Balaam's theological cleverness, his careful reading of the covenant's language to find a gap in divine protection, did not save him. It condemned him. He thought he had found a way to act against Israel while remaining safe from consequence, using the very promises God made as cover for atrocity. The midrashic tradition insists that this is not how the covenant works. The promise to Noah was a promise of mercy, not a license for cruelty. Using God's mercy as a loophole to harm the innocent is not cleverness. It is its own kind of desecration.

Balaam would eventually meet his end too, killed in the war against Midian according to (Numbers 31:8), the man who could not curse Israel dying at Israelite hands. The arc of his life runs from Pharaoh's court to the Midianite battlefield, from the counsel that ordered the drowning to the death that followed the blessing he could not refuse to give.

The water that killed the Egyptian army had once held the bodies of Israelite infants. The tradition does not let either fact stand alone. They belong to each other. And the man who started the chain of events by finding the theological argument for infanticide did not live to see old age in comfort.

Some loopholes close from the inside.