Balaam Stood on the Heights and Could Only Bless

Most people think Balaam was stopped by God. The actual tradition says he was stopped by the Patriarchs, by arithmetic, and by the arrangement of tents.

The story in Numbers is familiar enough: Balak, king of Moab, hires the non-Israelite prophet Balaam to curse the approaching Israelite nation. God tells Balaam he cannot curse what God has blessed. Balaam opens his mouth and blessings come out instead of curses, three times in a row, each one more exalted than the last (Numbers 23-24). The surface reading is that God overrode Balaam's tongue directly. a kind of divine ventriloquism.

The rabbinic tradition preserved in Legends of the Jews tells a stranger and more interesting story.

When Balaam was transported to the high places to prophesy, he found himself in the company of the Patriarchs. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. He was not receiving divine inspiration in some abstract sense. He was standing with the ancestors of the people he had been hired to destroy. And what he discovered there was a logic that made cursing literally impossible.

He turned to Balak and made a genealogical argument. Balak was a descendant of Lot. Lot's life had been saved when Abraham rescued him from the destruction of Sodom (Genesis 14, 19). Without Abraham, Balak would not exist. Balaam himself was a descendant of Laban. Jacob had protected Laban's household and multiplied his flocks across twenty years in Paddan-aram. Without Jacob, Balaam would not exist. Both of them owed their lives to the ancestors of the nation they were trying to harm. The curse would be a logical contradiction before it was a theological one.

In the Ginzberg rendering of Balaam's exchange with Balak, Balaam also corrects the king's theology on the spot. He makes Balak stand when God's words are to be spoken. "thou mayest not be seated when God's words are spoken." Then he explains the nature of the God he is now serving as prophet, however unwillingly: "God is not like a man of flesh and blood, who makes friends and disowns them as soon as he finds better ones." The covenant with the Patriarchs is not revocable. God does not cancel the vow he made to Abraham about Canaan because a Moabite king has offered Balaam money.

The question the tradition is really asking in all of these Balaam texts is not whether God can prevent a curse. Of course God can. The question is what kind of prophet Balaam was and what kind of instrument he became. He was not an Israelite prophet. He had no covenant relationship with God. He was a practitioner of the divinatory arts who happened, by some mechanism the tradition doesn't fully explain, to have genuine access to divine communication. The midrash in Legends of the Jews treats him with a mixture of grudging respect and deep suspicion. He knew things. He could reach the high places where the Patriarchs stood. But he was for hire, and that compromised everything. The prophetic gift required a dignity the transactional relationship with Balak kept undermining.

On his third attempt, Balaam tried a different approach. He recited Israel's sins in the desert. the Golden Calf, the complaints, the rebellion of Korah, the episode with the Moabite women at Baal Peor. attempting to catalog enough failures to justify divine punishment. It was not entirely without merit as a strategy. Israel had indeed sinned, repeatedly and seriously.

But when Balaam looked down at the camp, what he saw undid him. The tents were arranged so that no household's entrance faced another household's entrance directly. Privacy between neighbors. Dignity built into the architecture of the camp. This detail. this small, civil, daily courtesy. overwhelmed the catalog of sins. He looked at a nation that had received Torah in the desert and had accepted it, and he looked at tents arranged to protect each other's dignity, and the curses turned to ash in his mouth.

What emerged instead was one of the most celebrated lines in Jewish liturgy: Mah tovu ohalecha Yaakov, mishkenotecha Yisrael. how good are your tents, O Jacob, your dwelling places, O Israel (Numbers 24:5). Morning after morning, Jews open their prayer with Balaam's forced blessing, the words of the hired enemy who could find nothing to curse.

The tradition in Legends of the Jews adds a final detail that rarely appears in the simple retelling: Balaam's gift of prophecy depended on his elevation. When Balak "cast him down". frustrated, demanding curses, reducing the prophet to a paid contractor. Balaam lost access to the heights where the Patriarchs stood. The gift required a kind of dignity that Balak's transaction kept stripping away. You cannot curse from the place where the Patriarchs live. And you cannot reach the Patriarchs when you are someone else's instrument.