Balaam Had Gifts Equal to Moses and Spent Them All on Kings

The Prophet Appointed for the Nations

After the flood, when the world began again from Noah's family outward, God had a problem that required solving. Israel was not yet a people. The covenant line had not yet been established. But the nations that existed and would exist needed prophets too. Someone had to stand before the gentile world and say: here is what the divine requires. Someone had to carry revelation to peoples who were not Israel.

Shem, Noah's son, was the first appointed to this task. He prophesied for four hundred years. Four hundred years of speaking to nations that were largely not listening.

Eventually the prophetic gift moved along a different line. It descended to Balaam, who came from the family of Nahor, Abraham's brother. By the time Balaam entered the historical record in Numbers, he was already a figure of significant standing. He and the companions of Job, Eliphaz, Zophar, Bildad, and Elihu, formed something like a prophetic circle for the gentile world. They had access to divine knowledge. They were trusted by kings. They were the closest thing the nations had to what Moses was for Israel.

The Gift He Was Given

The tradition was precise about Balaam's prophetic capacity: it equaled Moses's. Not approached. Equaled. Moses had access to God. Balaam had access to God. Moses could speak blessing and curse into existence. Balaam could do the same. The distinction the tradition drew was not about power. It was about how power was used.

Moses used his prophetic gift in service of the people he had been assigned to shepherd. He spent forty years in the wilderness arguing with a stiff-necked generation, interceding for people who constantly made it harder to intercede for them, refusing to let God destroy them and start over with a better nation descended from Moses himself, though God offered exactly that. He carried the prophetic gift as a burden accepted and borne.

Balaam used his gift as a tool for hire. He went where kings sent him. He offered his services to whoever could pay. He sat with Balak of Moab and tried to find the angle of approach from which the curse would stick, circling Israel from mountaintop to mountaintop looking for the right sightline. God kept interrupting him. Four times he opened his mouth to curse and what came out was blessing. Four times. He tried and he tried and he could not make himself say what Balak was paying him to say.

The Parting Plan

Unable to curse, Balaam did something the tradition considered worse. He gave Balak a plan.

The plan was elegant and patient. Balaam understood that Israel could not be defeated directly. God was between any attacking army and its target. But Israel could be made to defeat itself. Send the daughters of Moab. Send them with invitations to the Baal-Peor festivals, with wine and hospitality and the particular warmth of welcome from people who had been enemies. Let the Israelite men walk into the worship of Baal-Peor voluntarily. Let them do it slowly, socially, one invitation at a time. The covenant would not be broken by a sword. It would be dissolved from within, by the men who carried it choosing something else over and over until the choosing became habit and the habit became identity.

The plan worked, for a time. Twenty-four thousand died in the plague that followed the episode at Peor. The tradition remembered this as Balaam's worst act: he could not take Israel with a curse, so he arranged for Israel to take itself.

The Advisor to Kings and His End

After the Moab episode, after the failed curses and the successful plan and the plague, Balaam disappeared from the main narrative and reappeared in the records of his employment by various kings. He had fled the battle. He had made his way into advisory positions with rulers who needed someone with his particular combination of prophetic access and willingness to use it for whoever was paying.

The tradition traced his movements through these positions with a kind of exhausted contempt. Here was a man who had been given the rarest gift in the world. He had spoken prophecies over Israel that became permanent fixtures in the liturgy, words so true that the tradition could not discard them even though it despised the man who had spoken them. He had been forced by divine compulsion to bless the very people he was paid to curse. He had, despite himself, become a prophet of Israel's greatness. And he spent the rest of his life working for kings who wanted to use him against other kings, until one of those kings' wars finally caught up with him.