Balaam Was the Last Prophet That God Gave the Nations

Balaam stood on the bare top of Peor with Balak beside him and the tents of Israel spread out under them in the valley, and he opened his mouth to curse, and something else came out.

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It came out loud. God had put a carrying power into that voice, and the words did not stop at the edge of Moab. Farmers in countries that had never heard of Israel straightened up in their fields. Sailors heard it. Every inhabited place on the earth got the same sentence at the same moment, delivered by a man who had been paid to say the opposite.

God Is Not a Man

What the world heard first was a boundary.

God is not a man, Balaam said, and the man who passes himself off as a god is lying. And the one who tells you he will vanish for a while and then come back is promising you something he cannot deliver. Woe to the nation that listens to him.

Balak had hired a curse and was getting a public warning against imposters instead, broadcast to every kingdom that might one day produce one. There is no record of what his face did.

What He Saw From the Cliff

Then the sweep opened out and Balaam stopped being able to stop.

He saw David, centuries off, and the wars of his reign. He went further, out past every reign, to the last days, and watched the nations come apart. Rome. All of them. Israel standing at the end of it.

All of them but one family.

The descendants of a Midianite priest would be spared, Balaam said. They would be inside Israel's joys and inside Israel's griefs, counted in. And the Kenites, the sons of Jonadab, would be the ones to bring the news of the Messiah to Israel, the first up the road with offerings for the Temple, the first to stand in Jerusalem and announce that the city was free.

Balaam had been brought to Moab to break Israel. From the highest ground in the country he named the exact clan that would greet Israel's redemption, and the clan was his own neighbors.

The Girls Who Came Early to the Troughs

The priest in question had been an idol man once. Seven names got attached to him over a lifetime and each one marks a stage: Jether, because the Torah carries an extra section on his account. Jethro, because he ran over with good deeds. Hobab, the beloved. Reuel, the friend. Heber, the associate. Putiel, the one who walked away from idols. Keni, the one who was zealous and who bought the Torah with his life.

The town did not forgive him for the last three.

His daughters had to work around it. They would get to the wells before anyone else, in the grey before the shepherds came out, and haul water up hand over hand until the troughs were full. It never worked. The shepherds would arrive, drive the girls off, and water their own flocks out of the troughs the girls had just filled. Then the girls would go home.

One morning a man nobody knew was sitting by that well. He had killed an Egyptian and run for his life and had nothing at all. He got up and drove the shepherds off and watered the flocks himself, and Jethro took him in, and Moses married Zipporah, and the man who would take Israel out of Egypt spent forty years keeping a Midianite's sheep.

The Debt Ran Both Directions

That is the family Balaam named from the cliff.

The water at the trough came back as a place in the redemption. A stranger got fed and housed by a man his own town had turned on, and generations later the descendants of that man are the advance party at the rebuilt Temple, coming up out of the wilderness with gifts while everyone else is still working out what has happened.

Balaam had spent his working life trying to bury Israel. His last act as a prophet was to hand the honor of announcing Israel's rescue to the household that had once given Israel's rescuer a drink.

Nothing Came After That

Then it stopped.

The prophetic spirit went out of Balaam on that hilltop and did not come back. He came down off Peor an ordinary man with a reputation, went to Moab and then to Midian, and turned to the only trade he had left, which was selling advice on how to hurt Israel by other means.

Moses had asked, once, that prophecy belong to Israel and to no one else. God had held the request open. On the cliff at Peor He granted it, and the way He granted it was by not replacing Balaam. No prophet was ever given to the nations again. The last thing the last one of them said was where to stand when the Messiah comes, and the address he gave was a tent camp in the wilderness of Judah, downwind of the sheep.