Balaam Was the Last Prophet God Gave the Nations

The Gift Given So No One Could Complain

God gave the nations a prophet. This is the logic the tradition applies to explain Balaam's existence: if Israel had Moses and no comparable figure existed for the other nations, those nations could argue at the end of days that their distance from God was not their fault. They had been given no one of equal standing to bring them closer. The defense would have had some force. So God gave them Balaam, a prophet of genuine power, acknowledged even in the Talmud Bavli's tractate Sanhedrin as one of the few non-Jewish figures who achieved prophetic status on the level that the designation actually meant something.

Balaam received the gift. He spent it on a career of attempted cursing, on advising the Midianites on how to seduce Israel into apostasy, on sorcery in Midian at the end. When the gift was withdrawn, after the Moab episode left him without the ruach hakodesh, he had used it badly enough that God did not replace him with another prophet for the nations. He was the last. The arrangement ended with him.

The Star Out of Jacob

His final prophecy from the high places of Moab, before the spirit left, covered time in an extraordinary sweep. He looked out from Peor and saw what was coming. He saw King David, who would crush through the borders of Moab and subdue all the children of Sheth. He described the conquest in military terms specific enough that later generations could read their history in his words. He saw what the Talmud Bavli, tractate Sanhedrin, identifies as one of the clearest Messianic passages in the entire Torah: a star shall come out of Jacob, and a scepter shall rise out of Israel (Numbers 24:17). The rabbis disputed exactly who the star named - David, who did come, or the Messiah, who would - and the tradition preserved in Legends of the Jews, Louis Ginzberg's compilation published between 1909 and 1938, generally holds both: David was its first fulfillment, the Messiah its complete one.

Balaam also saw the end of days. The acharit hayamim - the last times, when the nations would be judged and the covenant people vindicated. He named Amalek first among the enemies and said their end was utter destruction. He named Asshur and Eber and traced the arc of power through empires and ages. He was a man who had spent his career trying to curse Israel, and his last prophecy from Moab's heights was a map of how Israel would outlast every force that had been arrayed against them.

Who Would Announce the Messiah

Then Balaam did something the tradition treats as one of the most specific and remarkable elements of his prophecy. He named the descendants of Jethro, Moses' father-in-law, as the family who would be the first to greet the Messiah in Israel. They would come from the wilderness of Judah to offer gifts at the rebuilt Temple. The Kenites, the Rechabites, the families descended from the Midianite priest who had taken in a fugitive from Egypt and become, through that act of hospitality, the father-in-law of the greatest prophet who ever lived - these were the ones Balaam named as the advance guard of the Messianic welcome.

The tradition in Ginzberg's compilation treats this detail with care: the same connection that had disqualified Moses from personally leading the war against Midian - the principle that you do not throw a stone into the well from which you drank - ran in the opposite direction here. Jethro's descendants, whose ancestor had sheltered Moses, would be the first to welcome the redemption Moses had dedicated his life to bringing. The gratitude owed to Jethro would be paid by history itself.

The Last Warning That Was Also Prophecy

Balaam also delivered a warning that the Legends of the Jews says was amplified by God so that every nation could hear it. The warning was this: God is not a man. Anyone who claims to be God is lying. Anyone who says they will disappear and return, who makes themselves into a figure of divine return and redemption, is making a promise they cannot keep. The tradition, preserving Balaam's voice as God's warning to the nations through the last prophet they would ever receive, uses this declaration to establish a permanent boundary: there is one God, God is not human, and the messianic hope belongs to the particular covenant story Balaam had just mapped out from his hill in Moab.

After this, the spirit left. Balaam came down from Peor with his prophetic gifts gone, his career of attempted cursing behind him, and the counsel of Shittim still ahead. He went to Midian. Phinehas came to Midian. Balaam tried to fly away. He did not succeed. The last prophet the nations would ever have died in the same country where Jethro had once sheltered the man Balaam had spent his life trying to destroy.