Bilam Praised Yitro for Walking Out of Pharaoh's Council

The decree was not written yet, but the room had already chosen its side.

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Bilam stayed in his chair. Yitro stood up and walked out.

Two Advisers in Pharaoh's Room

The last Hebrew to stand in that throne room had come up out of a pit and a prison. Joseph was thirty when he stood before Pharaoh. He got there because he worked in Potiphar's house when nobody was watching, and because the woman who tried to bury him with a story could not make him stay in her room. Diligence had put a Hebrew in front of a king. He did not stand before that obscure woman. He stood before Pharaoh.

Generations later a different Pharaoh filled the same room with advisers and asked what to do about the Hebrews, who had grown numerous. Bilam was in the room. So was a Midianite priest named Yitro.

What came out of that meeting was the decree that put Hebrew infants in the river. Bilam stayed for it. Yitro did not. He left the counsel, left the gold of Egypt, and went home to Midian while the ink was still wet. Walking out of that room was the whole of his miracle.

Moses Took the Flock

Yitro went home to his seven daughters and his wells. One day a man came out of Egypt with a killing behind him and sat down at one of those wells. Yitro fed him. Then Yitro asked him to stay.

Moses swore himself to that household. He took Zipporah. His father-in-law handed him the flock.

So the man who would take a nation out of Egypt spent forty years learning the work on somebody else's sheep. He counted them at dusk. He carried the ones that could not keep up. He ran down the one that bolted into the rocks. He was tending, and he went on tending, worthy at the beginning of it and worthy at the end.

Aaron Came to Eat Bread

Then the news reached Midian. A sea that stood up. An army that did not come back. Bread falling in a wilderness.

Yitro packed and went out to find him. When he arrived, Aaron came. All the elders of Israel came. The whole leadership of a people that had been slaves under the decree Yitro had walked out of sat down to eat bread with a Midianite priest, because he had bound his house to Moses.

He had not bought that table with gold. He had married a daughter to a man Heaven had already picked, and the honor came toward his house the way water comes toward low ground.

The Curse Would Not Come Out

Balak's silver bought the wrong prophet. Bilam went up on the heights to curse Israel, and blessings kept coming out of him instead, three times, until the king who hired him was slapping his own hands together in rage.

Bilam looked out over the camps and kept speaking. He saw Amalek and had no trouble at all. First among the nations, and its end is oblivion. The curse came out of him clean and whole.

Then he saw the Kenites, and the Kenites were Yitro's line, and what came out was this. Mighty is your dwelling. Set your nest in the rock. (Numbers 24:21)

He could hear himself. He knew exactly who he was praising, and he could not stop, so he put the knife in sideways. "Kenite," he said, "you sat in that counsel with us." The room in Egypt. The decree. "Who seated you with the mighty of the world?"

The Bird on the King's Statue

There is a hunter, and there is a bird he has been running down all afternoon, and the bird finally drops out of the air and settles on a statue of the king.

The hunter stops. He has the bird. It is right there, close enough to reach, and he cannot reach for it, because the thing it is sitting on is the king's own image, and a man who chips a king's face off a statue does not go home that night.

So he stands in the road with his hands empty and says the only thing left to say. "What a fine flight that was, that you flew."

Bilam stood on the height with a mouth full of somebody else's words and praised the same flight in better poetry. The adviser who got up and left the room had landed somewhere no hired curse could follow, on a rock, at a table with Aaron and the elders of Israel, and the one who stayed in the room had to stand there in the open and admire the bird.