Bilam Praised Yitro for Walking Out of Pharaoh's Council

Click for full size

The Room Where Egypt Decided

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, and he got there because he worked in Potiphar's house when nobody was watching him work, and because the woman who tried to bury him with a story in the dark could not finally make him stand in front of her instead of in front of a king.

Generations later a different Pharaoh filled the same room with advisers and asked what to do about the Hebrews, who had gotten 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.

The Priest of Midian Set Him Over the Flock

Yitro went home to Midian and his seven daughters and his wells, and 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.

The word Scripture uses for what Moses did next binds two ways at once, an oath sworn and a house settled into, the same word a host uses when he tells a traveler at dusk to stop walking and lie down. Moses swore himself to that household. He took Zipporah. And 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, counting them at dusk, carrying the ones that could not keep up, running 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 and All the Elders Came to His Table

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. What happened when he arrived is the part the sages will not let anyone skim. Aaron came. And all the elders of Israel came. The whole leadership of a people that had been slaves under the decree Yitro had walked out of came and 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 That Would Not Come Out Straight

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.

He could hear himself. He knew exactly who he was praising, and he could not stop, so he put the knife in sideways instead. "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 and 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 said the same thing 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 flight.