Moab and Midian Allied Against the Power in Israel's Mouths

Moab and Midian hated each other. The Torah records it plainly: there had been a king of Midian who smote Moab in the field of Moab (Genesis 36:35), and the enmity between them was deep enough to be considered permanent. This is why, when the book of Numbers records that "Moab said to the elders of Midian," the sages of Midrash Rabbah, the great homiletical collection compiled in the fifth and sixth centuries, immediately asked: what are the elders of Midian doing in Moab's territory in the first place?

The answer is fear. Israel had just destroyed Sihon and Og, two kings whose military power had seemed unassailable. They had done it without conventional warfare making the decisive difference. The nations watching from the sidelines could see that something beyond ordinary military strength was operating in Israel's camp. The elders of Midian told Moab what they had observed: "His power is only in his mouth." Moses had risen to prominence in Midian, in the wilderness years before the Exodus, and the Midianites had studied him. They knew what kind of leader he was. He was not a general. He was a speaker, a pray-er, a man whose words carried weight that no army could match.

Moab heard this and understood immediately what it meant. If Israel's strength was in mouths, then the only weapon that could touch them was another mouth. A wolf, the midrash says, was approaching one of two dogs who were fighting each other. The dog not being attacked said: if I do not help now, the wolf will kill my enemy today and come for me tomorrow. That is why Moab aligned with Midian. Ancient hatred dissolved in the face of a common threat.

Their description of Israel is worth sitting with. "Now this assembly will lick clean all our surroundings, as the ox licks clean the grass of the field" (Numbers 22:4). The ox metaphor is precise. The ox's strength is in its mouth, yet that same mouth destroys everything it touches. There will be no sign of blessing in anything Israel touches, they said. And the ox also gores with its horns, but Israel's horns, in the language of Deuteronomy, are the horns of the wild ox, meaning their prayers. They gore with their prayers. They lick clean with their words. Their mouths are both destructive and consuming.

This is why Balaam was the obvious solution. Balaam was a prophet whose power, like Moses', resided in speech. The nations were not wrong to think this way. They were correctly diagnosing what they were up against. The mistake they made was in thinking that prophetic power could be turned like a weapon, purchased for silver and aimed at a target. The midrash traces the logic of this alliance precisely because the nations' reasoning is coherent. It is also entirely missing the point of what prayer is.

The mystical texts read alongside this story reveal what prayer actually does. When Israel prays, they are not sending words into empty air. They are petitioning the divine King through the Shekhinah, the divine presence that rests among them. The Kabbalistic tradition describes this precisely: Israel does not approach the King directly. They say to the Shekhinah, using the language of the Song of Songs: "Where has your beloved gone? To where has your beloved turned, that we may seek him with you?" (Song of Songs 6:1). The prayer moves through the Shekhinah, and the Shekhinah carries it to the King. The beloved does not depart from Israel entirely, except when Israel has not behaved respectfully toward the Shekhinah. Even then, the Shekhinah holds the King captive with Israel through the six days of the week, and the gates open on Shabbat and New Moon.

Moab and Midian saw the result and called it the power of the ox's mouth. They were not wrong about the power. They were wrong about the mechanism. Prayer in the Jewish understanding is not a form of magic, not a verbal spell that can be aimed at enemies or purchased from a prophet for hire. It is a relationship. The Shekhinah stands among Israel because Israel stands in prayer, because they lift their voices in the direction of the King, because they maintain the relationship through which the divine presence can rest in the world at all.

Balak son of Tzipor had been a prince in Midian, identified with Tzur, one of the Midianite chiefs recorded in Joshua (Joshua 13:21). He became king of Moab only because Sihon was killed, and the collapse of the old order created a vacuum that Balak filled. A man who became king by accident, hiring a prophet for pay, to fight a people whose strength was a covenantal relationship with the divine presence. The outcome was never in question. What the Moabites and Midianites had observed correctly was real. What they had misunderstood was irreversible.

The nations could align. The ancient enemies could set aside their hatred. A prophet could be purchased and positioned on a hilltop overlooking Israel's camp. None of it could touch what the Shekhinah had placed among the people. Israel's power in their mouths was not a technique. It was a sign of whose presence dwelt among them, and that presence had not been purchased with silver and could not be bought away.