Seven Altars for Seven Patriarchs, and God Quoted Proverbs Back

Balaam stood before seven altars and asked God a direct question. The question was: why Israel? If the measure of devotion was sacrifice, then Balaam had just built seven altars on the high place of Baal, one for each of the great figures who had ever built an altar before God, from Adam in the garden to Moses at Sinai. He had matched them, altar for altar. So why did God favor a single nation over the seventy nations of the world, especially when Balaam was now offering, before God's eyes, everything they had ever offered?

The answer God gave him was a verse from Proverbs: "Better is a dry morsel and quietness therewith than a house full of sacrifices with strife." This is recorded in Legends of the Jews, Louis Ginzberg's monumental synthesis of rabbinic tradition published between 1909 and 1938. The verse, from Proverbs 17:1, does not mention Israel or Balaam or altars. It talks about dry bread eaten in peace. That was the answer. A dry crust at a quiet table beats a feast in a house full of strife.

The seven altars were drawn precisely. In the tradition preserved by Ginzberg's collection, Balaam deliberately mirrored the seven altars of Adam, Abel, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses. He knew the history of Israelite devotion. He had studied it. He understood that Israel's claim on divine favor was rooted in its ancestors' accumulated acts of worship. So his strategy was mathematical: replicate the sum, claim the merit. If God rewarded seven altars, here were seven altars. What more could be asked?

The problem, which the rabbis of Midrash Rabbah (5th-century Palestine) articulate with their characteristic precision, is that merit is not transferable that way. The altars of the patriarchs were not simply fire and stone. They were built out of relationships, out of decades of walking with God through confusion and testing and covenant. Abraham's altar after the binding of Isaac carried the weight of a man who had been asked for his son and had not withheld him. Noah's altar after the flood carried the weight of a man who had watched the world drown. You cannot copy the external form and inherit the internal weight.

Balaam asked God directly: "Am I not adored by seventy nations while Israel is adored by only one?" The numbers were meant to be flattering. Balaam was offering God the devotion of almost every nation on earth, versus the devotion of a single small people. It was a business argument. God's answer, the dry crust and quietness, rejected the entire framework of the argument. The question wasn't volume. The question was whether the offering came out of love or out of transaction.

Midrash Tanchuma, the Torah-portion commentary attributed to Rabbi Tanchuma bar Abba in the 5th century and preserved in our Tanchuma collection, makes the point another way. Balaam's altars were built with strife at their foundation. He was trying to curse a people. He was building altars of devotion in the service of hatred. The sacrifice and the intention were contradictions. A house full of sacrifices with strife, exactly as Proverbs said, was worth less than a dry crust eaten in peace.

The Zohar, published in Castile, Spain, around 1280 CE, adds a dimension that the earlier midrash only implies: Balaam's error was not ignorance. He knew better. He had genuine prophetic gifts. The traditions preserved in the texts about Balaam's hidden wisdom make clear that he understood, on some level, what made Israel's relationship with God distinctive. He asked the question about the seventy nations not because he didn't know the answer but because he hoped the altar-building would change it. It did not.

What the seven altars actually produced was the opposite of what Balaam intended. Each altar became an occasion for God to speak, and each time God spoke through Balaam, the words that came out were blessings, not curses. The mountain of sacrifice that Balaam had erected to channel destruction became, against his will, the platform from which some of the most luminous words in the Torah were spoken. A dry morsel in quietness. God was not impressed by the altars. God was already present in the camp below, among the people going about their ordinary day, and no amount of building on the heights was going to change that.