Bileam tried one last trick before delivering his final oracle. According to the Targum's version of (Numbers 24), he "set his face toward the wilderness, to recall to memory the work of the calf which they had there committed." He was trying to conjure Israel's worst sin—the Golden Calf—as ammunition for a curse. It did not work.
Instead, the Spirit of prophecy seized him, and what came out was poetry. The Targum transforms Bileam's famous blessing of Israel's tents into a vision of their schools and houses of study. "How beautiful your houses of instruction, in the tabernacle where Jacob your father ministered!" The tents were not dwellings—they were academies. Their disciples sat in "fellowships of their schools" like gardens by flowing streams, and "the light of their faces shone as the brightness of the firmament which the Lord created on the second day."
The messianic prophecy in this chapter gets its most explicit Targum expansion. "From them their King shall arise, and their Redeemer be of them and among them." The first king would wage war against Amalek and be exalted above their king Agag—a clear reference to King Saul—"but because he had spared him his kingdom will be taken from him." The Targum reads Israel's entire royal history into Bileam's oracle.
But the most dangerous moment came after the blessings ended. Furious Balak dismissed Bileam, and the sorcerer offered his parting counsel—a plan that appears nowhere in the Torah's version of this scene. "Go, furnish tavern houses, and employ seductive women to sell food and drinks cheaply, and bring this people together to eat and drink, and commit whoredom with them, that they may deny their God." Bileam could not curse Israel with words, so he designed a trap of pleasure and assimilation. "Then in a brief time will they be delivered into your hand, and many of them fall."
The final oracle names Israel's future enemies by their later identities. A prince of Jacob's house "will destroy and consume the remnant that have escaped from Constantina the guilty city" and will "lay waste the rebellious city, even Kaiserin the strong city of the Gentiles." The Targum reads Rome and Constantinople directly into Bileam's ancient prophecy, collapsing thousands of years into a single vision.