Balaam

The Balaam narrative is built as a repeating procedure that fails three times and then breaks. Balak takes the diviner to a high place from which part of Israel is visible, seven altars are built, seven bulls and seven rams offered, Balaam withdraws, and comes back with words. Each time the words are a blessing. Balak moves him to a different vantage on the theory that a different view will produce a different result, and the sequence runs again. The fourth oracle is given unbidden and goes furthest, speaking of a star coming out of Jacob and a sceptre out of Israel, a line later read messianically in both Jewish and Christian tradition and quoted at Qumran.

The road scene that precedes it is written as comedy and its joke is theological. A professional seer, hired for his sight, rides an animal that can see the angel standing in the way with a drawn sword while he cannot. The donkey turns aside into a field, crushes his foot against a wall, and finally lies down under him, and he beats her three times. Then she speaks, and asks whether she has ever behaved this way before. Only afterwards are his own eyes opened.

Together the two halves make a single argument: a diviner is not a man who can compel a god, and a man who takes payment for oracles may find he can produce only what he is given, in front of the client who is paying.

In 1967 excavators at Tell Deir Alla, in the Jordan Valley on the east bank, recovered fragments of a text written in red and black ink on wall plaster, brought down by an earthquake and pieced together from hundreds of pieces. It opens by naming Balaam son of Beor, a seer of the gods, and describes a night vision in which a council of deities decrees a darkening of the sky. The language is a local Aramaic or Canaanite dialect and the text is not Israelite. It is the only case in which a figure from the Hebrew Bible turns up by name and patronymic in a religious text written by somebody else.

The find changed the question. Balaam is not a character invented to make a point about foreign prophets; he was a known figure of trans Jordanian religion whom the biblical writers took up and argued about.

And argue they did. The oracles in Numbers 22 to 24 treat him as a genuine seer of the God of Israel. Later passages take the opposite view: Numbers 31 blames him for the counsel that led Israel into apostasy at Peor, Joshua 13 calls him a diviner rather than a prophet, and Deuteronomy remembers only that God turned his curse into a blessing. The New Testament follows the hostile line, and rabbinic tradition in Sanhedrin makes him the type of the wicked gentile prophet. The atlas holds both readings because the tradition does, and the plaster from Deir Alla is the only voice in the file that is not taking a side in that argument.