Book of Numbers

Numbers opens with a census and repeats one in chapter 26, and the two lists have almost no names in common. That is not an accident of record keeping, it is the argument of the book made structurally. The generation counted at Sinai is not the generation counted on the plains of Moab. Everyone in the first list, with two named exceptions, dies in the wilderness in between.

The Hebrew name comes from the first verse, in the wilderness, and describes the book better than the English one does. The opening chapters arrange the camp: each tribe in its place around a sanctuary at the centre, the Levites in an inner ring, the order of march specified. It is a portrait of a people organised for a journey that is about to fail.

The failure is chapter 13. Scouts are sent into the land and ten of the twelve report that it cannot be taken. The people believe them, and the sentence is that they will have the wilderness they asked for, forty years of it, one for each day the scouts were gone. What follows is a sequence of revolts: Korah and his company challenge the priesthood and the ground opens; the people complain about the food; Moses strikes the rock at Meribah instead of speaking to it and is told he will not enter either.

The book is unusually honest about its own leadership. Aaron makes the calf in Exodus and is not removed. Miriam is struck for challenging Moses and Aaron, who made the same challenge, is not. Moses himself is barred from the land over an incident the text describes in four verses and does not fully explain.

Chapters 22 to 24 leave Israel entirely and follow a Mesopotamian diviner named Balaam son of Beor, hired by Balak of Moab to curse an approaching people. Israel does not appear as an actor in the episode at all; it is camped in the valley and never learns what is happening on the ridge above it.

The story is comic before it is anything else. Balaam sets out and his donkey stops in the road because it can see an armed messenger the professional seer cannot. He beats the animal three times, it speaks, and the man who is paid to perceive what others cannot is shown to be the least perceptive figure on the road. He then climbs to three vantage points, builds altars at each, and each time delivers a blessing instead of a curse, to the increasing expense of Balak.

Balaam is treated inconsistently across the canon, and the inconsistency is worth noticing rather than smoothing over. In these chapters he is scrupulous, saying only what he is given to say. Elsewhere in Numbers and in later books he is blamed for the seduction at Peor and remembered as a byword for a prophet who sold his gift.

He is also one of a very small number of figures from the Hebrew Bible attested outside it. A plaster inscription found at Deir Alla in the Jordan valley, written on the wall of a building, records the visions of a seer called Balaam son of Beor, in a text that is not Israelite and does not know the biblical story. Whatever else he was, he was a figure the region already had.