Dr. Keith Essex · The Master's Seminary · 53 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Keith Essex, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
The course reaches the chapters that stand on a par with Genesis 49 and Moses' final speeches: the Balaam oracles. Dr. Essex first settles who Balaam was, weighing his own pious claims against the verdict of the whole Bible, then walks the donkey episode and all seven oracles. Listen for why the blessing over a rebellious generation had to rest on the covenant with Abraham rather than the covenant at Sinai, and for how Balaam finally died, and why.
Numbers 22 through 24 stands at one of the Torah's three great junctures, alongside Jacob's words in Genesis 49 and Moses' final speeches in Deuteronomy: poetry about the end of the days at the close of a generation's narrative. And this installment comes from the unlikeliest source in the Torah: a diviner from the East, hired to curse the very people he will bless.
Balaam talks like Yahweh's man: I will bring back word as Yahweh may speak to me; Yahweh my God. Some interpreters take the claim at face value. The rest of Scripture does not. Wherever the Old Testament recalls the episode, Nehemiah 13 and Micah 6 among them, Balaam stands with Israel's opponents; and the New Testament is explicit: 2 Peter 2 names the way of Balaam, who loved the wages of unrighteousness and was rebuked by a mute donkey restraining the madness of the prophet; Jude and Revelation 2 concur. Balaam's character is not incidental to the narrative; it is the narrative's point: God pronounced irrevocable blessing through a man who never belonged to him.
The text itself signals the distance. Balaam speaks of Yahweh, but when the visitations come, Moses writes that God came to Balaam, the Creator addressing a pagan diviner, not the covenant LORD communing with his prophet. And after his eyes are opened, Balaam's own words shift: I shall speak the word that God puts in my mouth. He is Yahweh's instrument; he is not Yahweh's man, and the narrative keeps the difference visible.
Balak of Moab, terrified of the people covering the land and knowing he cannot beat them in battle, allies with Midian and sends for Balaam with the fees of divination and a reputation: he whom you bless is blessed, and he whom you curse is cursed. The words unknowingly echo the covenant that will defeat him, for it is Yahweh who told Abraham that those who bless his seed are blessed and the one who disdains them is cursed. Balak proposes to fight the Abrahamic covenant with a hired curse.
God's first answer is plain: do not go with them; the people are blessed. When Balak sends nobler envoys and richer promises, Balaam mouths the right words, a house full of silver and gold could not move him, and then invites the men to stay the night while he asks whether God has changed his mind. God permits the journey and is angry that Balaam takes it: the divine will had already been spoken, and the permission exposes the desire of Balaam's heart. He rides off under one condition: only the word I speak to you shall you do.
Three times the angel of the LORD stands in the way with drawn sword, and three times the donkey sees what the seer cannot: she turns into the field, crushes Balaam's foot against the wall, and finally lies down under him, taking his blows each time. Then the LORD opens her mouth, and, as Essex notes, the greater marvel is that Balaam argues back. When his eyes are opened at last, the angel's verdict is withering: your way was against me; the donkey saved your life. Balaam confesses, I have sinned, and is sent on with the same leash: speak only the word I tell you.
Seven altars, the offerings, and then the first discourse: how shall I curse whom God has not cursed? Balaam sees a people who dwell apart, not reckoned among the nations, and asks who can count the dust of Jacob, the very language of the promise to Abraham. He even prays to die the death of the upright, and let my end be like his, words that will indict him. The blessing, he declares in effect, is irrevocable.
Balak tries a different vantage; the word does not change. God is not a man that he should lie; he has blessed, and it cannot be reversed. Yahweh has beheld no misfortune in Jacob, the shout of a King is among them, no omen or divination avails against this people, and Israel rises like a lioness, like a lion that does not lie down until it devours the prey. The lion is Genesis 49 sounding again: the victory over Egypt is the down payment on a victory, through a king, over all the peoples.
For the third oracle Balaam abandons his omens, and the Spirit of God comes upon him, a coming, Essex notes, that was never salvific, for Balaam was never saved. He sings the beauty of Israel's camps and land, a king higher than Agag, echoing the Amalekite battle of Exodus 17, a kingdom exalted, the lion couching whom none dares rouse, and the Abrahamic refrain verbatim: blessed is everyone who blesses you, cursed is everyone who curses you. Then, enraged Balak dismissed, the fourth oracle opens with Jacob's own formula, what this people will do to you in the days to come: a star shall come forth from Jacob, a scepter shall rise from Israel, and shall crush the forehead of Moab; Edom shall be a possession; one from Jacob shall have dominion. The hired curser tells his employer that the coming King will crush his own people.
Balaam is not finished. Amalek, first of the nations to attack Israel, ends in destruction, a thread running to Saul and Agag and on to Esther. The Kenites are carried off by Assyria. And in the last, ships from the coast of Kittim afflict Asshur and Eber and themselves come to destruction, a horizon that prepares the reader for Daniel 11 and the final world power put down so that the promised kingdom stands. From Egypt behind to the last empire ahead, the oracles run the whole line of the end of the days.
Chapter 24 closes as if Balaam simply rode home. Chapter 31 fills in the rest. When Israel executes the LORD's vengeance on Midian, Balaam son of Beor falls by the sword among Midian's kings, and verse 16 explains why he was there: it was Balaam's counsel that snared Israel at Peor, I cannot curse them, but immorality and idolatry will bring their own God's judgment on them, the advice Revelation 2 still remembers. That is how he finally got paid. The man who prayed, let my end be like the upright man's, died fighting on the side of Israel's enemies: he had spoken Yahweh's words under compulsion, and his heart had never changed.
Why did this blessing come through a pagan, and not a prophet in Israel? Because the first generation stood at its lowest, days from the apostasy of Peor, under the Mosaic covenant's curse and blessed only as the seed of Abraham, the oracles' whole ground. And because these words were heard first by the nations: Moab and Midian received, from their own hired prophet, the announcement that Israel's God blesses Israel and will judge those who disdain them, and they did not repent, exactly the pattern the latter prophets' oracles to the nations will repeat. Balaam himself, the ancient pluralist ready to contact whatever god a client named, stands as the type of every teacher whose mouth God's truth has passed through and whose heart it never entered.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Tap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all fourteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. With which passages do the Balaam chapters stand structurally?
2. How does the New Testament judge Balaam?
3. What does the narrator's phrase God came to Balaam signal?
4. What reputation moved Balak to hire Balaam?
5. Why was God angry though he permitted the journey?
6. What is the withering point of the donkey episode?
7. What does the first oracle declare?
8. What imagery ties the second and third oracles to Genesis 49?
9. What came upon Balaam before the third oracle, and what does Essex note about it?
10. What does the star-and-scepter oracle promise?
11. Where do the three short oracles finally reach?
12. How and why did Balaam die?
13. On what covenant ground could a rebellious generation be blessed?
14. Who first heard the oracles, and with what result?
All fourteen correct. Lecture 21 is complete.
Balaam spoke God's true words with an unchanged heart, and died with God's enemies. What distinguishes being God's instrument from being God's man, and how would that difference show in a life?
The blessing over a failing generation rested on the covenant with Abraham, not on Israel's performance at Sinai. Where does your own assurance actually rest when your record is at its worst?
Balaam could not curse Israel, so he taught their enemies to tempt them instead. What does that strategy reveal about where God's people are genuinely vulnerable, then and now?
The fourth oracle of Numbers 24: I see him, but not now; I behold him, but not near; a star shall come forth from Jacob, and a scepter shall rise from Israel.
The lecture's own trail: 2 Peter 2, Jude, and Revelation 2, the New Testament's three-fold verdict on the way, the error, and the counsel of Balaam; Numbers 31 read as the epilogue chapter 24 withholds; and Genesis 49 set beside Numbers 24, the two great end-of-days poems answering each other across the Torah.