BS 
 580 
 B3 
 C6 
 
 
 A 1 
 
 *X ! 
 
 
 SOUTHERN REGIONA 
 
 ', OOO coc 
 
 
 L LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 >co cocvjoo <y>
 
 yys H7o2> 
 
 ubrww 
 
 UN »V6RS«Tf OF 
 CALFORNIA 
 SAN DIEGO
 
 '/ 
 
 J o 
 
 
 !0
 
 BALAAM
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 A COMMENTARY ON THE BOOK OF JOB. With a Trans- 
 lation. Demy Svo. 15s. 
 
 SALVATOR MUNDI : or, Is Christ the Saviour of all Men ? 
 Ninth Edition. Crown Svo. 5s. 
 
 THE LARGER HOPE: A Sequel to "Salvator Mundi." 
 16mo. Is. 
 
 THE GENESIS OF EVIL, and other Sermons. Mainly 
 Expository. Third Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 
 MIRACLES : An Argument and a Challenge. Crown 8vo. 
 2s. 6d. 
 
 %* For Notices of the Press, see end of this volume. 
 
 London : Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co.
 
 BALAAM 
 
 AN EXPOSITION AND A STUDY 
 
 SAMUEL COX, D.D. 
 
 AUTHOR OF "A COMMENTARY ON JOB," " SALVATOR MUNDI," ETC. 
 
 " / have not flattered him, hut took him to life as well as I could, sitting so 
 far off. and having no better light." — Lord Bacon. 
 
 London : 
 
 KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, & CO., i PATERNOSTER SQUARE. 
 
 1884.
 
 MADE AND PRINTF- 
 IN GREAT BRITAIN.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 In preparing for this " Study " I carefully re- 
 perused all that had been written on its theme by the 
 great scholars and thinkers for whom the imposing 
 but enigmatical figure of the Chaldean Prophet has 
 possessed a singular fascination, from Bishop Butler 
 down to Cardinal Newman. Whatever I felt to be 
 most helpful and suggestive, — and I found my most 
 valuable aids in the sermons of Butler, F. D. Maurice, 
 and F. W. Robertson, — I have woven, with due ac- 
 knowledgment, into my own work. And hence I 
 would fain hope that this little book will be found 
 useful to those who wish to acquaint themselves with 
 the best that has been thought and written on a con- 
 fessedly difficult problem. 
 
 Of my own solution of that problem I must leave 
 my readers to judge for themselves. But I may be 
 permitted to say that the substance of this volume 
 has already appeared in the pages of The Expositor —
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 re-appearing here with only a few corrections and 
 some slight additions ; and that in this earlier shape 
 it gained a favourable and generous verdict from the 
 leading critical journals, and won the general approval 
 of many of our most eminent Biblical scholars, among 
 whom were three or four of our most learned 
 Hebraists. Encouraged by these tokens of favour, I 
 now venture to reproduce it in this separate and 
 compendious form. 
 
 s. COX. 
 
 Nottingham.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 Pack 
 
 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM— 
 
 
 
 
 The Text 25 
 
 The Invitation 
 
 
 
 34 
 
 The Journey 
 
 
 
 50 
 
 The Oracles 
 
 
 
 84 
 
 First Oracle .... 
 
 
 
 91 
 
 Second Oracle .... 
 
 
 
 94 
 
 Third Oracle .... 
 
 
 
 101 
 
 Fourth Oracle .... 
 
 
 
 119 
 
 THE SUPPLEMENTARY SCRIPTURES 
 
 
 
 . 137 
 
 Adverse ...... 
 
 
 
 144 
 
 Favourable 
 
 THE CONCLUSION .... 
 
 
 
 155 
 . 173
 
 BALAAM. 
 
 " A man of two minds, he is unstable in all his ways. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Even in the noble portrait-gallery of the Old Testa- 
 ment there are few figures more striking 1 , more im- 
 pressive, or more perplexing than that of Balaam. A 
 heathen, not a Hebrew, and yet elected for special 
 distinction in the service of God ; a diviner, seeking 
 omens and auguries and interpreting them after the 
 approved methods of the ancient East, and yet a 
 prophet who heard the words of God and saw visions 
 from the Almighty with opened eyes ; a soothsayer, 
 affecting to foretell and even to control human 
 destinies, and yet a seer familiar with the ecstasies of 
 the prophetic trance, and to whom the inspiration of 
 the Almighty gave understanding of things to be ; a 
 man of God who, in the face of all threatening and 
 allurement, professed that he could not go beyond the 
 word of the Lord his God, " to do a small thing or a 
 great," and who, in the teeth of his own most clamor-
 
 10 BALAAM. 
 
 ous interests and desires, did consistently " speak the 
 word that the Lord put into his mouth," and yet a 
 man of God who was disobedient to the word of the 
 Lord, and who by his vile counsel to the daughters of 
 Midian cursed Israel far more effectually than by any 
 spell he could have cast upon them ; a sage before 
 whose mind there floated the loftiest moral ideal which 
 has ever blessed the eyes of man, and to whom both 
 the life and the death of the righteous were infinitely 
 desirable, and yet a " fool " who " loved the wages of 
 unrighteousness " even more than righteousness itself : 
 here, surely, was a man whose character it is by no 
 means easy to decipher and harmonize, a man of 
 qualities and impulses so contradictory and opposed 
 that, to most of us, he remains an enigma to this 
 day. 
 
 Many have attempted to solve, and one or two 
 have gone far toward solving, this enigma. Bishop 
 Butler, Dr Arnold, Cardinal Newman, F. D. Maurice, 
 Robertson (of Brighton), Dean Stanley, with many 
 more, have been attracted by it ; but while they have 
 all contributed something to our knowledge of the 
 man, and two of them, Butler and Maurice, have 
 contributed all, or nearly all, of which their respective 
 methods of inquiry would admit, it is still open, even 
 to far inferior men, by employing new methods, or 
 even by using old methods more rigorously, to arrive
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 at a truer solution of the problem, a more adequate 
 conception of this great but most unhappy Prophet. 
 
 And there are two methods of inquiry, I think, 
 which may still be used with some hope. Up to this 
 time no English scholar has, so far as I know, collected 
 together all the Scriptures which relate to Balaam — 
 Scriptures much more numerous than is commonly 
 supposed — and studied them in the light of the new 
 modern learning ; though, obviously, this is the only 
 method by which all the facts of the case can be 
 recovered and ranked in their due order and import- 
 ance, and the problem we have to solve can be fairly 
 stated or re-stated. And, again, I have never yet 
 seen what may be called the comparative method 
 deliberately applied to the history and character of 
 Balaam ; that is to say, I have never seen him fairly 
 placed alongside of other faulty or even guilty 
 prophets, men such as Jacob, Saul, Solomon, Jonah, 
 Caiaphas, etc., who, though they too were at times 
 moved by the Holy Ghost, nevertheless fell under the 
 dominion of divers lusts as degrading, if not as fatal, 
 as those by which he was carried away captive ; while 
 yet, it will be admitted, that if we can only classify 
 Balaam, and read the problem of his character in the 
 light of that of men of his own type, this of itself will 
 carry us far toward the solution of which we are in 
 search, or will, at lowest, relieve the problem of many 
 of its difficulties.
 
 BALAAM. 
 
 These two methods, therefore, I propose to apply. 
 By a careful study of all that Holy Scripture records 
 of him, I hope we may get the facts of the case, the 
 quantities of the problem, more clearly stated ; while 
 by running a comparison between him and other 
 inspired men of a similar type, I trust we may find 
 that the problem is a much more common one than 
 we have been wont to suppose, that his case, which 
 has been assumed to be without a parallel, is not so 
 unique, and therefore not so difficult and perplexing, 
 as it seems : even though, after all is done, we should 
 have to confess of Balaam, as Schlegel of Hamlet, 
 that he is an enigma, " resembling those irrational 
 equations in which a fraction of unknown magnitude 
 always remains that will admit of no solution." 
 
 Pope called Lord Bacon — 
 
 "The wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind." 
 
 Few epigrams are more brilliant, or more unjust. 
 But though Bacon was wronged by it, there have been 
 men who have, in some measure, deserved it ; men 
 far wiser than their fellows, raised high above them 
 by a splendid dowry of the gifts which the world most 
 admires, but who have nevertheless abused their gifts 
 to their own shame, and to the lasting injury of all who 
 loved and trusted them. And among these rare and 
 gifted men, who once shone with a lustre so brilliant
 
 INTRODUCTION. 13 
 
 and attractive, but have long since sunk into the 
 darkness of reprobation and pity and contempt, " lost 
 to name and fame and use," we shall, I suspect, be 
 led to rank this great, bright, but mean Prophet of 
 Pethor. 
 
 Now of course, in urging this inquiry, our first 
 question must be : What are the historical documents, 
 the authorities, at our command ; and what are they 
 worth ? 
 
 The first, and by far the fullest, historical document 
 at our disposal is that which, for the sake of brevity 
 and distinction, we may call The Chronicle of Balaam 
 inserted in the Book of Numbers. Every reader of 
 that Book must have observed that in Chapters 
 xxii. 2 — xxiv. 25 we have an episode complete in 
 itself; and all the modern critics who have studied 
 this Scripture concur, I believe, in the conclusion that, 
 in this place, the Author or Compiler of the Book 
 has inserted one of those ancient, detached or detach- 
 able, documents of which we find so many in the 
 Pentateuch. 
 
 Where and how he got it, is a question not easy to 
 answer, if indeed answer be possible. But, from the 
 comparatively favourable light in which the Chronicle 
 presents the facts of Balaam's story, most of our better 
 scholars conclude that in some way he derived it from
 
 H BALAAM. 
 
 Balaam himself. Hengstenberg, who has devoted 
 much labour to the illustration of the Chronicle, goes 
 so far, indeed, as to assume that, on his dismissal by 
 the King of Moab, Balaam betook himself to the camp 
 of Israel, and told the chosen people how he had been 
 constrained to bless them again and again, in the hope 
 that they would welcome and reward him ; and that, 
 on meeting with but a cold reception, he went over 
 to the Midianite camp, and so fell with the chiefs of 
 Midian when they made war upon Israel. But this 
 is pure assumption, without a single recorded fact to 
 support it. And, therefore, I venture to offer a 
 speculation of my own which has at least some 
 recorded facts to go upon. 
 
 We are told (Numbers xxxi. 8) that, together with 
 five Midianite chiefs, Balaam was taken prisoner by 
 the Israelites, and put to "a judicial death " after the 
 battle had been fought and won. 1 A judicial death 
 implies some sort of trial. And what more natural 
 than that Balaam should plead in his defence the 
 inspirations he had received from Jehovah, and the 
 long series of blessings he had pronounced on Israel 
 when all his interests, and perhaps also all his in- 
 clinations, prompted him to curse them ? Such 
 
 1 So the best critics read the Verse, understanding by "Balaam 
 they slew with the sword" the sword of justice, since the battle 
 was over when he was slain.
 
 INT ROD UCTION. 1 5 
 
 defences, in the East, were commonly autobiographi- 
 cal. Even St Paul, when called upon to plead before 
 kings and governors, invariably told the story of his 
 life as his best vindication. 1 And if Balaam, called 
 upon to plead before Moses and the elders, told 
 the story we now read in his Chronicle — what a 
 scene was there ? What a revelation his words would 
 convey to the leaders of Israel of the kindness of God 
 their Saviour, of the scale on which his providence 
 works, and of the mystery in which it is wrapped to 
 mortal eyes ! So, then, God had been working for 
 them in the mountains of Moab, and in the heart of 
 this great diviner from the East, and they knew it 
 not ! Knew it not ? nay, perhaps were full of fear 
 and distrust, doubting whether even He Himself were 
 able to deliver them from the perils by which they 
 were encompassed ! As Balaam unfolded his tale, 
 how their hearts must have burned within them — 
 burned with shame as well as with thankfulness — when 
 they heard of interposition after interposition on their 
 behalf of which up till now they had been ignorant, 
 and for which at the time perchance they had not 
 ventured to hope ! 
 
 Balaam may well have thought that such a story as 
 this would plead for him more effectually than any 
 other defence he could make. And, no doubt, it did 
 1 Cf. Acts xxii, 1-21 ; xxvi. 1-23.
 
 1 6 BALAAM. 
 
 plead for him ; for we all know that it is when our 
 hearts have been touched by some unexpected mercy 
 that they are most easily moved to pity and forgive- 
 ness : it might even have won him absolution but for 
 that damning sin of which nothing is said here — the 
 infamous counsel he gave to the daughters of Midian 
 which had deprived Israel of four and twenty thousand 
 of its most serviceable and precious lives. 1 Even with 
 that crime full in their memories, it must have cost 
 Moses and the elders much, one thinks, to condemn 
 to death the man who had told them such a story 
 as this. 
 
 On no other hypothesis can we so reasonably ex- 
 plain, I think, how Israel became possessed of the 
 story recorded in the Chronicle of Balaam. But, 
 however they got it, there can be no doubt that it 
 shews us Balaam on his best side, in the noblest 
 posture of his soul ; and that, had we nothing but 
 this Chronicle to go upon, we should have formed a 
 far higher conception and have pronounced a far more 
 favourable verdict on him than we are able to do. 
 
 For while even the Chronicle contains some hints 
 of human imperfection and weakness, the other Old 
 Testament Scriptures which refer to him clearly reveal 
 those baser elements in his character which, blending 
 with his noble qualities and gifts, have made him a 
 1 Numbers xxxi. 16 ; xxv. 9.
 
 IN TROD UC T10N. 1 7 
 
 standing puzzle to mankind. There is, indeed, one 
 passage outside the Chronicle which, so far from 
 lowering, raises him in our thoughts, viz., Micah vi. 
 5-8 ; for here a moral ideal is attributed to him than 
 which even the Christian ideal itself is hardly more 
 lofty and sublime. But most of these Old Testament 
 Scriptures paint him in dark and sinister lines ; while 
 the New Testament speaks of him with an absolute 
 and passionate reprobation which fairly astonishes us, 
 so unlike is it to its usual gentleness, until we remem- 
 ber that the higher and more splendid a man's gifts 
 the lower he falls and the baser he becomes if he should 
 pervert his gifts to selfish and sinister ends. It is 
 from these outside Scriptures we learn that Balaam 
 wanted to curse the people he was compelled to bless 
 (Deut. xxiii. 5 ; Josh. xxiv. 10 ; Neh. xiii. 2) ; that 
 it was by his counsel that the daughters of Midian 
 were sent to tempt the men of Israel into the licentious 
 orgies by which Baal and Astarte were worshipped, 
 and so betrayed them to the anger of God (Num. 
 xxxi. 16) ; and that, much as he loved righteousness, 
 he loved the wages of unrighteousness still more 
 (2 Pet. ii. 15, 16; Jude 11). And thus these 
 Scriptures throw back a lurid light on the Chronicle 
 itself, and compel us to read it with other and severer 
 eyes. 
 
 Against this compulsion, however, we must be on 
 
 B
 
 1 8 BALAAM. 
 
 our guard, lest it should carry us too far. Dark as 
 is the shadow cast on the character of Balaam by 
 these passages in Numbers, in Deuteronomy, in 
 Joshua, in Nehemiah, in Peter and in Jude, we have 
 no right to put the worst construction on every act 
 recorded in the Chronicle, or to fit all Balaam's 
 innocent or laudable actions with evil motives. It is 
 not by making him out all bad, or all good, that we 
 shall solve our problem, though this is how too many 
 have tried to reach a solution. It is the mixture of 
 good and bad in the man which constitutes the pro- 
 blem, which makes him so interesting to us, and so 
 perplexing. And, again and again, in reading the 
 commentaries on this Chronicle, one has to remind 
 one's-self that to cut a knot is not to untie it, and 
 that to strike out all the difficult terms of a problem 
 is not to solve it. 
 
 Thus, for instance, some of the most orthodox com- 
 mentators simplify their task, cut their knot, by 
 reading the basest inuendoes into the sacred narrative, 
 and wresting every incident of the story to Balaam's 
 disadvantage. He can do nothing, and say nothing, 
 which they do not turn against him, so thickly do 
 motes of prejudice and suspicion float through the 
 eyes with which they view him. Starting with the 
 conviction that he was an unredeemed villain and 
 impostor, they find confirmation strong as Holy Writ
 
 INTRODUCTION. 19 
 
 of that absurd assumption in trifles light as air. 
 When, for example, they read that Balaam begged 
 Balak's messengers to lodge with him a night, in 
 order that he might consult God before he gave them 
 their reply, they find in this natural and religious 
 action only " a show of sanctity," assumed to " enhance 
 his own importance." In God's question to him, 
 " Who are these men that are with thee ? " they 
 hear a stern rebuke of his disloyalty in not having at 
 once sent them back to their master with a peremptory 
 refusal of his request. When Balaam refuses to go 
 with them and to curse Israel, they cry out upon him 
 for not giving them the whole of God's command to 
 him : God had said, " Thou shalt not curse them, for 
 they are blessed ; " but Balaam says nothing of this 
 " for they are blessed," wilfully suppressing words he 
 did not want them to hear. Nay, more : so per- 
 suaded are these commentators of the unqualified 
 villany of the man as to maintain that he only refused 
 Balak's first advance " in order to make better terms 
 for himself " and to secure a larger reward. The four 
 misconstructions just cited are forced on only three 
 verses of the Chronicle ; and similar misconstructions, 
 quite as malicious and perverse, are forced on it on 
 pretty much the same scale throughout. And it is 
 curious to observe that the critics who pursue Balaam 
 with this microscopic and unrelenting malignity are
 
 BALAAM. 
 
 the very men who are most resolved to find Messianic 
 predictions in the oracles he uttered, and are most 
 sure that to him it was given to see the day of Christ 
 afar off ! 
 
 No study of Scripture pursued in this carping and 
 censorious spirit, and working by a method so irra- 
 tional and unjust, can possibly conduct us to sound 
 and honest conclusions. Nor will any orthodoxy of 
 creed, or devoutness of intention, exonerate those who 
 handle the Word of God so ungenerously and deceit- 
 fully. A lie is not less, but a thousandfold more, a 
 lie when men "lie for God," when they think to 
 please the Lord and Lover of truth by wresting the 
 truth in his behalf. And we should never forget, 
 though we are all too apt to forget, that we are no 
 less strictly bound by the laws of justice and charity 
 in forming and uttering our verdicts of those who are 
 long since dead than in speaking of the living ; nay, 
 that to libel the dead is a meaner and a more cowardly 
 sin than to libel the living, since the dead are no 
 longer with us to speak on their own behalf. As 
 there are few things more foolish, so also there are few 
 more wicked, than an attempt to vindicate the ways of 
 God by hard and undeserved censures on the characters 
 of men, whether they be still with us or have gone 
 
 before. 
 
 But if we need to be on our guard against the
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 tendency and fault of certain (so called) orthodox 
 commentators, we must also be on our guard against 
 the tendency and fault of certain rationalistic com- 
 mentators ; for these, too, cut the knot instead of un- 
 tying it, and that in the most irrational and unblush- 
 ing way. As I have given a specimen of the injustice 
 of the one school, it is but fair that I should also give 
 a specimen of the unreasonableness of the other. Dr 
 Kalisch, then, who is justly severe on a fault to which 
 he himself is not prone, has written a considerable 
 volume on the story of Balaam, of the scholarship and 
 erudition of which it would be difficult to speak in 
 terms too high. And this is how he deals with it. 
 The Scriptures outside the Chronicle of Balaam paint 
 him, for the most part, in far darker colours than the 
 Chronicle itself. We must therefore assume that 
 these Scriptures follow a different and wholly untrust- 
 worthy tradition, and drop them quietly out of the 
 account. Nay, when we examine the Chronicle itself, 
 we discover in it one long episode — that which 
 describes how the anger of the Lord was kindled 
 against Balaam for taking the very journey He had 
 bidden him take, and how " the dumb ass, speaking 
 with man's voice, forbad the madness of the prophet " 
 — which is evidently inconsistent with the general 
 tenour of the narrative ; this, too, therefore, we must 
 cut out as a later and misleading " interpolation,"
 
 BALAAM. 
 
 "an unwarranted addition" to the Chronicle. But 
 even yet there is a single word in the Chronicle — in 
 the Verse (Num. xxiv. 1) which affirms that Balaam 
 was wont to search for "enchantments" or "auguries" 
 — which clashes with the general tone of the narra- 
 tive ; and this, though there is no diplomatic ground 
 for suspecting it, but simply because it is " a single 
 and isolated expression strikingly at variance with 
 the tenour and spirit of the entire composition," we 
 must replace by another word, and assume that what 
 he went to seek was "inspirations," not ''auguries." 
 Having thus cut and carved the Narrative to our mind, 
 we shall have no hesitation in concluding that Balaam 
 was a prophet of the purest and noblest type, without 
 a stain on his character or a questionable incident in 
 his career. " Firm and inexorable like eternal Fate, 
 he regards himself solely as an instrument of that 
 Omnipotence which guides the destinies of nations by 
 its unerring wisdom. Free from all human passion, 
 and almost from all human emotion, he is like a 
 mysterious spirit from a higher and nobler world, 
 which looks upon the fortunes of the children of men 
 with an immovable and sublime repose." 1 
 
 Thus Rationalism, with an unconscious but 
 egregious irrationality which is its almost constant 
 
 1 Bible Studies. Part I. The Prophecies of Balaam. By Dr 
 Kalisch, p. 11.
 
 INTRODUCTION. 23 
 
 Nemesis, affects to solve the problem by calmly wiping 
 it off the slate, and presents us with a faultless 
 monster in place of a man of like passions with 
 ourselves. 
 
 Not thus, but by accepting all that the Bible, both 
 in and outside the Chronicle, has to tell us concerning 
 him, and by patiently studying these scriptures till 
 light arises in the darkness, shall we come to know 
 Balaam as he was, and learn the true lessons of his 
 life.
 
 PART I. 
 
 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 Numbers xxii. 2 — xxiv. 25. 
 
 Introduction. — Chapter xxii. 2. Now Balak, the son of 
 Zippor, saw all that Israel had done unto the Amorites. 
 
 3. And Moab was sore afraid of the people, because they were 
 so many ; and Moab loathed the children of Israel. 
 
 4. And Moab said unto the elders of Midian, Now shall this 
 host lick up all that is round about us, as the ox licketh up the 
 grass of the field. And Balak, the son of Zippor, was king of 
 Moab at that time. 
 
 First Embassy. — 5. He sent messengers therefore unto 
 Balaam, the son of Beor, to Pethor, which is by the river, to the 
 land of the children of his people, to call him, saying : Behold, 
 there is a people come out from Egypt ; behold, they cover the 
 face of the earth, and they abide over against us. 
 
 6. Come now therefore, I pray thee, curse me this people ; for 
 they are too mighty for me. Peradventure I shall prevail that 
 we may smite them, and that I may drive them out of the land ; 
 for I know that he whom thou blessest is blessed, and he whom 
 thou cursest is cursed. 
 
 7. And the elders of Moab and the elders of Midian departed 
 with the rewards of divination in their hand ; and they came 
 unto Balaam and spoke unto him the words of Balak. 
 
 8. And he said unto them, Lodge here this night, and I will 
 bring you word as the Lord shall speak unto me. And the 
 princes of Moab remained with Balaam. 
 
 9. And God came unto Balaam, and said, Who are these men 
 that are with thee ?
 
 26 BALAAM. 
 
 10. And Balaam said unto God, Balak, the son of Zippor, 
 hath sent unto me, saying : 
 
 11. Behold, there is a people come out from Egypt which 
 covereth the face of the earth ; come now, curse me them : perad- 
 venture I shall be able to fight against them, and drive them 
 out. 
 
 12. And God said unto Balaam, Thou shalt not go with them : 
 thou shalt not curse this people : for they are blessed. 
 
 13. And Balaam rose up in the morning, and said unto the 
 princes of Balak, Get you into your land ; for the Lord refuseth 
 to give me leave to go with you. 
 
 14. And the princes of Moab rose up, and they went unto 
 Balak, and said, Balaam refuseth to come with us. 
 
 Second Embassy. — 15. And Balak sent yet again princes 
 more and more honourable than they. 
 
 16. And they came to Balaam, and said to him, Thus saith 
 Balak, the son of Zippor, Let nothing, T pray thee, hinder thee 
 from coming unto me ; 
 
 17. For I will promote thee unto very great honour, and I 
 will do whatsoever thou sayest unto me. Come, therefore, I 
 pray thee, curse me this people. 
 
 18. And Balaam answered and said unto the servants of 
 Balak : If Balak would give me his house full of silver and gold, 
 I cannot go beyond the word of the Lord my God, to do a small 
 thing or a great. 
 
 19. Now therefore, I pray you, tarry ye also here this night, 
 that I may know what the Lord will say unto me more. 
 
 20. And God came unto Balaam at night, and said unto him : 
 If the men are come to call thee, rise up and go with them : 
 but only that which I shall tell thee, that shalt thou do. 
 
 21. And Balaam rose up in the morning, and saddled his ass, 
 and went with the princes of Moab. 
 
 The Journey. — 22. And God's anger was kindled against him 
 as he was going ; and the angel of the Lord placed himself in
 
 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 27 
 
 the way to withstand him. Now he was riding upon his ass, 
 and his two servants were with him. 
 
 23. And the ass saw the angel of the Lord standing in the 
 way with his sword drawn in his hand ; and the ass turned 
 aside out of the way and went into the field ; and Balaam smote 
 his ass, to turn her into the way. 
 
 24. Then the angel of the Lord stood in a hollow between 
 vineyards, a wall being on this side and a wall on that side. 
 
 25. And the ass saw the angel of the Lord, and she pressed 
 herself against the wall, and crushed Balaam's foot against the 
 wall : and he smote her again. 
 
 26. Then the angel of the Lord went further on, and stood in 
 a narrow place where there was no room to turn either to the 
 right hand or to the left. 
 
 27. And the ass saw the angel of the Lord, and she fell down 
 under Balaam ; and Balaam's anger was kindled, and he smote 
 the ass with his staff. 
 
 28. Then the Lord opened the mouth of the ass, and she said 
 to Balaam : What have I done unto thee, that thou hast 
 smitten me these three times 1 
 
 29. And Balaam said unto the ass, Thou hast played me false : 
 if there were a sword in my hand, verily I would have killed 
 thee. 
 
 30. And the ass said unto Balaam, Am I not thine ass which 
 thou hast ridden from the first unto this day 1 Was I ever 
 wont to do so unto thee 1 And he said, Nay. 
 
 31. Then the Lord opened the eyes of Balaam, and he saw 
 the angel of the Lord standing in the way, with his sword drawn 
 in his hand ; and he bowed down and fell on his face. 
 
 32. And the angel of the Lord said unto him, Wherefore hast 
 thou smitten thine ass these three times 1 Behold, it was I 
 who came forth to withstand thee, because thy journey is fool- 
 hardy in my sight ; 
 
 33. And the ass saw me, and turned from me these three 
 times. Unless she had turned from me, verily I should now 
 have killed thee and saved her alive.
 
 BALAAM. 
 
 34. And Balaam said unto the angel of the Lord, I have 
 sinned, for I knew not that thou wast standing in the way 
 against me : now, therefore, if it displease thee, I will get me 
 back again . 
 
 35. And the angel of the Lord said unto Balaam, Go with 
 the men ; but only the word that I shall speak unto thee, that 
 shalt thou speak. So Balaam went with the princes of Balak. 
 
 Arrival and Reception. — 36. And when Balak heard that 
 Balaam was come, he went out to meet him unto Ir-Moab, which 
 is on the border of the Anion, even at the utmost boundary. 
 
 37. And Balak said unto Balaam, Did not I urgently send 
 unto thee to call thee 1 Wherefore didst thou not come unto 
 me 1 Am I not able forsooth to promote thee to honour ? 
 
 38. And Balaam said unto Balak, Behold, I am come unto 
 thee. Have I now any power at all to say anything? The 
 word that God shall put into my mouth, that shall I speak. 
 
 39. And Balaam went with Balak, and they came unto Kirjath- 
 huzzoth. 
 
 40. And Balak killed oxen and sheep, and sent thereof to 
 Balaam, and to the princes that were with him. 
 
 First Oracle. — 41. And on the niorrow, in the morning, 
 Balak took Balaam, and brought him up to Bamoth-Baal, that 
 thence he might see the outskirt of the camp. 
 
 Chapter xxiii. 1. And Balaam said unto Balak, Build me here 
 seven altars, and prepare me here seven bullocks and seven rams. 
 
 2. And Balak did as Balaam had spoken; and Balak and 
 Balaam offered on each of the altars a bullock and a ram. 
 
 3. And Balaam said unto Balak, Stand thou by thy burnt- 
 offering, and I will go : peradventure the Lord will come to meet 
 me ; and the word that he shall shew me, I will tell thee. And 
 he went away to a scaur. 
 
 4. And God met Balaam, and he said to him, I have prepared 
 the seven altars, and I have offered on every altar a bullock and 
 a ram.
 
 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 29 
 
 5. And the Lord put a word in Balaam's mouth, and said, 
 Eeturn unto Balak, and thus shalt thou speak. 
 
 6. And he returned unto him, and, lo, he was standing by his 
 burnt-offering, he and all the princes of Moab. 
 
 7. And he took up his parable and said : 
 
 From Aram hath Balak brought me, 
 
 The King of Moab from the mountains of the East, 
 
 (Saying) Come, curse me Jacob, 
 
 And, come, ban Israel ! 
 
 8. How shall I curse whom God hath not cursed, 
 Or how shall I ban whom the Lord hath not banned % 
 
 9. For from the summit of the rocks I see them, 
 
 And I behold them from the hills : 
 Lo, it is a people that dwelleth apart, 
 And is not reckoned among the nations. 
 10. Who can count the dust of Jacob, 
 Or number the fourth part of Israel ? 
 Let me die the death of the righteous, 
 And be my last estate like his. 
 
 11. And Balak said unto Balaam, What hast thou done unto 
 me? I took thee to curse mine enemies, and, behold, thou hast 
 altogether blessed them. 
 
 12. And he answered and said, Must I not take heed to speak 
 that which the Lord putteth into my mouth ] 
 
 Second Oracle.— 13. And Balak said unto him, Come, I pray 
 thee, with me unto another place where thou mayest see them 
 
 only the outskirt of them shalt thou see, and shalt not see 
 
 them all — and curse me them from thence. 
 
 14. And he brought him to the Field of the Seers, to the top 
 of Pisgah, and built seven altars, and offered a bullock and a 
 ram on each of the altars. 
 
 15. And he said unto Balak, Stand thou, as before, by thy 
 burnt-offering, while I go to meet [the Lord] as before. 
 
 16. And the Lord met Balaam, and put a word in his mouth, 
 and said, Go back to Balak, and speak thus.
 
 3 o BALAAM. 
 
 17. And when he came to him, behold, he was standing by 
 his burnt-offering, and the princes of Moab with him. And 
 Balak said unto him, What hath the Lord spoken ] 
 
 18. And he took up his parable, and said : 
 
 Arise, Balak, and hear : 
 
 Hearken unto me, thou son of Zippor ! 
 
 19. God is not a man that he should lie, 
 
 Nor a son of man that he should repent. 
 
 Hath he said, and shall he not do it, 
 
 Or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good 1 
 
 20. Behold, I have been charged to bless ; 
 And if he blesseth, I cannot reverse it. 
 
 21. No iniquity is to be descried in Jacob, 
 
 No distress to be seen in Israel : 
 
 The Lord their God is with them, 
 
 And the trumpet-sound of their King among tbem. 
 
 22. God brought them forth from Egypt ; 
 
 They have the bison's strength. 
 23. Lor there is no augury in Jacob, 
 
 Nor any divination in Israel ; 
 
 But in due time it is told to Jacob, 
 
 And to Israel, what God doeth. 
 
 24. Behold, they are a people that rise up like a lioness, 
 
 And lift themselves up as a lion ; 
 
 They lie not down till they eat their prey 
 
 And drink the blood of the slain. 
 
 25. And Balak said unto Balaam, Thou shalt never curse them 
 again, nor bless them again. 
 
 26. But Balaam answered and said unto Balak, Did I not tell 
 thee, saying, All that the Lord speaketh, that must I do. 
 
 Third Oracle. — 27. And Balak said unto Balaam, Come,. I 
 pray thee, I will bring thee unto another place ; peradventure it 
 may please God that thou shouldest curse me them from thence. 
 
 28. And Balak brought Balaam unto the top of Peor, that 
 looketh over the Waste.
 
 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 31 
 
 29. And Balaam said unto Balak, Build me here seven altars, 
 and prepare me here seven bullocks and seven rams. 
 
 30. And Balak did as Balaam had said, and offered a bullock 
 and a ram on each of the altars. 
 
 Chapter xxiv. 1. And -when Balaam saw that it pleased the 
 Lord to bless Israel, he went not, as at the other times, to seek 
 for auguries, but he set his face toward the "Waste. 
 
 2. And Balaam lifted up his eyes, and he saw Israel encamped 
 according to their tribes ; and the Spirit of God came upon him. 
 
 3. And he took up his parable and said : 
 
 Thus sayeth Balaam, the son of Beor, 
 
 And thus sayeth the man whose eyes are open ; 
 
 4. Thus sayeth he who heareth the words of God, 
 
 He who seeth the vision of the Almighty, 
 
 Prostrate, but with opened eyes : 
 
 5. How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob, 
 
 Thy tabernacles, O Israel ! 
 
 6. As valleys that are spread out, 
 
 As gardens by the river's side, 
 
 As aloes which the Lord hath planted, 
 
 As cedars beside the waters ! 
 
 7. Water shall stream from his buckets, 
 And his seed be by many waters ; 
 
 And his king shall be higher than A gag, 
 And his kingdom shall be exalted. 
 
 8. God brought him forth out of Egypt : 
 
 He hath the bison's strength : 
 
 He shall eat up the nations that are round about him 
 
 And shall suck their bones, 
 
 And break their loins in pieces. 
 
 9. He croucheth, he lieth down like a lion, 
 
 And like a lioness, who shall rouse him up % 
 
 Blessed are they that bless thee, 
 
 And cursed are they that curse thee. 
 
 10. And Balak's anger was kindled against Balaam, and he 
 
 smote his hands together ; and Balak said unto Balaam, I
 
 32 BALAAM. 
 
 called thee to curse mine enemies, and, behold, thou hast 
 altogether blessed them these three times. 
 
 11. Therefore, now, haste thee to thy place. I thought to 
 promote thee to great honour ; but, lo, the Lord hath kept 
 thee back from honour. 
 
 12. And Balaam said unto Balak, Did I not also speak unto 
 thy messengers whom thou sentest unto me, saying, 
 
 13. If Balak would give me his house full of silver and gold, 
 I cannot go against the commandment of the Lord, to do either 
 good or bad of mine own mind ; but what the Lord saith, that 
 will I speak. 
 
 14. And, now, behold, I go unto my people. Come, I will 
 advise thee what this people shall do unto thy people in later 
 days. 
 
 Fourth Oracle. — 15. And he took up his parable, and said : 
 Thus sayeth Balaam, the son of Beor, 
 And thus saith the man whose eyes are open : 
 16. Thus sayeth he who heareth the words of God, 
 And knoweth the knowledge of the Most High ; 
 He who seeth the vision of the Almighty, 
 Prostrate, but with opened eyes : 
 17. I see him, though he be not now ; 
 I behold him, though he be not nigh : 
 There cometh a star out of Jacob, 
 And out of Israel there riseth a sceptre, 
 And smiteth in pieces both flanks of Moab, 
 And shattereth all the sons of tumult : 
 
 18. And Edom is his possession, 
 And Seir, his enemies, is his possession, 
 And Israel shall do valiantly ; 
 19. Jacob shall have dominion over them, 
 And shall destroy them that escape out of their cities. 
 20. And when he looked on Amalek, he took up his parable 
 and said : — 
 
 Amalek is the first of the nations, 
 But his end shall be destruction.
 
 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 33 
 
 21. And he looked on the Kenites, and took up his parable, 
 and said : 
 
 Strong is thy dwelling-place, 
 
 And thy nest fixed in the crags ; 
 
 22. For surely Kain shall not be destroyed 
 
 Until Asshur shall carry thee away captive. 
 
 23. And he took up his parable, and said : 
 
 Alas ! who shall live when God doeth this ! 
 
 24. But ships shall come from the coast of Chittim, 
 
 And shall humble Asshur and humble Eber : — 
 
 And he also shall be destroyed. 
 
 25. And Balaam rose up, and went away, and turned toward 
 
 his place ; and Balak also went his way.
 
 34 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 § 1. The Invitation (Numbers xxii. 2-21). 
 
 When the Children of Israel, purged from the worst 
 taints of slavery by their long sojourn in the pure air 
 of the Desert, and in some measure trained to habits 
 of order, freedom, and courage by the hardships and 
 adventures of the way, drew near to the borders of 
 the Promised Land, they were encountered by the 
 Amorites, the great fighting clan of the highlands of 
 Canaan and of its borders, under the renowned 
 warrior-chiefs Sihon of Heshbon and Og of Bashan. 
 It was a critical and a perilous moment ; for, with 
 this fighting clan once conquered and swept out of the 
 way, there was none left who could successfully oppose 
 their entrance into the goodly land ; while, had they 
 suffered defeat, the whole Arab race would probably 
 have flung themselves upon them and hunted them 
 down in the Wilderness. Happily for them, and for 
 us, their victory was immediate and decisive ; and, the 
 Amorites being utterly broken and subdued, their road 
 lay open before them, with none to make them afraid. 
 But though, and because, there was none to bar the 
 way by force of arms, the fear of them fell on neigh- 
 bouring clans, and two of these, taking counsel of
 
 THE INVITATION. 35 
 
 their fears, consulted together how, since force was of 
 no avail, they might betray and undo them by fraud. 
 These two were the Midianites, a peaceful nomadic 
 clan, whose caravans travelled and traded throughout 
 the East ; and the Moabites, a settled and organized 
 clan, whose pastures were alive with cattle, and whose 
 cities were rich in the arts and luxuries of the ancient 
 civilization. To the King and princes of Moab the 
 sheikhs of Midian suggested an expedient which, how- 
 ever strange it may seem to us, instantly commended 
 itself to these statesmen of the antique world, and 
 would commend itself to many of their descendants to 
 this day. They agreed to " hire a wise man " to 
 curse the Children of Israel, never doubting that he 
 could lay a spell upon them under which their 
 strength and valour would wither away. 
 
 Now the Midianites in their long journeys, journeys 
 which often extended to the Euphrates and even 
 beyond it, had heard of a man so wise, and whose 
 words were so potent, that none could withstand him. 
 A prophet, and the son of a prophet, he was called 
 Balaam, the son of Beor ; that is — for men are always 
 most attracted and impressed by the darker side of 
 the prophetic character — he was known as the 
 Destroyer, the son of the Burner. At the present 
 moment he was head of the Prophetic College of 
 Pethor, on the Euphrates, where men from many lands
 
 36 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 gathered to study under him the arts of divination 
 and enchantment. But, doubtless, if so great and 
 opulent a prince as Balak were to send a suitable 
 embassy to him, with " the rewards of divination " in 
 their hands, he would come and curse the enemies whom 
 both Moab and Midian had so much cause to dread. 
 
 This, as we gather from the Chronicle, was how 
 they regarded Balaam ; and it was on this report of 
 him that Balak resolved to send for him. But how 
 are we to regard him ? That he was a Soothsayer we 
 must admit, for by this name he is expressly described 
 to us (Josh. xiii. 22); and therefore we must admit 
 that he was largely dependent for his knowledge on 
 omens and the auguries he drew from them ; we must 
 admit that he was versed in the arts of astrology and 
 divination, and bears a suspicious resemblance to the 
 augurs of Borne, to the " prophets " of the Homeric 
 poems and the Athenian tragedies, and even to the 
 astrologers, sorcerers, diviners, the wise men or magi 
 of Egypt, Chaldea, and Persia. In the words of 
 F. D. Maurice, "He is evidently supposed to have 
 that knowledge of things past, present, and future 
 which is ascribed to Calchas," for example, "and 
 which gave him his high repute with the Grecian 
 fleet. He is appealed to just as that seer was 
 appealed to when a pestilence was raging in the camp 
 or when the ships were weather-bound ; just as
 
 THE INVITATION. 37 
 
 Tiresias was sent for to explain the calamity which 
 had befallen Thebes, and to clear up the mystery 
 which overhung the house of CEdipus." He falls into 
 trances, he forecasts the future, he gives advice, he 
 utters oracles, he takes rewards, just as they did, and 
 wraps himself in the very cloud of mysterious and lofty 
 pretension which they were apt to wear. The Bible 
 is not even at the pains to delineate him as an excep- 
 tionally favourable specimen of his class, but, on the 
 contrary, represents him as eager to win Balak's favour 
 by fulfilling his wishes, and even as ultimately fulfilling 
 them far more effectually than by a formal curse. 
 
 Hence it is, I suppose, that the more orthodox 
 critics — Keil, to wit — beg us to observe that, in the 
 Hebrew, Balaam is never called a prophet (nabi), 
 or a seer (chozeli), but only a soothsayer or diviner 
 (lia-cozim), a title never applied to any true prophet ; 
 forgetting, apparently, that a still higher authority, 
 the New Testament, expressly calls Balaam a prophet, 
 although in the same breath it rebukes "the madness 
 of the prophet." Hence, too, it is that, in the vulgar 
 mind at least, Balaam has been set down, generation 
 after generation, as a vulgar impostor whose inspiration 
 came from beneath, not from above ; or, at best, as an 
 ambitious and crafty schemer who, to enhance his own 
 importance and give weight to his counsels, threw the 
 conclusions at which he arrived by reflection, ex-
 
 3 8 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 perience, and political sagacity into an oracular form, 
 and heightened his figure as a statesman, or a sage, 
 by mounting the tripod of the prophet. 
 
 But the Bible lends no countenance to this singular 
 theory. It does not ascribe his inspiration to an evil 
 spirit, or treat him as one pretending to powers which 
 he did not possess. It acknowledges his insight and his 
 foresight to be real and true. It grants him his pro- 
 phetic trances, confesses that he saw visions and dreamed 
 dreams, affirms that God spake to him face to face as 
 a man speaketh with his friend ; it even asserts that 
 at times " the Spirit of God came upon him " (Num. 
 xxiv. 2) with such overmastering force that, raised out 
 of "the ignorant present," he beheld things which 
 were to come to pass centuries after he should have 
 left this earthly scene : nay, it even depicts him as 
 lifting himself to the loftiest of prophetic functions, 
 and holding forth an ideal of righteousness than which 
 none is more simple, noble, and complete. 
 
 No, the Bible denies him no honour ; it lavishes on 
 him all the signs and credentials of the true prophet, 
 down even to contumely and rejection, while yet it 
 brands him as false to his prophetic vocation. For 
 great as it seems to us, the Bible holds it a very small 
 thing to be a mere prophet, to be able to foresee and 
 to foretell things to come, or even to conceive and 
 admire an ideal of righteousness which does not mould
 
 THE INVITA TION. 39 
 
 and inform the Hfe. This was the real blot on 
 Balaam's character ; it was here that he fell from 
 his high vocation ; and it is here that we must find the 
 difference between the false prophet and the true. 
 We must, in short, judge him, as we judge every man, 
 not by his gifts, but by the use he made of them. 
 He was royally endowed. He could detect the germs 
 of the future in the present and the past. He could 
 discern and admire the true ideal of human life. His 
 predictions were fulfilled. The experience of sub- 
 sequent ages has confirmed his moral insight. But 
 to what end did he foresee the Star that was to come 
 out of Jacob and the Sceptre that was to rise in Israel, 
 if he would not walk in the light of that Star or 
 submit to the rule of that Sceptre ? To what end 
 did he admire and covet Righteousness if, not content 
 with bowing his own lofty spirit under the yoke of 
 unrighteousness, he could stoop to betray men in 
 whom God " saw no iniquity " into a crime so foul that 
 it could only be washed out in their blood ? 
 
 With this conception of Balaam in our minds, this 
 hypothetical solution of our problem — thinking of him 
 as at once a great prophet and a false prophet ; great 
 in gifts but false in the use he made of them — we 
 can at least read his history in a just and generous 
 spirit. We need deny him no gift, nor grudge him 
 any good act or word. It is his very greatness which
 
 4o THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 makes him so little, his very goodness which makes 
 him so bad. Moab and Midian saw in him nothing 
 more than a diviner, a wizard, who could shape as 
 well as forecast the future, who could control the 
 events he foresaw ; but we may see in him a man on 
 whom Jehovah conferred many choice inspirations and 
 gifts, whom He loved and tried to save, — just as 
 Jesus loved the Young Man in the Gospels, and tried 
 to save him, though he too loved riches and fell into 
 a snare. 
 
 Conceiving of him simply as a great wizard, the 
 kins: of Moab sent twice across the whole breadth of 
 the Assyrian desert to secure the services of this 
 master of potent spells ; for Balaam's home was 
 beyond the Euphrates, among the mountains where 
 the vast streams of Mesopotamia take their rise, and 
 whence Abraham had long before come out, not 
 knowing whither he went. His first messengers 
 arrive, we are told, " with the rewards of divination 
 in their hands,"' — a phrase from which many bitter 
 waters of aspersion have been drawn. Simply 
 because they brought these rewards with them, it 
 has been inferred that Balaam hankered after them, 
 although those who drew that inference must surely 
 have known both that, in the East, to enter the 
 presence of any distinguished person without a 
 nuzzur, or present, is simply to insult him, and that
 
 THE INVITATION. 41 
 
 Oriental custom and courtesy ordained that no one 
 should consult a seer without carrying him an appro- 
 priate offering. Assuredly it is not the fault of the 
 Bible if they did not know this; for, in that charming 
 idyllic story of Saul seeking for his father's asses and 
 finding a kingdom, we read (1 Sam. ix. 7, 8) that, 
 when Saul's servant advised him to consult the Seer 
 who might perad venture shew them the way they 
 ought to take, Saul replied : " But if we go, what 
 shall we bring the man ? what have we ?" and could 
 not be persuaded to listen to the advice until his 
 servant produced " the fourth part of a shekel " from 
 his pouch. And yet who ever heard Samuel con- 
 demned as a mercenary impostor because Saul and his 
 servant came to him " with the reward of divination 
 in their hand " ? 
 
 So, again, it can only be the effect of a prejudice, 
 determined to see nothing good in him, that has led 
 good and learned men to find " a mere show of 
 sanctity " in Balaam's resolve to consult God before 
 giving a reply to the messengers of Balak. For what 
 should the servant of Jehovah do before engaging in 
 any great enterprise ? Would not the very critics 
 who now condemn him for " hypocrisy," simply 
 because he consulted God, have been the first to 
 charge him with " presumption " if he had not 
 consulted God ?
 
 42 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 " But," say they, " even if it were right that he 
 should ask God what he was to do when Balak's first 
 messengers came to him, how can you defend him 
 when a second embassy, consisting of more and more 
 honourable princes than the first, reached him, and 
 he begs them to tarry with him while he consults God 
 again ? Did he not already know what the will of 
 the Lord was ? Can any thi ng be more plain than 
 that he wanted, if possible, to change rather than to 
 learn the Divine will, in order that he might secure 
 the hire and the honour which Balak had pledged 
 himself to bestow V 
 
 To all which we can only reply : — Very possibly 
 all your conclusions are sound enough, but they are 
 not warranted by the facts from which you infer them. 
 Many of the best men are represented as taking the 
 same question to God again and again, and you have 
 called ou us to admire them for their piety, for their 
 steadfast] and persevering faith ? Why, then, are we 
 to blame in Balaam what we are to admire in them ? 
 Why are we to condemn him because, after an inter- 
 val of many weeks, during which all the conditions of 
 the case might have changed, he took his question to 
 God a second time in order that he might learn 
 " what the Lord had to say unto him more " ? Even 
 if we grant that he wanted to change the will of God 
 and bend it to his purpose, must we necessarily con-
 
 THE INVITATION. 43 
 
 demn him for that ? Did not Paul " thrice " beseech 
 the Lord to take the thorn out of his flesh ? Did not 
 Abraham six times plead with God for the Cities of 
 the Plain, and even venture to beat down the terms 
 of the Almighty from the fifty righteous persons whose 
 presence within those cities was to save them from 
 their doom to forty and five, to forty, to thirty, to 
 twenty, to ten ? And if we are to admire his bold- 
 ness as " heroism," why are we to condemn that of 
 Balaam as " an impudent irreverence " ? Nay, even 
 if Balaam was attracted by " the very great honour " 
 to which Balak promised to advance him, we still run 
 some risk of doing him a grave injustice if we assume 
 that his only motive was a mercenary or selfish one. 
 May not " a prophet " have felt that a noble career 
 was open to him should he become the trusted 
 counsellor of a Prince who had given him the pledge, 
 "I will do whatsoever thou sayest unto me"? May 
 he not have dreamed, as many a recluse scholar has 
 done, of the good he might effect by leaving his 
 studious seclusion to mingle with men, to mould their 
 policy, purge and elevate their aims, and place before 
 them that fair ideal of Righteousness which he had 
 conceived ? If, as we learn from Micah, he shewed 
 Balak that God required no sacrifice or offering, but 
 only a just, kindly, and humble heart, may we not 
 well believe that part, and great part, of the charm of
 
 44 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 Balak's invitation lay in the hope that he might be 
 able to work in Moab a moral and religious reforma- 
 tion not inferior to that through which Israel had 
 recently passed ? 
 
 While so many innocent and laudable motives are 
 possible, we have no right to conclude that Balaam 
 was actuated by none but base and evil motives ; the 
 lofty stature of the man of itself renders such a 
 construction of him improbable, unreasonable, in- 
 adequate. We are bound to judge him as we 
 ourselves would be judged, and to give him credit for 
 all the good we honestly can. 
 
 On the other hand, we are also bound not to 
 ignore, or condone, what was plainly evil in the man, 
 because we find much to admire and approve. We 
 know from the Scriptures outside the Chronicle that 
 Balaam did want to curse the people whom he 
 blessed, wanted, that is, to gratify his powerful client 
 and to secure the honours and rewards, the great and 
 influential position, which had been dangled before 
 him ; we know also that he " loved the wages of 
 unrighteousness " in their basest form, and cared over- 
 much for wealth and for the luxuries it would bring 
 him. And if we read the first twenty verses of this 
 Chronicle in the lurid light of these outside Scriptures, 
 we may honestly find in them, I think, two slight 
 hints of the presence and activity of the evil spirit
 
 THE INVITATION. 45 
 
 that was at work in his heart, and was righting against 
 the Spirit of all truth and goodness. 
 
 In Verse 13, for example, we may hear a sigh of 
 bitter disappointment in his words to the first 
 messengers of Balak : " Get you into your own land, 
 for the Lord refuseth to give me leave to go with 
 you." " The Lord would not hearken unto Balaam," 
 we read elsewhere, 1 " but turned his curse into a 
 blessing." And here we have a similar phrase, a 
 phrase which leaves a similar impression on our mind. 
 The impression is that Balaam would have liked to 
 turn his spells against Israel, and would, if he could, 
 have won the Divine consent to his wish. For if 
 these simple words, " The Lord refuseth to give me 
 leave to go with you," have in them a touch of the 
 schoolboy denied a holiday on which he had set his 
 heart, they are also tinged with the bitterness of a 
 grave ambitious man who sees himself debarred from 
 entering on a great and much desired career. 
 
 In Verse 18, as even the critics who most delight 
 to honour Balaam are compelled to admit, there is a 
 touch of that vile greed, that lust of riches, which 
 seems to have been the most obvious, as it is also the 
 most sordid, defect in his character ; though even 
 here, if we would be just, we must remember that 
 Balaam is by no means the only distinguished 
 
 1 Deuteronomy xxiii. 5.
 
 46 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 personage in the religious world whom this sordid 
 craving has marred : perhaps, indeed, there is no sin 
 more common in the Church than this foolish " trust 
 in riches," and no truth more commonly evaded than 
 that which pronounces riches " a hurtful snare." 
 When we hear him say to the second group of 
 messengers, "If Balak would give me Ms house full 
 of silver and gold, I cannot go beyond the word of 
 the Lord my God, to do a small thing or a great," 
 we cannot but feel that the silver and gold in Balak's 
 house had a certain attraction for him, that the 
 possession of wealth enters too prominently into his 
 ideal of a perfect human life. Even l)r Kalisch 
 himself is constrained to confess that the words imply 
 that Balaam was " agitated by an inward struggle " 
 which is suggested " with the subtlest psychological 
 art," and, for a moment at least, suffered his desire for 
 large and affluent conditions to darken his clear and 
 unstained soul. 
 
 In this Verse, moreover, we find the first of several 
 utterances which, for all so noble as they sound, breed 
 a certain suspicion in us. He who here says, "I cannot 
 go beyond the word of the Lord my God to do a small 
 thing or a great," afterwards says to Balak, " The 
 word that God shall put into my mouth, that (only) 
 will I speak " ; and again, " The word that He shall 
 shew me I will tell thee " ; and again, " Must I not
 
 THE INVITATION. 47 
 
 take heed to speak that which the Lord putteth into 
 my mouth ? " and, again, " Did I not tell thee, saying, 
 All that the Lord speaketh, that must I do ? " and, 
 again, " Did I not speak unto thy messengers, saying, 
 If Balak would give me his house full of silver and 
 gold, I cannot go against the commandment of the Lord, 
 to do either good or bad of mine own mind, but what 
 the Lord saith, that shall I speak ? " As we listen to 
 these reiterated and vehement asseverations the ex- 
 clamation rises to our lips, " Methinks the prophet 
 doth protest too much !" while, as we observe the 
 emphasis he lays on the implicit obedience he owes to 
 Jehovah and intends at all costs to pay, we suspect 
 that the temptation to disobedience was already rising 
 within his heart, and fear that he may break down at 
 the very point at which he brags the loudest. 
 
 As indeed he did — most sorrowfully for him, most 
 instructively for us ; teaching us the danger of an 
 overweening self-confidence, and that we are never in 
 such peril from ourselves as when we are most sure 
 of ourselves : teaching us also that neither the 
 most splendid gifts, nor the most earnest inten- 
 tions of obedience, are a sufficient guarantee of 
 obedience. For it is not by denying that Balaam 
 was a true and even a great prophet, nor by 
 denying that he meant and tried to use his high 
 prophetic gifts for noble ends, that we reach
 
 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 the true lesson of his life. Any man may be, 
 and is, a prophet who, not content with living in 
 the outward show of things, is for ever seeking to 
 acquaint himself with the principles, the realities, 
 which lie behind the great spectacle of human life, 
 ordain the lines along which it must move, and mould 
 the forms through which it shifts. Such an one is 
 able to see how the present has grown out of the past, 
 and to project the present into the future and forecast 
 the moulds into which it must inevitably run. He 
 can trace events backward to their causes and for- 
 ward to their results, and can thus, in some measure, 
 read the whole story of time, which for most of us 
 has no connected story to tell. He can explain us to 
 ourselves, tell us how we became what we are, and 
 what we must be in the years to come ; he can 
 anticipate the course which we shall take, rouse that 
 which has fallen asleep in us, quicken in us that 
 which is dead. 1 And he may honestly mean to use 
 this strange power — a power which is only strange to 
 us because we are so inobservant, so unreflecting, so 
 preoccupied — purely for good and noble ends. But 
 unless he does continue to use them for such ends, let 
 him once pervert them to a selfish use, to the grati- 
 fication of his own ambition, greed, fame, and forth- 
 with his clear and mounting spirit grows dark and 
 Cf. F. D. Maurice, The Patriarchs of Israel. Sermon on Balaam.
 
 THE INVITATION. 49 
 
 dull, his insight fails him, his prevision fails him, his 
 noble intention fails him ; he sinks into the deeper 
 sin because it is from such a height he falls. Great 
 gifts are a great responsibility, and may only too 
 easily become a great shame. While, therefore, we 
 earnestly covet the best and greatest gifts, if we learn 
 wisdom from Balaam's fall, we shall most earnestly 
 seek that " more excellent way," on which St Paul 
 insists, the way of Charity : for a pure and unselfish 
 love is not only the greatest and most excellent of all 
 gifts ; it is also the only gift which will keep all our 
 other gifts sweet and pure.
 
 5o THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 § 2. The Journey (Numbers xxii. 22-34). 
 
 Of Balaam's long journey from Mesopotamia to Moab 
 only a single incident is recorded, and this, apparently, 
 occurred as his journey drew to a close. All the 
 graphic and local touches in the description of the 
 road he took, — first, through the open field where the 
 ass could turn aside, then along a path between high 
 vineyard walls against one of which the terrified and 
 shrinking ass crushed his foot, and then along the 
 strait place, the narrow causeway, where there was no 
 room to turn — indicate that he was approaching a 
 city ; for only in the environs of a city would he be 
 likely to pass successively through cultivated fields, 
 carefully guarded vineyards, and the raised narrow 
 way which led up to the gate. And it has been con- 
 jectured, with much probability, that the city he was 
 approaching was Ir-Moab, or Ar of Moab, on the 
 eastern border of Balak's kingdom, near the spot 
 where the Upper Arnon receives its tributary Nahaliel. 
 One of the upper branches of this stream still bears 
 the name Balu, and in this name there is very 
 possibly a reminiscence of Balaam. 
 
 Only one incident of the journey is recorded, but
 
 THE JOURNEY. 51 
 
 this incident is so singular in itself, and, in the 
 shallower sort of mind, has assumed such undue 
 proportions and given rise to so much sceptical and 
 jesting comment, that it is impossible to pass it by 
 with the few words which are all that it really 
 deserves. That " the dumb ass, speaking with man's 
 voice, should rebuke the madness of the prophet," is 
 but a theme for ridicule and merriment to many ; 
 while, to many more, it presents a grave and serious 
 difficulty any solution of which they would thankfully 
 welcome. I myself can well remember a time when 
 Balaam's ass was a much more perplexing figure than 
 Balaam himself, and when I turned with disappoint- 
 ment from any sermon or essay on the character of 
 this singular prophet — even the weighty and illu- 
 minating discourses of Bishop Butler and F. D. 
 Maurice — which made no attempt to explain this 
 incident in his story. And as there must be many 
 who are still as immature and perplexed in thought 
 as I then was, it may be well to treat this incident as 
 if it were of more importance than I think it is, and 
 to deal with it at somewhat disproportionate fulness 
 and length. 
 
 The angel appeared, then, and the dumb ass spake 
 "to rebuke the madness of the prophet." What was 
 his madness ? in what did it consist ? is, therefore 
 the first question we ask ; for if we can get at the
 
 52 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 motive of this strange intervention, that may go far to 
 explain the intervention itself. 
 
 Here, then, was a man of high prophetic gifts, and 
 very proud of the gifts which raised him so high 
 above his fellows (Chap. xxiv. 3, 4 ; 15, 1G) ; a man, 
 too, of a conscience so far quick and sensitive that he 
 could not enter on any course without first persuading 
 himself that he had Divine sanction for it : and he is 
 2'oin£ on an errand which he feels to be a dubious 
 one, an errand in which he is conscious that his own 
 wishes and interests are not in harmony with the will 
 of God. He wants to curse the people whom God 
 has commanded him to bless. And though he quite 
 means, or has persuaded himself that he quite 
 means, to obey the Divine command, he would gladly 
 induce God to modify it ; while in the darker corners 
 of his soul, into which he does not care to pry, there 
 lurks perhajDS a hope that he may hit on some means 
 of evading that command while seeming to obey it, 
 without doing too much violence to his conscience. 
 And so, as he goes on his way, he plots and broods 
 and schemes; he bids his brains go about and 
 devise some plan by which, while true to the letter of 
 the Divine command, he may yet be false to its spirit. 
 
 We are doing him no injustice, I hope and think, 
 in assuming that this was the point about which his 
 thoughts hovered and revolved during his long journey;
 
 THE JOURNEY. 53 
 
 for we base the assumption not simply on the course 
 he ultimately took, but also on all the details of the 
 strange intervention by which his thoughts and 
 schemes were arrested at the close of the journey, and 
 on one or two direct hints which the Chronicle yields 
 to an attentive student. Thus, in Verse 22, we are 
 told that " the anger of the Lord was kindled against 
 him as he was going;" not "because he was going," 
 as in the Authorised Version, but by something 
 transpiring within the man as he went. Now God is 
 not angry without cause ; and the one cause which 
 makes Him angry with men is some unrighteousness in 
 them, or some inward leaning toward unrighteousness. 
 And what could the unrighteous leaning of Balaam be 
 but that, in the conflict between his own interests and 
 desires and the will of God, he was permitting his 
 interests and desires to prevail over his sense of duty, 
 suffering; the baser elements of his nature to override 
 the promptings of that in him which was highest and 
 best, giving way, in short, to the temptation which 
 Balak had held out before him, and scheming how he 
 might please man without altogether breaking with 
 God? 
 
 So absorbed is he in his schemes, so preoccupied, 
 that this man, ordinarily so alert, so quick to discern 
 omens, so sensitive to spiritual intimations, so proud 
 of his open eye, actually does not see the angel who
 
 54 THE CHRONICLE OE BALAAM. 
 
 stands full in his path, with his sword drawn in his 
 hand. So unlike himself is he that, forgetting his 
 customary composure and moderation, he cruelly 
 smites the ass who is saving him from destruction, 
 and only longs that his staff had been a sword that 
 he might slay her ! 
 
 This inward preoccupation and deterioration was 
 "the madness" which the dumb ass forbad and 
 rebuked. And how severe and humiliating, yet how 
 merciful, the rebuke ! How humiliating that he who 
 prided himself on being " the man whose eyes are 
 open, who heareth the words of God and seeth the 
 vision of the Almighty," should find himself outdone 
 by the very beast he rode, blind to what even his ass 
 could see; so insensate, so "transported from himself" 
 as that he had sought to slay the very creature who 
 had saved him ! And yet what a wonder of mercy 
 and grace was it that' even while, as the angel told 
 him, his way was rash, foolhardy, full of hidden perils 
 which he ought never to have affronted, God had not 
 forgotten or forsaken him, but had miraculously 
 interposed to warn him that the course he was 
 meditating could only lead him to destruction, to 
 arrest him in his downward path, to quicken his 
 attention, to open his eyes to the spiritual facts and 
 omens of which he had lost ken, and to call him back 
 to the allegiance he so loudly professed ?
 
 THE JOURNEY. 55 
 
 These are the thoughts naturally suggested by this 
 incident to reflective and spiritual minds : and it will 
 be admitted that it is somewhat depressing to be 
 called down from such thoughts as these — thoughts 
 which throw so much light on God's providential 
 dealing with us and with all men — to a consideration 
 of the mere form of the narrative and of the difficulties 
 which it suggests to the inquiring and sceptical in- 
 tellect. But since this also is a necessary part of our 
 task, let us at once address ourselves to it and get it 
 out of our way. 
 
 Now, of course, if we are to approach this problem 
 in a fair and reasonable spirit, we must peremptorily 
 banish from our minds all the sordid and ludicrous 
 associations which, here in England, have long been 
 connected with the ass. We have only to go as far 
 as Spain to find a much nobler strain of this patient 
 and useful beast ; while, in all Eastern lands and 
 from the earliest times, the ass has been as habitually 
 ridden by the learned and dignified classes in time of 
 peace as the horse in war. More sure of foot than 
 the horse, of a steadier nerve, more patient of labour 
 and distress, it is eminently suited to such lands as 
 Syria and Mesopotamia, where stretches of burning- 
 sand alternate with lofty mountain ranges, with their 
 difficult rocky passes and steep dangerous ascents and 
 descents.
 
 56 THE CHRONICLE OE BALAAM. 
 
 Then, too, if the angel of the Lord appeared, as 
 we are told, in a visible, and probably in a human 
 form, brandishing a drawn sword against the advanc- 
 ing prophet, we need find no difficulty in the fact, 
 need betake ourselves to no theory of instinct to 
 understand, that the ass saw him, and sought to avoid 
 the peril to which both she and her master were ex- 
 posed ; while the Prophet himself, brooding over his 
 schemes with downcast and introverted eyes, might 
 very well see nothing beyond the ass on which he 
 rode, even when his attention was partly aroused by 
 its unwonted behaviour. 
 
 The real difficulty of the incident to those who feel 
 a special difficulty in it consists, I suppose, in the 
 alleged fact that the ass spoke, spoke in apparently 
 human words and with a human voice. And this 
 difficulty has, to say the least of it, been very neatly 
 turned by many of our ablest critics and commentators, 
 some of whom have as little love for miracles as the 
 veriest sceptic. They say : Balaam, the soothsayer 
 and diviner, was trained to observe and interpret the 
 motions and cries of beasts and birds, and especially 
 anything that was exceptional in them ; to draw 
 auguries and portents from them, to see in them the 
 workings of a Divine power, to infer from them in- 
 dications of the Divine will. When, therefore, the 
 beast he rode shewed so strange and unwonted a
 
 THE JOURNEY. 57 
 
 reluctance to advance ; when he first " turned aside 
 out of the way," then "crushed" Balaam's foot against 
 a wall, and then fell doAvn groaning in " a narrow 
 place where there was no room to turn either to the 
 right hand or the left," all the diviner woke in the 
 man. Here was a portent indeed, and he must in- 
 terpret it. And to him it seemed that the ass was 
 striving and remonstrating with him ; that, conscious 
 of a presence of which he himself was unaware, it was 
 seeking to save him from a doom which he was heed- 
 lessly provoking. And so, with the dramatic instinct 
 of an Oriental poet, either Balaam himself or the 
 original writer of the Chronicle translated these sub- 
 jective impressions into external facts, and made the 
 ass " speak " the meaning which he read in its 
 motions and groans. 
 
 Nor is it only rationalistic critics who lean toward 
 the interpretation which makes Balaam read the speech 
 or rebuke into the dumb ass's inarticulate cries. It 
 is adopted in one of the most orthodox of recent com- 
 mentaries — the Speaker's Commentary, where we 
 read : " The cries of the ass would seem to have been 
 significant to Balaam's mind only," and not to have 
 meant anything to the servants and the envoys who 
 were with him ; just as Saul alone heard " words " on 
 the way to Damascus, those who journeyed with him 
 hearing a " sound," indeed, but finding no articulate
 
 5 S THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 meaning in it. " God may have brought it about 
 that sounds uttered by the creature after his kind 
 became to the prophet's intelligence as though it 
 addressed him in rationed speech. Indeed to an 
 augur, priding himself on his skill in interpreting the 
 cries and movements of animals, no more startling 
 warning could be given than one so real as this, yet 
 conveyed through the medium of his own art ; and 
 to a seer, pretending to superhuman wisdom, no more 
 humiliating rebuke can be imagined than to teach 
 him by the mouth of his own ass." 
 
 Then, too, to complete their case, those who hold 
 this hypothesis proceed to point out to us the con- 
 gruity of the speech with the supposed speaker. If, 
 they say, the ass had had any profoundly spiritual 
 truth put or read into its mouth, there would or might 
 have been a marked and repulsive disproportion be- 
 tween the truth revealed and the medium through 
 which it was conveyed. But no such truth is attri- 
 buted to her ; what she says, or is supposed to say, 
 is whollv in keeping with her animal nature and 
 conditions. It is simply what myriads of the animals 
 who have been reduced to the service of man might 
 and would have said could they have spoken with 
 man's voice. All she does is to remonstrate against 
 the injustice and cruelty with which she has been 
 treated, to appeal to the fidelity of her service as a
 
 THE JOURNEY. 59 
 
 reason why she should not be suspected of wilful 
 disobedience. Virtually she says to her master (Verse 
 30) : " You have smitten me these three times. You 
 would have slain me if you could, although my only 
 offence is that I have been trying to save you from 
 a danger you did not see. Why have you treated me 
 so cruelly ? Have I not served you faithfully ever 
 since I was thine ? Have I ever disobeyed you before, 
 or disobeyed you without sufficient cause ? Am I 
 wont to do so unto thee ? If not, why forget my 
 past service and fidelity ? Why did you not conclude 
 that I had good reason for disobeying you now ? " 
 
 Certainly, if an ass could speak, she could hardly 
 speak more appropriately. She is simply speaking 
 for the whole animal race, and once for all protests 
 against and rebukes the madness and the cruelty with 
 which these poor relations of ours upon the carnal side 
 are only too often treated. 
 
 The whole hypothesis is reasonable enough, indeed; 
 for surely nothing is more probable than that a 
 soothsayer and augur, accustomed to find omens in 
 the actions of beasts and birds, should find a spiritual 
 significance in the motions and groans of the ass 
 beneath him which those who travelled with him did 
 not so much as suspect. And if there are still any who 
 find it a relief to look at the incident in this light, 
 thev will do well to look at it in this light. There is
 
 60 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 no need to say a word against it, — no need even to 
 remind them that the only Scripture which describes 
 the ass as actually speaking with man's voice is the 
 so-called Second Epistle of St Peter, and that this 
 Epistle, which was not admitted into the canon of the 
 early Church, seems in a fair way of being cut out 
 from it by the scholarship of the modern Church. 
 Nay, even if any should conclude that the Divine 
 warning to the Prophet was thrown into a fabulous or 
 legendary form by the simplicity of ancient times, I 
 for one will not quarrel with them for that ; but will 
 rather admit that, as we find some admixture of fable 
 or legend in all ancient literatures, so also we may 
 reasonably expect to find some such admixture in the 
 ancient Hebrew literature, since the Spirit of all truth, 
 as He has used most of the other literary forms in 
 which men instruct or delight each other, may very 
 probably have used this form also for our instruction. 
 For myself, indeed, I care very little what inter- 
 pretation may be placed on this singular passage in 
 Balaam's story, and would as soon believe that the 
 mouth of the dumb ass was really opened to utter 
 articulate human words as that Balaam's sensitive and 
 practised ear heard these words into his groans and 
 cries. I would say, with F. D. Maurice : " How the 
 dumb ass rebuked the madness of the prophet I know 
 not, nor care to know. But I believe that whatever
 
 THE JOURNEY. 61 
 
 sounds it uttered they did convey exactly that mean- 
 ing to the mind of the prophet which it is said that 
 they conveyed. He felt that the instinct of a brute 
 was made the instrument of teaching him, that what 
 he would not learn by gracious inward discipline was 
 brought home to him by rough, humiliating, outward 
 discipline. I feel too deeply the essential veracity of 
 the story to be troubled with minute questions about 
 its details." And hence I do not need to say with 
 Ewald, " A beast is often more sagacious and fore- 
 boding than an obdurate man ; " or with Keil, " that 
 animals have a perception of the abnormal and even of 
 the supernatural, is the popular belief of all ages." I 
 could be content with Robertson 1 to pass it by with 
 the curt parenthesis, " The intervention of the ass, 
 tvJtether literal or figurative," or even to pass it by, as 
 Bishop Butler did, without a single word. 
 
 For, after all, what does it matter what we do with 
 it, hoiv we read it ? Get rid of the speaking ass, if 
 you will ; you do not thereby get rid of the speaking 
 angel. And if, as I suppose, the angel stood at least 
 as high above the Prophet as the ass stood below him 
 on the scale of being, the question how the angel could 
 so speak as that Balaam should understand him is to 
 
 1 Robertson (of Brighton) does indeed add a few words, very few, 
 on the several ways in which the incident has been explained ; but 
 it is only to conclude, with Maurice : "There is too much profound 
 truth throughout this narrative for us to care much about either the 
 literal or the figurative interpretation." — Sermons, vol iv., p. 40.
 
 62 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 the full as difficult and perplexing as the question 
 which has been so long discussed, — how the ass could 
 so speak as to be understood by the Prophet. Nay, 
 if we are to talk of the difficulties of this ancient 
 Chronicle, who will explain how, in what form and 
 method, God Himself came to Balaam at night, and 
 said : " Who are these men that are v/ith thee ? " 
 or how the Spirit of God came upon him on the moun- 
 tain, and opened his eyes to see the distant future, 
 and taught his tongue to utter oracles the full meaning 
 of which he himself could not grasp ? The story is full 
 of miracles — miracles so strange, complex, awful, that 
 this poor wonder of the speaking ass sinks into utter 
 insignificance, and one can only marvel how men 
 should have been so profoundly impressed by this and 
 yet so little moved by those. Nay, more, if we do but 
 think of it, what — as Carlyle has asked — is the fact 
 that man himself can speak, and speak with most 
 miraculous organs, but a miracle ? this miracle of 
 Speech, too, running up into the still greater miracles 
 of Thought and Life : all of them wonders which no 
 advance of science is at all likely to explain, least of 
 all that science, which sees the promise and the 
 potency of all things in an infinite cataract of 
 infinitesimal atoms, and whose votaries 
 
 " Hedge their minds by present things, 
 The small parochial world 
 Of sight and touch."
 
 THE JOURNEY. 63 
 
 To escape from miracles is simply impossible. 1 
 Every man who believes in God at all believes in the 
 supernatural — believes, that is, in a supernatural order 
 underlying the natural order ; believes even in a super- 
 natural Being who originated the natural order, who 
 is immanent in it and transcends it. And every man 
 who believes that God has in any way, or at any time, 
 revealed his will to men, believes that the supernatural 
 order has broken through the natural order which it 
 underlies and in which it is immanent, believes that 
 the supernatural Being has, so to speak, come forth 
 from the secret places of the pavilion in which Ho 
 habitually dwells, to manifest Himself to mankind. 
 But if we believe in miracles at all, and especially if 
 we believe them to be the necessary and inevitable 
 adjuncts of any revelation of the Divine will, is it not 
 a little childish of us to compare this miracle with 
 that, and say, " This we can accept, but not that ? " 
 Is it not more than a little childish of us to stand dis- 
 cussing the inevitable accompaniments of Revelation 
 while we neglect the revelation itself, and so fail to 
 learn the very lesson for the sake of which the 
 miracles were wrought ? 
 
 As many of us as have received the Bible's own 
 
 1 " Before giving a too credulous ear to those who would persuade 
 us that this or that is incredible because it is a miracle, it were 
 prudent to require them to put their finger on something that is not 
 miraculous. "--Julian Hawthorne.
 
 64 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 account of itself decline to be so childish. We have 
 reached a point of view from which all such difficulties 
 as this cease to have any power over us, and stand on 
 a rock from which we can be swept by no wave 
 whether of Criticism or of Scepticism. For we 
 believe that God's revelation of His will has been 
 gradual and progressive, and that even to the end we 
 have this heavenly treasure in earthen vessels. "We 
 believe that God revealed the truth to men as they 
 were able to receive it, in and through the words with 
 which they were familiar, in and through the mental 
 and imaginative forms with which they were familiar. 
 We believe that, if He deigned to speak to men at 
 all, He must speak to them in the verbal, literary, 
 and imaginative forms which they had invented, 
 and which they employed at the time -He spoke. 
 And hence it does not disturb our faith in His 
 Word to learn either that, when He would teach 
 men that all things were created by Him at the 
 beo-inning, He disclosed that initial and pregnant fact 
 in the scientific terms of the age to which He taught 
 it ; or that, when He would rebuke the madness of a 
 diviner, He should deign to use the forms in which 
 such a man thought, or even the art which he pursued, 
 and humble him by setting his own ass to prove how 
 blind he was, despite his " open eye." It matters 
 little to us whether the ass actually spoke or did not
 
 THE JOURNEY. 65 
 
 speak, whether we have history here or fable. Nor 
 does it perplex us to see that inspired writers regarded 
 as history what we, perhaps, can only receive as 
 parable. We say : If God was to speak to men, He 
 could only speak to them through the words, the 
 thoughts, the conceptions and beliefs, current among 
 them at the time, just as a man can only speak to a 
 child effectually by speaking as a child and thinking 
 as a child. And if these verbal and mental forms 
 were imperfect — as doubtless they were and still are 
 — nevertheless the lessons conveyed through these 
 imperfect forms were of a perfect wisdom. Though 
 the vessels of Revelation be of earth, the treasure they 
 contain is heavenly and from Heaven. 
 
 Hence it is that we can say with entire frankness 
 and honesty : Put what construction on the talking 
 ass you will ; call it fact, call it fable, or say that 
 Balaam read an ominous rebuke into the natural cries 
 of the beast on which he rode, — whatever the con- 
 struction you put upon it, you will be little the wiser 
 for it, little the better unless you listen to the appeal, 
 to the rebuke which Balaam heard from the mouth of 
 the ass or put into it. That lesson may be, and is, a 
 very simple one ; but its very simplicity at once 
 makes it the more valuable and renders it the more 
 probable that, much as we need to learn it, we may 
 have overlooked it. 
 
 E
 
 66 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 What, then, was this lesson or rebuke ? The ass 
 
 said, or Balaam took her to say, " Wherefore smite 
 
 me ? Have I not served thee faithfully ever since I 
 
 was thine ? Am I wont to rebel against you ? " 
 
 And how could one who had been accustomed to look 
 
 for ethical and religious meanings in all the signs of 
 
 nature fail to look for an ethical meaning in this 
 
 appeal, or fail either to find it, or to find how heavy 
 
 a rebuke it carried for himself ? He too had a Master, 
 
 a Master in heaven, and was loud and frequent in his 
 
 protestations of loyalty to Him. Yet could he look 
 
 up to heaven and say to his Master, " Why hast Thou 
 
 checked and rebuked me ? Have not I served Thee 
 
 faithfully ever since I was Thine unto this day ? Am 
 
 I Avont to disobey Thy word ? " Why, at that very 
 
 moment he was untrue, disloyal, to his Master ; he 
 
 was plotting how he might speak other words than 
 
 those which God had put into his mouth, and serve 
 
 his own will rather than the Divine will ! Might he 
 
 n$t, then, well hear in the rebuke of the ass some 
 
 such appeal as this : " Have you been as true to your 
 
 Master as I to mine ? Have you been as mindful of 
 
 the heavenly vision as I of the heavenly apparition 
 
 which I have seen ? Has your service been as 
 
 faithful, as patient, as disinterested as mine ? " 
 
 The lesson is simple enough, I admit ; but is it not 
 also most necessary and valuable ? Once of old God
 
 THE JOURNEY. 67 
 
 Himself had to appeal to those who professed to love 
 and obey Him : "If I be a father, where is Mine 
 honour? and if I be a master, where is My reverence?" 
 Might He not make the same appeal to-day ? And if 
 He did, which of us could look up and reply : " Have 
 not I been true to Thee ever since I was Thine ? Am 
 I wont to disobey Thee ? " 
 
 The miracle of the speaking ass is, however, only 
 one, and one of the least, of the many marvels of this 
 ancient Chronicle. It sinks into utter insignificance 
 when compared with the fact that God permitted his 
 servant to go on an errand on which He had forbidden 
 him to go, and was then displeased with him for 
 availing himself of that permission. For if man can 
 give a voice even to things without life, as the pipe 
 or harp, and if God daily speaks to us by all the 
 creatures He has made, insomuch that, albeit there 
 are "so many kinds of voices in the world," yet 
 " none of them is without significance for us," 1 it may 
 well have been that He should speak to the soothsayer 
 by the dumb ass, and rebuke his madness by teaching 
 him the significance of her movements and cries. 
 But how are we to explain the fact that God should 
 say to his servant both " Go " and " Do not go," — 
 should both allow him to set out on an errand He 
 1 Corinthians xiv. 7, 10.
 
 68 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 had prohibited and withstand him as he went upon 
 it ? Can we say that here too the difficulty is largely 
 of our own making, and that we should never have 
 been perplexed by it had we read the Chronicle with 
 open eyes ? 
 
 Yes, even here, and great as the difficulty seems to 
 be, it is of our own making, at least in this sense, 
 that it is not peculiar to the Bible, much less to this 
 particular narrative in the Bible, but meets us at 
 every step we take, and pervades the whole structure 
 of human life. For is it only in the Bible that two 
 potent but opposed voices are heard to speak within 
 the soul of man ? Is it only in the Bible that Ave 
 find men allowed to disobey a Divine command, and 
 yet withstood at every step in their downward course, 
 and threatened with destruction should they persist in 
 it ? Do we not daily meet with those who, confessing 
 that they too have a Master in heaven, confessing 
 even that his commandments are good and right, 
 nevertheless struggle against his high pure will, and 
 plot how to disobey the very commands which they 
 acknowledge they ought to obey ? And if the Bible 
 is to reflect human life fairly and to explain its true 
 significance to us, must it not record this perplexing 
 element in human life, and tell us what it means ? 
 
 This, in brief, is the key to the whole mystery 
 which confronts us here; and we have only to expand the
 
 THE JOURNEY. 69 
 
 thought and illustrate it in order to arrive at a teaching 
 full of comfort and of large hopeful suggestion. 
 
 Balaam, then, as we have seen, was a man of like 
 passions with ourselves. In him, as in us, the flesh 
 made war upon the spirit ; base cravings for reward 
 and for personal distinction struggled within him 
 against his sense of duty and the noble aspirations 
 and inspirations which impelled him to follow after 
 truth and righteousness. It was to his interest, he 
 thought, to curse the people whom God had bidden 
 him bless ; and there is too much truth in the bitter 
 sarcasm of Epictetus, " Few men love anything, even 
 their God, so much as their own interest." As he 
 brooded over Balak's invitation, with its manifold 
 promise of honour, reward, and influence, and prided 
 himself perhaps on his courage in declining it, many 
 regrets seem to have mingled with his self-approval, 
 and to have prepared him to yield to the second and 
 still more promising invitation when it reached him. 
 
 We are not to blame him, we do not blame him, 
 simply because, when this second invitation came, he 
 consulted God again to see whether He had anything 
 " more " to say to him, any new command to give 
 him. But we cannot but blame him if, as there is 
 too much reason to believe, he went to God a second 
 time to " get his duty altered rather than to learn what 
 his duty was ; " for, in that case this lover of righteous-
 
 70 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 ness betrayed that his fimdamental conception of 
 righteousness was inaccurate and misleading, and shewed 
 that he conceived of " the will of God as making right 
 rather than as being right," as able, therefore, to 
 sanction things wrong in themselves if only they were 
 plausibly presented to Him or artfully veiled from his 
 sight. Assuredly many since his time have thus 
 thought of God ; they have conceived of his will as a 
 personal caprice, liable to alter with every wind of 
 supplication, every breath of desire, instead of think- 
 ing of it as the steadfast and righteous law of the 
 universe which, simply because it is right, cannot 
 change. God might be " managed," he hoped, and 
 induced at least to connive at the course he wished to 
 take, or even tricked into conceding his sanction to it 
 unawares. In short, he appears to have been in a 
 very similar position to that which many men still 
 take when, craving an indulgence very strongly, they 
 half persuade themselves that it is not so sinful as 
 they have been wont to think it, or that God will not 
 be strict to mark and punish a sin to which they are 
 urged by impulses so strong and so natural. 
 
 Now when a man's whole soul is darkened and 
 confused by this conflict between interest and con- 
 science, between duty and desire, mere words, how- 
 ever prohibitory and threatening, are of little avail. 
 What can be said to him which has not been said to
 
 THE JOURNEY. 71 
 
 him already, and has not already quickened echoes of 
 assent within his own conscience and heart ? As a 
 rule, and if he is to be saved from his sin, and taught 
 that God's will does not make right but is right, and 
 cannot therefore vary with his varying moods, he must 
 be allowed, he is allowed, to go out after the desire of 
 his heart, to indulge his craving, and to see what 
 comes of it. " When the spirit of a man thus con- 
 tradicts itself, God becomes a contradiction to him, 
 and He who had said ' Go not,' now says ' Go.' " 
 With the froward God shews Himself froward, as with 
 the upright He shews Himself upright ; and that not 
 in the Bible alone, but in the broad fields of daily 
 human experience. Words of warning may still be 
 vouchsafed ; they were vouchsafed to Balaam ; for 
 when Jehovah, replying to the unspoken desire of his 
 heart, said, " Go with the men if you will," He added, 
 " But only that which I tell thee, that shalt thou do." 
 But when desire is strong, and the Divine will is 
 not recognized as an unchanged and unchangeable 
 Righteousness, such words are of little use ; such 
 warnings are speedily consumed in the name of the 
 burning desire, or they are obscured by its fumes, or 
 the intoxicated will presses blindly on to its gratifica- 
 tion through every obstacle ; or, cooled and chas- 
 .tened by the rebuke, it studies how to evade it, or
 
 72 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 even to draw some specious but bastard sanctioD 
 from it. 1 
 
 And hence we are not surprised to hear that as 
 Balaam went on his wilful way, and drew near to the 
 close of his journey, something more than words was 
 wanted to save him from open and flagrant dis- 
 obedience. At the start, he may have persuaded 
 himself that he was quite strong enough to meet the 
 temptation face to face, that there was no fear of his 
 going beyond the word of the Lord in small things or 
 great, even with Balak's silver and gold full in view. 
 But, as he went, his selfish, ambitious, and covetous 
 desires grew stronger — as a cool observer with any 
 knowledge of human nature would have expected 
 them to do — fiercer, and yet more cunning, till, as we 
 have seen, he was plotting how he might please Balak 
 and indulge himself without wholly displeasing God. 
 For if he had not been contriving to do what God had 
 told him not to do, why should God's anger have been 
 kindled against him ? God is not angry with men for 
 doing his will, but for not doing it. 
 
 What is most worthy of note and reflection, 
 however, in the miracle which has drawn so much 
 attention and comment is the pedagogic, i.e., the 
 educational and disciplinary, intention of it. We 
 
 1 Robertson (Sermon IV. in Fourth Series), from whom the 
 citations in this and the previous paragraph are taken.
 
 THE JOURNEY. 73 
 
 daily see that God does permit men to walk in ways 
 that are not good, and that his anger is kindled 
 against them for walking in those ways. And how 
 often does the question arise within us, " Why does 
 He allow them ? Why does He not forbid and 
 prevent them ? and what is the motive and end of 
 his anger against them ? " It matters little to us 
 whether the ass did or did not speak : but it matters 
 much to us that we should learn the secret of God's 
 dealing with us when we too are torn by passionate 
 desires, and overpowered by them, and hurried by 
 them into courses which even we ourselves do not 
 approve, however strongly we may be bent upon 
 them. 
 
 Mark, then, the form which God's anger took with 
 the Prophet who was scheming how he might disobey 
 the word of the Lord. He sends an angel, with a 
 sword, to withstand him in his way, to awaken him 
 to the peril of the course to which he was leaning, 
 and to terrify him into abandoning it. Here was a 
 miracle, indeed, but a miracle of mercy— the mar- 
 vellous loving-kindness of the Lord seeking to arrest 
 his servant in his downward course and hold him back 
 from sin. 
 
 In his blind preoccupation, however, he fails to see 
 the angel of the Divine Mercy, and to take the 
 warning vouchsafed him ; and so the Divine interposi-
 
 74 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 tion has to be carried a step further, and he exposes 
 himself to the humiliation of being rebuked by his 
 own ass. He is convicted of having cruelly wronged 
 the innocent creature who had saved him from the 
 sword ; of having failed at his strongest point and lost 
 the " open eye " of which he was wont to boast ; and 
 of not being as true to his Master in heaven, despite 
 his loud professions of loyalty and obedience, as she 
 had been to her master on earth. If no rebuke could 
 be more severe and humbling, none surely could have 
 been more kind and merciful. For if men are not to 
 be held back from evil by an angel, is it not well that 
 they should be held back even by an ass? If the 
 gentler strokes of correction fail, is it not well that 
 they should be followed by severer and more effectual 
 strokes ? If appeals to our higher nature do not 
 suffice to arrest us, is it not well that we should be 
 arrested by appeals to our lower nature ? 
 
 Thus, at least, Balaam's eyes were opened. He 
 saw the angel standing in the way with his sword 
 drawn in his hand, and -was told plainly why the angel 
 had come forth to withstand him. It was because the 
 " way," the course on which he was bent, was 
 " foolhardy," rash, presumptuous, full of unsuspected 
 dangers, and could only issue in his destruction. But 
 for the superior sagacity of the ass whom he had 
 smitten he would have been slain already ; and if he
 
 THE JOURNEY. 75 
 
 persisted in the evil course on which he was set, he 
 was simply travelling to his doom. He was losing his 
 prophetic power already, his power to see visions, to 
 recognize spiritual presences, omens, warnings ; and if 
 he did not turn from the evil of his ways, he would 
 soon loose all, and his own soul to boot. 
 
 It was thus that Balaam understood the Divine 
 rebuke when, at last, he became capable of again 
 hearing the words of God and seeing visions from the 
 Almighty. For he confesses (Verse 34), "I have 
 sinned, for I knew not that thou ivast standing in 
 the ivay against me." By which I take him to 
 mean, not simply that he had sinned in not re- 
 cognising a Spiritual Presence, but that the mere fact 
 that he had not seen the heavenly apparition was a 
 sufficient proof that he had sinned away his power ; 
 that by cherishing a sinful purpose in his heart he 
 had clouded his spiritual insight, darkened the eyes of 
 his mind, sunk not only below the level of the 
 prophet, but even below the level of the brute, and so 
 had justly been rebuked by a brute. So deeply is he 
 convinced of his sin, of what he has lost by it, of the 
 imminent and deadly perils to which it has exposed 
 him, that he will even go back to his distant home, 
 though his foot is on the very border of Moab, rather 
 than displease God or the angel again. 
 
 But, no, that cannot be. A man is bound by his
 
 76 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 past ; his future is shaped by his past. When he has 
 once entered on an evil course, a return to former 
 innocence and simple uncomplicated obedience is 
 impossible. He cannot go back and be what he 
 once was. He has called new forces into play ; he 
 has introduced new conditions into his lot ; and he 
 must reckon with these now. Often his only chance 
 is to go on in the new course on which he has entered 
 — as when, for instance, a man has mistaken his true 
 vocation, or made an unhappy marriage, or pledged 
 himself to a losing bargain — and to be true to the 
 voice of conscience or of God at all costs to himself, 
 and be the consequences what they may. It would 
 seem to have been thus with Balaam. He could 
 hardly turn back now. He had entered into covenant 
 with Balak, and Balak was close at hand, eagerly ex- 
 pecting him. All that he could do was to be faithful 
 to God as well as to Balak, and to keep his vow that, 
 come what would, he would not go against the com- 
 mandment of the Lord. And, hence, as God had said 
 to him in distant Pethor " Go with the men," that 
 Balaam might put himself to the proof and come to 
 know what manner of spirit he was of, so now the angel 
 of the Lord repeats " Go with the men," that Balaam 
 might be true to his compact with Balak and to the 
 new conditions which he had accepted. But let us 
 note also that just as God had added to his permission
 
 THE JOURNEY. 77 
 
 a warning, " Go with them, but only that which I 
 shall tell thee, that shalt thou do" so also the angel 
 of the Lord adds the selfsame warning, " Go with the 
 men, but only the word that I shall speak unto thee, 
 that shalt thou speak." What it all came to was 
 virtually this : " You have elected to set out on this 
 foolhardy errand despite the promptings of your better 
 part ; you have pledged yourself to it. Go on with 
 it then; but, 0, take heed to yourself and to your 
 ways ; for only as you are true to God, and true to 
 your better self, can you hope to escape the perils by 
 which you are beset." 
 
 I do not see how any thoughtful man can consider 
 this story without discovering why God allows men 
 to enter on ways which are not good, and which are 
 therefore full of peril, and why He nevertheless 
 "withstands" them when they walk in them. He 
 allows them to enter on such ways that they may 
 come to know themselves as they are, in their weak- 
 ness as well as in their strength, that they may see 
 clearly what is evil in their nature as well as what is 
 good ; and He withstands them in order that they 
 may become aware of the perils to which they are 
 unconsciously exposing themselves, may feel their need 
 of his guidance and help, and may suffer Him to save 
 them from their sins, and out of weakness make them 
 strong.
 
 78 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 There is nothing in this miraculous intervention of 
 the angel and the ass comparable in value to this 
 revelation of the redeeming love and purpose of God. 
 What does it matter how we read it, whether we take 
 it as parable or history, if only we see in it how the 
 very anger of God is but a form of his grace, and how 
 He strove by warning and rebuke, by now appealing 
 to his higher nature, and now appealing to his lower 
 nature, to shew Balaam how low he had fallen, to 
 chasten from his soul that selfish hankering after 
 reward and distinction which was overmastering his 
 love of righteousness, his sense of duty, to drive him 
 from halting between that in himself which was good 
 and honourable and that which was base and bad, 
 and so to save him from the destruction which he 
 had provoked ? To my mind there is an infinite 
 pathos, as there is also a teaching the most pertinent 
 and valuable, in this detailed description of the 
 struggle between the pure will of God and the impure 
 will of man, in this patient and most merciful en- 
 deavour to unite a divided heart, and to purify a 
 heart tainted with selfish and covetous desires. Any 
 glimpse into a human heart thus at odds with itself 
 could hardly fail to be impressive and instructive, for in 
 every such heart we may find a reflection of our own. 
 But when we see God ranging Himself on the side of 
 all that is good and pure in such a heart, and seeking
 
 THE JOURNEY. 79 
 
 by means exquisitely adapted to its needs to recover 
 it to a settled love of truth and a steadfast pursuit of 
 righteousness, we may well be rapt with wonder and 
 with joy at so striking and pathetic an illustration of 
 his love for us and of his method of dealing with us. 
 For if his anger be a redeeming anger, and his 
 very rebukes be intended for our salvation ; if 
 even when we walk in paths of our own choosing 
 He is still leading us, still warning and protecting us 
 against the unseen dangers we have affronted ; if He 
 is striving to make us true when we are most untrue, 
 honest when we are most dishonest with Him and 
 with ourselves, pure when we are most impure : if 
 this be the secret of his Providence, what is any other 
 secret to us as compared with this ? What could 
 more effectually nerve us for our daily struggle with 
 the evil within us, or cast a more welcome and 
 radiant light of hope on the great conflict between 
 good and evil which is going on around us, in the 
 world at large and in every human breast ? 
 
 That this ivas the end and purpose of God in 
 dealing with Balaam is plain. To whatever depths 
 of infamy he ultimately fell, he was for the time a 
 saved man. Let Balak tempt, let him flatter or 
 browbeat Balaam as he would, day by day the Prophet 
 consistently refused to go against the commandment 
 of the Lord, or to speak any words save those which
 
 80 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 God put into his mouth. As we follow him from 
 mountain to mountain, weighing every action and 
 word, and half expecting that he will yield to his own 
 base craving or to the pressure put upon him by the 
 disappointed and incensed king, we detect no sign of 
 irresolution in him ; no faltering tone falls from his 
 lips ; and when at last Balak drives him from his 
 presence with bitter ridicule and contempt, he can 
 honestly and proudly claim that he has been true to 
 his vow, and has neither done nor said anything, 
 good or bad, of his own mind, but has faithfully 
 uttered the words that were given him to speak. 
 
 And why should we doubt that God's purpose in 
 withstanding Balaam is also his purpose in with- 
 standing us 1 What can He desire for us but that 
 we too should rise into a settled love of the truth and 
 a steadfast pursuit of righteousness ? If we are to 
 remain men, with discourse of reason, and to be taught 
 why our wills are our own, He cannot stop us by 
 force when we set out in wrong and foolhardy ways ; 
 nor, when we have walked in those ways, can He relieve 
 us from the pressure of the evil past we have left behind 
 us. That would be to reduce us from men to mere 
 automata, to degrade us into the mere puppets of his 
 power. He can only permit us to walk on in the 
 paths we have chosen, to gratify our clamorous desire, 
 and take the wage we have thereby earned, and dis-
 
 THE JOURNEY. 
 
 cover how little it is to our mind. Or, if He is to 
 arrest us in our course, it can only be by revealing its 
 dangers to us before we are overwhelmed by them, 
 warning and instructing us by appeals to all that is 
 highest and noblest in us, or by the rebukes of pain 
 and fear and loss. If He makes our way hard, it is 
 that we may leave it ; if He permits the consequences 
 of past transgressions to gather round and upon us, it 
 is that we may renounce them ; if He teaches us the 
 vanity of our desires by granting them, it is only that 
 we may be henceforth true to our loftier aims. What 
 should, what can He " withstand " us for but to turn 
 us back ? Why should He lead us to the dizzy edge 
 of the precipice and light up its depths with the 
 warning flashes of his anger, save that we may recoil 
 from it ? What can be his purpose in teaching us 
 that " the end of these things is death," but that we 
 may turn and live ? 
 
 To the spiritual and attentive heart all the miseries 
 that wait on sin are but the pangs and sobs of his 
 wounded love, crying to us, "Turn ye, turn ye, why will 
 ye die ? " And the great value of the story of Balaam 
 is that it confirms this intuition of the heart, and 
 shews us the love of God streaming through the re- 
 bukes with which He visits transgression, and working 
 through them for the redemption of a great yet sordid 
 soul, a soul in which good and evil were blended as in 
 
 F
 
 82 THE CHRONICLE OE BALAAM. 
 
 our own. No revelation can be more acceptable or 
 helpful to us than this. As we stand scanning the 
 various ways of men, and marking how strangely good 
 and evil are blended in every soul and therefore in 
 every lot, and how human life is but an evolution 
 from the past conducted along the lines of an iron 
 necessity, so that no man can escape from himself and 
 the conditions which he has created for himself and 
 the punitive consequences of his own deeds, we should 
 altogether lose heart did we not know and believe 
 that this evolution is conducted by a Divine Hand ; 
 that a Heart of Mercy beats under the iron necessities 
 of the law by which we are governed ; and that the 
 free grace of God is able to quicken a new spirit and 
 therefore a new life in men, and so to set new forces at 
 work for their redemption, nay, to compel even the 
 necessities of pain and shame and loss to contribute 
 to their redemption. And hence it is that the 
 spectacle of this Love and Grace at work for the 
 redemption of a spirit in which the elements were so 
 mixed as they are in us touches us very nearly, and 
 kindles within us a sure and certain hope both for 
 ourselves and for the world. 
 
 Here, then, I think we may pause. We have run 
 our small problem up into that great mystery of 
 Necessity and Freewill, against which men have 
 bruised their brains for the last four thousand years ;
 
 THE JOURNEY. 83 
 
 and perchance even that great mystery may have 
 grown a little less oppressive to us if we have learned 
 that, while we are bound by the chains which we and 
 our fathers have forged in the past, all escape from 
 them is not impossible, since the grace of God may 
 quicken and call into action new and redemptive forces 
 within us which, if only we are true to them and 
 give them free play, will yet raise us from our low and 
 fallen estate, conduct us into new and happier condi- 
 tions, and so lift us into a new and better life.
 
 84 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 S 3. The Oracles. (Numbers xxii. 36 — xxiv. 25.) 
 
 Fresh from his encounter with the angel of the Lord, 
 and with the echoes of the Divine rebuke of his 
 duplicity still making " a fearful music " in his soul, 
 Balaam arrives at Ir, a city on the extreme north- 
 eastern boundary of Moab ; and here he meets a new 
 antagonist. Messengers had no doubt been sent on, 
 after the Eastern fashion, to announce his approach to 
 the King ; for we find that Balak had left his capital 
 (Rabbah) and come forth to this border city to receive 
 him. A twofold motive may have prompted the 
 King. He may have intended, and probably did 
 intend, to give the Prophet a signal mark of his 
 favour ; and, according to Oriental notions, he could 
 have shewn him no greater honour than by coming so 
 far to meet him. But, though on courtesy bent, he 
 may also have shewn a frugal mind ; and probably in 
 coming so far to meet the Prophet his strongest 
 motive was to save time. For the mountains from 
 which he proposed that Balaam should overlook and 
 curse the camp of Israel lay in the immediate vicinity 
 of Tr-Moab ; and it is easy to see that Balak was 
 impatient to have the curse pronounced, thought that
 
 THE ORACLES. 85 
 
 too much time had been wasted already, and was in no 
 mood to brook another instant of unnecessary delay. 
 
 Kings do not easily bow before an authority higher 
 than their own ; and even when they are obliged to 
 court the aid of an eloquence, a statesmanship, or a 
 genius for war, which they do not themselves possess, 
 they are apt to suspect and dislike the very instru- 
 ments they are compelled to use. There is a touch of 
 this royal insolence in the demand with which king 
 Balak greets the Prophet he has sent so far to fetch : 
 " Did I not urgently send unto thee to call thee ? 
 Wherefore didst thou not come unto me ? Am I not 
 able, forsooth, to promote thee unto honour ? " But 
 a man who has stood face to face with God is not 
 likely to fear the frown of a king ; and hence Balaam 
 replies with quiet dignity : " Behold, I have come 
 unto thee ! (But) have I any power at all (now. that 
 I have come) to say anything ? The word that 
 Jehovah shall put into my mouth, that (only) will I 
 speak." His dignified reply had its effect ; for the 
 next thing we hear of these two men is that they rode 
 peacefully together to a city called Kirjath-huzzoth, 1 
 
 1 Knobel conjectures, with some probability, that Kirjath may 
 have been an older form of Kerioth. The sole interest of the 
 conjecture lies in the fact that Judas Iscariot, i.e., Judas of Kerioth, 
 came from a place which bore the same name, though in a different 
 locality ; and thus supplies a sort of link between the Prophet 
 who turned traitor to Jehovah and the Apostle who betrayed 
 Jesus.
 
 86 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 an ancient Strass-burg, or " city of streets " as its 
 name implies, or perhaps the word rather means " a 
 fort with streets " round it. It was probably, there- 
 fore, a border-fortress on the way to the ranges of 
 Attarus and Abarim, from divers peaks of which they 
 were to look down on the Hebrew encampment. 
 Here Balak holds a feast in honour of Balaam's 
 arrival, sending the best portions of the oxen and 
 sheep he slew to Balaam's table, as an Arab sheikh 
 would do to this day on receiving a guest whom he 
 delighted to honour. 
 
 On the morrow, early in the morning, Balak rode 
 with Balaam to a neighbouring summit consecrated to 
 the service of his god, and thence called Bamoth-Baal, 
 or " high place of Baal," on which therefore there was 
 probably a grove of sacred trees, and from which they 
 could look down and see the host of Israel encamped 
 upon the plain beneath. And no doubt the site was 
 chosen partly because it was a sacred place, very meet 
 therefore for a religious imprecation, just as the 
 anathemas of the Pope are supposed to gain special 
 force because they issue from St Peter's chair, and 
 partly because it was an article of ancient superstition 
 that the seer must have those whom he was to curse 
 under his eye if his curse were to take effect. 
 
 This latter superstition Balaam may have shared, 
 but from the former he hastens to detach himself.
 
 THE ORACLES, 87 
 
 He is the servant of Jehovah, not of Baal, and he 
 will not stoop or affect to serve any but the only true 
 God. When, therefore, they reach the " high place " 
 he separates himself decisively from the idolatry of 
 which it was the haunt. He will not use the altars 
 of Baal, nor join in any of the Moabitish rites. In a 
 tone of authority he bids Balak " build me seven 
 altars, and prepare for me seven bullocks and seven 
 rams." And these altars were dedicated, these 
 sacrifices were presented, as we learn from a sub- 
 sequent Verse (Chap, xxiii. 4), not to Baal, but to 
 Jehovah. 
 
 Among the ancients sacrifices preceded every enter- 
 prise of pith and moment, especially of course any 
 ceremony of adjuration ; and these sacrifices grew 
 more costly in proportion as the ceremony or enter- 
 prise was deemed critical and important. Since 
 bullocks and rams were the chief victims of the 
 Patriarchal and Mosaic altars, and seven was the 
 number of perfection and completion, we may fairly 
 infer from the seven bullocks and seven rams which 
 Balaam proceeded to offer on the seven altars, that 
 both the Prophet and the King attached the gravest 
 importance to the enterprise in which they were now 
 engaged. 
 
 An ancient augur, moreover, habitually chose some 
 lofty spot, with a wide and open outlook, in which to
 
 88 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 watch for omens and indications of the Divine will ; 
 and hence we can understand why, after having offered 
 his holocausts in the sacred grove, Balaam went forth 
 from its shade to " a bare place," a scaur, leaving the 
 King to stand by the altars. He wanted to be alone 
 and undisturbed that he might be the more sensitive 
 to any spiritual impact, any touch of spiritual light or 
 force, whether from within or from without. And he 
 also wanted (Chap. xxiv. 1) to secure a wide view of 
 earth and sky in which to detect some portent that 
 his art would enable him to interpret. For in this, 
 or in some similar form, he expected the Lord to 
 " meet " him, to direct and illuminate his mind, and 
 to give him some inkling of things that were to be. 
 And in this, or in some similar way, God did meet 
 him and put a word into his mouth ; that is to say, 
 the conviction was borne in upon him that he knew 
 what the Lord would have him say, what he must say 
 therefore, however unwelcome it might be, however 
 fatal to his interests and desires. He returns to the 
 sacred grove, therefore, and faithfully delivers the 
 burden of the Lord. 
 
 The oracles of Balaam are full of interest to the 
 historian, the antiquarian, and the literary artist, as 
 well as to the student of theology ; and did the 
 occasion require, it would not be difficult for one who 
 has studied these oracles patiently and minutely to
 
 THE ORACLES. 89 
 
 throw some light on certain curious psychological and 
 literary problems. But the occasion does not require 
 it. Our main endeavour is to decipher the character 
 of Balaam, to reach such a conception of it as shall 
 bring him within the recognized limits of our common 
 humanity. And hence we need not enter into the 
 difficult literary and philosophical problems which his 
 oracles suggest, but may be content simply to seize 
 such indications of character as they afford. 
 
 One of these characteristics pervades the whole 
 series. The honesty, the veracity, of Balaam is con- 
 spicuous throughout. Whatever base cupidity or 
 selfish ambition he may have cherished on the journey 
 from Mesopotamia to Moab, no trace of it is to be 
 found in the predictions he utters. And it would 
 have been so easy for him to be dishonest, to utter 
 words of double meaning, words which, while formally 
 a curse on Israel, were really a benediction, and thus 
 to seem to comply with Balak's wish, while neverthe- 
 less he ran counter to it ! Many of the ancient 
 oracles took this dubious form, offering a word of pro- 
 mise to the ear, while they broke it to the hope. 
 The oracles of Dodona and Delphi, for instance, 
 habitually paltered with words in a double sense ; as 
 when they informed Croesus that, if he attacked the 
 Persians, he would " destroy a mighty empire," but 
 quite omitted to inform him that that empire would
 
 go THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 be his own. 1 And our own Shakespeare supplies us 
 with a similar illustration of " the equivocation of the 
 fiend that lies like truth " in the oracle which 
 deceived Macbeth : " Fear not, till Birnam wood do 
 come to Dunsinane." The temptation to Balaam 
 thus to equivocate with Balak, and to make truth 
 itself a liar, must have been immense. For he loved 
 reward ; and, after buoying up the King with false 
 hopes, he might easily — had he been the villain 
 which some assume him to be — have gone off with 
 the silver and gold before the event betrayed him. 
 But he does not listen to, we cannot even detect a 
 single symptom that he so much as felt, the tempta- 
 tion. From first to last he is true to his vocation, 
 and speaks out simply and gravely the thoughts which 
 God had put into his heart. 
 
 And who can doubt that it was the intervention of 
 the Angel and the Ass which made and kept him 
 sincere ? His " madness " had been effectually 
 rebuked, so effectually that while he remains with 
 Balak we see no trace of its return. Was not that, 
 then, a most merciful rebuke, however humiliating 
 and severe it may have seemed, which exorcised the 
 evil spirit that he had been cherishing, and made a 
 true man and a true prophet of him, at least for a 
 
 1 Herodotus, Book I., chap. 53. It would be easy to give many 
 similar instances from the pages of Herodotus alone.
 
 THE ORACLES. 91 
 
 time ? If this was the end of the miracle, was it 
 not a worthy and sufficient end ? 
 
 First Oracle. 
 
 Balaam's First Oracle, which, like many of the 
 ancient heathen oracles, took a poetic form, runs thus 
 (Chap, xxiii. 7-10) : — 
 
 From Aram hath Balak brought me, 
 The King of Moab from the mountains of the East, 
 (Saying) Come, curse me Jacob, 
 And, come, ban Israel ! 
 How shall I curse whom God hath not cursed, 
 Or how shall I ban whom the Lord hath not banned 1 
 For from the summit of the rocks I see them, 
 And I behold them from the hills ; 
 Lo, it is a people that dwelleth apart, 
 And is not reckoned among the nations. 
 Who can count the dust of Jacob, 
 Or number the fourth part of Israel 1 1 
 Let me die the death of the righteous, 
 And be my last estate like his ! 
 
 With the exception of the tremulous sigh with 
 which it concludes, the oracle seems little more than 
 a simple statement of the events by which the 
 Prophet had been led to his present position, and an 
 equally simple description of the scene beneath his 
 
 1 An allusion to the four camps into which the Hebrew host was 
 divided.
 
 92 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 eyes. But, as we look into it, we discover traces of 
 character in it which help us to understand the man, 
 and to understand him in the loftier and nobler 
 aspects of his nature. There is not only an assertion 
 of his unalterable fidelity to the God whom he serves, 
 of the utter impossibility of his cursing any whom 
 God has not cursed ; but, obviously, he is even more 
 profoundly impressed by the holiness of the people on 
 whom he looks clown from the summit of the rocks 
 than by their vast numbers or their power. He 
 cannot but see that they are like the dust of the 
 earth for multitude ; but what strikes him most 
 is that which any but a genuine lover of righteous- 
 ness might altogether have failed to perceive. It 
 is that they are a people called to " dwell apart," 
 and not to be reckoned among the nations around 
 them. The isolation of the camp as he looked down 
 upon it from the heights, its sharply defined limits as 
 it lay in the great plain of the Jordan, its orderli- 
 ness, and a something peculiar and unique in its 
 aspect, may have suggested this thought to him ; 
 but, whatever suggested it, there can be no doubt 
 that it arrested and impressed him. For by this 
 separateness he does not mean simply that, under the 
 protection of Jehovah, they are to dwell in safety, 
 unvexed by the strifes and tumults of other races ; 
 but, mainly, that they are a people of other and better
 
 THE ORACLES. 93 
 
 laws, pursuing a different and nobler ideal than other 
 races. Separation is here, as throughout the Old 
 Testament, the symbol of sanctity, the outward and 
 visible sign of an inward and invisible grace, the grace 
 which impels men to the pursuit of a pure and unworldly 
 life, and makes righteousness, rather than culture or 
 power or wealth, their chief end and highest good. 
 
 Summoned to curse this peculiar people, he can 
 conceive no higher wish than that he may share their 
 aim and fate. And there is a special force and pathos 
 in the form into which he casts this wish. He 
 projects himself into the future, and asks himself how 
 he shall crave to have lived when he comes to die. 
 Under the shadow of death, when the garish lights, by 
 which during their brief day on earth men are too 
 often misled and betrayed, are withdrawn, they 
 discriminate the true aims of life more clearly and 
 are most profoundly sensible of their worth. Hence 
 Balaam draws the solemnity of death into his 
 thoughts, and, in that revealing darkness, finds that 
 his supreme desire is that he may be able to look 
 back on a well spent, a pure and kindly life, a life 
 ennobled and insured by the protection and love of 
 God. His ideal of righteousness was, as we learn 
 from Micah, to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk 
 humbly with God ; and he feels that, unless his ideal 
 be attained, he cannot die at peace.
 
 94 
 
 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 Second Oracle. 
 
 This is the noblest posture of the soul in which we 
 have yet seen this strange Prophet ; but in the Second 
 Oracle he touches a still higher point, and takes a 
 more penetrating tone. 
 
 Angered and disheartened by the result of his first 
 experiment, Balak nevertheless determined to risk 
 another. With what seems to us a childish simplicity, 
 but long seemed to our fathers the dictate of practical 
 sagacity and piety, he was content to seek for omen 
 after omen till he got one to his mind, and then, 
 forgetting all the portents which foreboded disaster, to 
 commit himself to that which flattered his hopes. 
 Hence he shifts his ground, and conducts Balaam to a 
 still more sacred and conspicuous spot, the Field of 
 the Watchers or of the Seers as it was called, on the 
 top of Pisgah, a peak of the mountain chain of 
 Abarim, a little north of the Attarus range which 
 they had just left. From this point, though it was 
 nearer to the camp of the Israelites, an intervening 
 spur may have shut out from view the greater part of 
 the camp ; for — and here we have another illustration 
 of the simplicity of antique superstitions — Balak seems 
 to have thought that the Prophet may have been 
 daunted by the vast numbers of the host on which
 
 THE ORACLES. 95 
 
 he looked down from the summit of Bamoth-Baal, 
 and would find it easier to curse them if he did "not 
 see them all" (Chap, xxiii. 13). 1 
 
 On Pisgah, then, and in a field set apart for 
 divination, as on Bamoth-Baal, altars were built, 
 sacrifices offered ; and once more the Prophet left the 
 King, to seek for auguries. As he gazed down on 
 the plain beneath him, his eye would pass, beyond 
 the Hebrew host, to the river Jordan, on the broad 
 margin of which they were encamped. And here, 
 possibly, while he heard the sound of the trumpet 
 which called them to worship, and the shout with 
 which they greeted it floated up to his ear, he may 
 have seen buffaloes and lions going up from the 
 swellings of Jordan, and have found in these the 
 omens of which he was in quest, as he certainly found 
 the dominant figures of his Second Oracle ; which 
 runs thus (Chap, xxiii. 18-24) : — 
 
 Arise, Balak, and hear ; 
 Hearken unto me, thou son of Zippor ! 
 God is not a man that He should lie, 
 Nor a son of man that He should repent. 
 Hath He said, and shall He not do it, 
 Or hath He spoken, and shall he not make it good ? 
 Behold, I have been charged to bless ; 
 
 1 In his Heth and Moab (pp. 136, 143), Captain Conder reports 
 that the black tents of Israel, in the white gorge of Abel Shittaim, 
 would be better seen from Bamoth-Baal than from Pisgah, but would 
 only be fully seen from Peor.
 
 96 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 And if He blesseth, I cannot reverse it. 
 
 No iniquity is to be descried in Jacob, 
 
 No distress to be seen in Israel : 
 
 The Lord their God is with them, 
 
 And the trumpet-shout of their King among them. 
 
 God brought them forth from Egypt ; 
 
 They have the bison's strength. 
 
 For there is no augury in Jacob, 
 
 Nor any divination in Israel ; 
 
 But in due time it is told to Jacob, 
 
 And to Israel, what God doeth. 
 
 Behold, they are a people that rise up like a lioness, 
 
 And lift themselves up as a lion ; 
 
 They lie not down till they eat their prey 
 
 And drink the blood of the slain. 
 
 No wonder that Balak was angry as he listened to 
 this lofty strain, and in his anger cried out on the 
 Prophet, " Thou shalt never curse them again, nor 
 bless them again ; " for here was the knell of all his 
 hopes. He is summoned at the outset to rise and 
 brace himself for tidings that will go near to unman 
 him ; and, as Balaam's song goes on, his worst prog- 
 nostics are verified and surpassed. He learns that he 
 is bent on "a hopeless contest against overwhelming 
 numbers," a contest with a race strong as the bison, 
 fierce and unrelenting as the lion when he seeks for 
 prey, and which all the power of Egypt had not been 
 able to withstand. He learns that the God who 
 brought them forth from Egypt is still with them and 
 for them, their Guide, Ruler, and Saviour, and that
 
 THE ORACLES. 97 
 
 He is neither to be tricked nor cajoled into enmity 
 against them. 
 
 But it is with Balaam that we are concerned, not 
 with Balak ; and this Second Oracle shews him to us 
 at his best, in his most piercing insight, in his noblest 
 poise. He repeats in firmer accents (Verse 19) his 
 belief in the unchangeable fidelity of God. He depicts 
 in a more memorable and impressive phrase the 
 righteousness and consequent blessedness of Israel. 
 Nothing, indeed, could well be happier or more signi- 
 ficant than the sentence, No iniquity is to be descried 
 in Jacob, and therefore no distress is to be seen in 
 Israel, with its fine implication that the sins of men 
 are the sole cause of their miseries, and that their 
 miseries are intended to correct their sins. 
 
 But fine as is the spirit of such sentences as these, 
 the noble frankness and veracity of the man when he 
 was at his best come out still more strikingly in the 
 two passages which bear, directly or indirectly, on his 
 vocation as a soothsayer and a prophet. For the 
 Soothsayer affected to shape and change the Divine 
 will as well as to predict it, to vary the currents in 
 which it ran, and even to direct it against this man 
 or that at his pleasure. But even in the presence of 
 the King and the princes who deemed so highly of 
 his power, and valued him above all for this very gift, 
 Balaam plainly disavows the power they ascribed to 
 
 G
 
 9 8 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 him. He frankly confesses, " Behold, I have been 
 charged to bless, and if He blesseth, I cannot reverse 
 it." Nay, more, even in respect of that skill of his 
 craft, or gift of his vocation, which he still claims to 
 possess, the power to divine the future, he humbly 
 acknowledges that this is but a poor gift at the best, 
 very far from being so precious as it was accounted, 
 and not to be compared with the grace vouchsafed to 
 every child of Israel, however lowly his position, how- 
 ever limited his range. The Hebrews are so strong, 
 he says, God loves them and dwells with them, because 
 there is no augury in Jacob, nor any divination in 
 Israel ; but in due time it is told them what God 
 doeih. 1 That must have been a wonderful glimpse 
 into the ways of God with men which led a diviner to 
 decry his own art, and to confess that to wait with 
 childlike confidence on God till in due time He reveals 
 his will is a far greater and more precious gift than 
 to force or surprise the secrets of the future and to 
 pass in spirit through the times to be. God "met" 
 Balaam to purpose when He taught him a truth which 
 men, and even Christian men, have not yet learned, 
 
 that a little trust is better than much foresight, and 
 
 that to walk with God in patient and loving de- 
 pendence is better than to know the things to come. 
 And this insight into the real value of his special 
 1 Comp. Deuteronomy xviii. 9-22.
 
 THE ORACLES. 99 
 
 gift was part of that training, that discipline, by 
 which, as we have seen, God was seeking to save his 
 servant from his besetting sin. For Balaam was proud 
 of the gift which set him apart from and above his 
 fellows, of the eagle eye and unyielding spirit which 
 made the supernatural as easy and familiar to him as 
 the natural, while they were trembling before every 
 breath of change and finding omens of disaster in the 
 simplest occurrences of daily experience. He was apt 
 to boast that he was the man of an open eye, hearing 
 the voice of God and seeing visions from the Almighty, 
 falling into trances in which the shadows of coming 
 events were cast upon his mind, and that he could 
 read all secrets and understand all mysteries. Unlike 
 the great Hebrew prophets, who humbly confessed 
 that the secret of the Lord is with all who fear Him, 
 and so made themselves one with their fellows, he 
 was perverting his high gifts to purposes of self- 
 exaltation and self-aggrandisement. Was it not, then, 
 most salutary that he should be checked and rebuked 
 in this selfish and perilous course ? And how could 
 he be more effectually rebuked than by being shewn 
 a whole race possessed of even higher gifts than his 
 own, possessed above all of the gift of waiting for God 
 to reveal his will to them in due time, and so raised 
 out of all dependence on divinations and enchant- 
 ments ? At this spectacle even his own high and
 
 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 sacred endowment seemed but a vulgar toy, and the 
 aspiration was kindled in his breast for that greater 
 good, that greatest of all gifts, the power to walk in 
 ways of righteousness and to leave the future, with 
 simple trust, in the hands of God. 
 
 It is a lesson which we still need to learn. For 
 which of us would not rejoice had he prophetic 
 raptures and trances of which to boast, if men looked 
 up to him as possessed of a solitary and mysterious 
 power, and resorted to him that he might forecast 
 their fate and interpret to them the mysteries by 
 which they are perplexed ? Which of us does not at 
 times long to pierce the veil and learn how it fares 
 with those whom we have loved and lost a while, or 
 even what will be the conditions of our own life in 
 years to come or when death shall carry us away, 
 instead of waiting until in due time God shall reveal 
 even this unto us ? Let us, then, learn from Balaam, 
 if we have not yet learned it from David or St Paul, 
 that to rest in the Lord and to wait patiently for 
 Him is a higher achievement than to apprehend all 
 mysteries ; and that to do his will in humble trust is 
 a nobler function and power than to foresee what that 
 Will will do.
 
 THE ORACLES. 
 
 Third Oracle. 
 
 Disheartened and exasperated by the strain of 
 Balaam's Second Oracle, the king of Moab, for a time 
 at least, abandoned all hope of inducing him to curse 
 Israel, and sought only to withhold him from blessing 
 them. But the purpose which originally moved him 
 to send for the Prophet lay too near his heart to be 
 easily relinquished. Hence he soon rallies and nerves 
 himself for a final effort. He cannot altogether shake 
 off his dejection, however ; we can still detect some 
 trace of it in the words in which he invites Balaam 
 to a third and last trial of his skill. He no longer 
 maintains the confident and sanguine tone of his 
 former request, " Come with me to another place, and 
 curse me them from thence " ; but, conscious of the 
 risk he runs, he speaks with a certain hesitation and 
 distrust : " Come, I will bring thee to another place ; 
 peradventure it may please God that from thence 
 thou shouldest curse me them." 
 
 Still he will leave no chance untried. He travels 
 northward from Pisgah to another peak of the Abarim 
 range, and conducts Balaam to another sacred place, 
 the very name of which (Peor) shews that it was 
 dedicated to Baalpeor, the most shamelessly sensual 
 but best-beloved of the gods of Moab. Perchauce
 
 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 the conditions may here prove more favourable, or the 
 god more potent. At least one of the conditions is 
 wholly reversed. For whereas heretofore Balak had 
 carefully led the Prophet to points of view from which 
 he could see only a small part of the Hebrew camp, 
 lest he should be cowed by their number, he now 
 conducts him to a point from which he obtains an 
 uninterrupted view of the whole vast host, " encamped 
 according to their tribes" (Chap. xxiv. 2), in the 
 valley or plain below, — hoping, I suppose, that he may 
 take them all in in one comprehensive and withering 
 dance. From the Cliff of Peor, indeed, as we learn 
 from one of the most recent travellers in the East, 1 
 the Prophet would not only look down on the whole 
 camp of Israel, he w6uld also (see the next Oracle) 
 have Moab, Edom, and the City of David in view, and 
 even " the rocky nest of the Kenite never to be wasted 
 till Assyria carried him captive." 
 
 Here, then, in this thrice-sacred mountain grove, 
 new altars are built, new sacrifices offered. But the 
 new scene is so far from yielding new omens that 
 Balaam does not so much as go out to some bare spot 
 to look for them. He had learned the lesson that 
 " God is not a man that He should lie, nor a son of 
 man that He should repent." And hence he no longer 
 " as at other times " goes out " to seek for auguries," 
 1 Captain Conder, in "Heth and Moab," page 143.
 
 THE ORACLES. 103 
 
 but remains beside the king, gazing steadfastly down 
 on the wonderful and suggestive scene beneath him, 
 and allowing that wonderful spectacle to make its 
 own impression on his mind, being inwardly assured 
 that it is the will of God that he should bless the 
 people whose goodly tents in fair array attract his 
 eye, and inwardly resolute that he will not curse 
 them come what may. How, indeed, should he trust 
 in auguries to whom, as we learn from his Second 
 Oracle, it had been revealed that one great secret of 
 the strength and righteousness of the Hebrew host lay 
 in the fact that " there was no augury in Jacob, nor 
 any divination in Israel, but in due time it is told 
 them what God doeth ; " who had learned, therefore, 
 to distrust his own art, and to admit that to wait on 
 God with simple child-like confidence until it is his 
 good pleasure to disclose his will is a far nobler and 
 higher achievement than to anticipate what to- 
 morrow may bring forth ? God had disclosed that 
 will to him, his will to bless the sons of Abraham and 
 not to curse them ; and on this disclosure Balaam is 
 resolved to act, let him lose what he may by his 
 fidelity to the Divine command. 
 
 And verily he had his reward. For now we are 
 told, not simply that " God met him and put a word 
 into his mouth," but that " the Spirit of God came 
 upon him " with overmastering force, flinging him to
 
 104 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 the earth indeed, but lifting him into an ecstasy in 
 
 which he looked with open and illuminated eyes 
 
 through the years to be, and saw what they would 
 
 bring forth. 
 
 Under this mighty inspiration, he " takes up his 
 
 parable," i.e., his thoughts rise into poetic form, and 
 
 his voice breaks into song as he delivers his Third 
 
 Oracle (Chap. xxiv. 3-9). 
 
 Thus sayeth Balaam, the son of Beor, 
 
 And thus sayeth the man whose eyes are open ; 
 
 Thus sayeth he who heareth the words of God, 
 
 He who seeth the vision of the Almighty, 
 
 Prostrate, but with opened eyes : 
 
 How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob, 
 
 Thy tabernacles, O Israel ! 
 
 As valleys that are spread out, 
 
 As gardens by the river's side, 
 
 As aloes which the Lord hath planted, 
 
 As cedars beside the waters ! 
 
 Water shall stream from his buckets, 
 
 And his seed be by many waters ; 
 
 And his king shall be higher than Agag, 
 
 And his kingdom shall be exalted. 
 
 God brought him forth out of Egypt : 
 
 He hath the bison's strength : 
 
 He shall eat up the nations that are round about him, 
 
 And shall suck their bones, 
 
 And break their loins in pieces. 
 
 He croucheth, he lieth down like a lion, 
 
 And like a lioness, who shall rouse him up 1 
 
 Blessed are they that bless thee, 
 
 And cursed are they that curse thee. 
 
 There are some repetitions here which have a
 
 THE ORACLES. 105 
 
 double worth. For when we find in this Third 
 Oracle, uttered in a prophetic rapture and under the 
 pressure of a kind of Divine " possession," thoughts, 
 words, figures which we have already met with in the 
 Second Oracle, for which no such absolute inspiration 
 is claimed, we cannot but feel that, even under the 
 extremest pressure, " the spirit of the prophet is 
 subject to the prophet ; " that even when, to use the 
 phrase of Novalis, he is " a God-intoxicated man," 
 yet in the full torrent, tempest, and whirlwind of the 
 prophetic frenzy, he remains himself and in full 
 possession of himself; his powers exalted, not ob- 
 literated ; enlarged in volume and scope, yet radically 
 unchanged. And when we mark what these repeti- 
 tions are, — how he still asserts that it was God who 
 brought Israel up out of Egypt, still likens their 
 strength to that of the bison or buffalo, still compares 
 them to the lion and lioness crouching over their prey, 
 whom none dares to challenge or provoke, still insists, 
 therefore, that Balak would simply court his own 
 destruction were he to attack them, we cannot fail to 
 be impressed with the fearless honesty with which 
 Balaam delivers the burden of the Lord, let the Kino; 
 cajole or threaten as he will. No message can be 
 more unwelcome to himself, or more fatal to Balak's 
 hopes, than that with which he is charged ; but, 
 nevertheless, he is true to God, and true to man,
 
 106 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 and speaks only the word which was given him to 
 speak. 
 
 This prophetic trance, or rapture, may have been 
 either a new, or more probably a rare, experience for 
 Balaam ; and hence he describes it with much 
 emphasis in Chapter xxiv., Verses 3 and 4, repeating 
 his description, with some slight variations, in Verses 
 15 and 10. From this description we learn that he 
 had sought to acquire knowledge, and above all know- 
 ledge of the will of God and of the principles on 
 which that high Will rules the affairs and destinies of 
 men, not by arts of divination alone, not only by 
 studying omens and auguries and interpreting them 
 according to the approved rules of his art, but also by 
 patient brooding meditation on the ways of God with 
 men. We learn that by chastening himself from 
 vulgar aims and rude animal desires, which were very 
 strong in him, he had sought to attain the pure heart 
 without which no man can see the Lord, to make his 
 inward ear sensitive to " words of God " which others 
 could not hear, to open his inward eye to the spiritual 
 significance of events, so that he might see " visions 
 from the Almighty " which others could not see ; and 
 that, at times, when he had thus prepared himself to 
 receive the heavenly Guest, the Spirit of God fell 
 upon him with a force which, if it flung him to the 
 earth, so strangely energized and elevated his spiritual
 
 THE ORACLES. 107 
 
 faculties and powers that, lying prostrate but with 
 opened eyes, all the horizons of thought grew luminous 
 with a more than mortal light, and shot out far and 
 wide beyond their usual scope, so that he could look 
 quite through the shows of things to the sacred 
 realities behind them, and even penetrate the future 
 and discern the things that must shortly come to 
 pass. It was this noble bent and gift of his spirit 
 which made the man no vulgar soothsayer merely, but 
 a genuine prophet, and which gave him his mastery 
 over the spirits of his fellows. 
 
 It is in this high mood, too, that he now looks 
 down on the Hebrew host, and, as if carried away by 
 the imposing aspect of their vast yet orderly camp, 
 addresses himself directly to them, and exclaims, 
 " How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob, and thy taber- 
 nacles, Israel ! " He instantly recovers himself, 
 however ; for it is not the children of Israel, but the 
 king and princes of Moab to whom he has to speak ; 
 and, for their instruction and warning, he proceeds to 
 depict the blessedness and the irresistible might of the 
 race they would have him curse. 
 
 The dominant figure in which his conception of 
 their happy estate is conveyed is one which would 
 commend itself to every Oriental mind ; for to the 
 Oriental no emblem carries such a sense of wealth and 
 felicitv as an abundance of water. And it is curious
 
 10S THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 to note how Balaam harps on this emblem with an 
 iteration which would have been unnatural in a 
 Western poet, and which, in any case, an English 
 poet would have sought to avoid. He compares 
 them to " gardens by the river s side ; " to " cedars 
 beside the waters ; " to a man bearing two buckets so 
 full and overfull that the " water streams " from them 
 as he moves. And, as if all this were not enough, he 
 declares that the seed, i.e., the posterity, of Israel 
 shall grow up " beside many waters." By this in- 
 sistance on a symbol so grateful and suggestive to an 
 Eastern mind, he doubtless sought to convey, and 
 succeeded in conveying to his hearers, a full conception 
 of the Divine favour for Israel, and made them feel 
 that under the blessing of God his people were to 
 enjoy the richest benedictions, the most lavish wealth 
 and prosperity, which heart of man could conceive. 
 No doubt, too, he took this image, as Dr Kalisch 
 suo-o-ests, from the scene on which he looked down. 
 For the land beyond the Jordan, which Israel was 
 to possess, was a goodly and delightsome land mainly 
 because it was " a land of brooks, a land of fountains 
 and lakes that sprang out of valleys and hills," a land 
 that constantly " drank water from the rain of 
 heaven." But this image, derived from the physical 
 features of Palestine, the land to which Israel was 
 going up, is complicated apparently by reminiscences
 
 THE ORACLES. 109 
 
 of Babylonia, the land from which Balaam had come. 
 " Valleys that widened out " were before his eyes as 
 he stood on Peor ; but when he proceeds to compare 
 Israel to " gardens by the river's side," his thoughts 
 probably revert to the famous artificial gardens on the 
 banks of the Euphrates which were reckoned among 
 the wonders of the ancient world. So, again, when 
 he declares, " His seed shall be by many waters," he 
 may refer to the innumerable brooks and streamlets ot 
 the goodly land ; but when he compares the ideal 
 Israel to a man bearing streaming buckets, he 
 obviously alluded to a mode of irrigation which 
 obtained in his Mesopotamian home, where he must 
 often have seen the weary peasants staggering up 
 from the river with the yoke of buckets which they 
 were about to pour on the thirsty fields. 
 
 Under these rural and pacific figures, then, the 
 Prophet depicts the coming wealth and felicity of the 
 people whom the Lord had blessed. But he is careful 
 to point out x that the wealth and happiness of Israel 
 are not to be "purchased by an inglorious obscurity." 
 They are to be " coupled with the highest political 
 power and splendour." They are to be " the fruit of 
 famous wars and brilliant victories." The nation which 
 has the strength of the buffalo is to use it like a 
 buffalo — to " eat up the nations that are round about 
 1 Dr Kalisch in loco.
 
 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 it, to suck their bones and break their loins in pieces." 
 Fierce and valiant as the lion, they are to hunt down 
 their prey, and to drink the blood of the slain, till 
 none shall dare to rouse them up. By their valour 
 and their wealth they are to build up a kingdom 
 exalted above the other kingdoms of the earth, and — 
 adds the Prophet in a singular phrase which demands 
 a word of explanation — to secure a king "higher than 
 Agag." 
 
 As we read the Oracle, this name, " Agag," checks 
 one curiously. It seems wholly out of place, and 
 meaningless, and only breaks up the flow and rush of 
 the prophetic strain. Nevertheless we find it quite in 
 place, and full of meaning, so soon as we remember 
 that Agag was the dynastic name of the kings of 
 Amalek, just as Pharaoh was the name of an Egyptian 
 dynasty, and corresponds to such English dynastic 
 names as Plantagenet, Tudor, Stuart, Guelph. For 
 Amalek was the fighting and victorious clan of the 
 Desert. It had recently conquered most of the 
 adjacent clans and kingdoms. It was the first to meet 
 and make war against the Israelites as they approached 
 the end of their long pilgrimage. When Moses 
 defeated Amalek, all the clans of Syria — Edomites, 
 Moabites, Midianites, Canaanites — were amazed, and 
 read their own doom in that of this warlike race. So 
 that when Balaam predicts for Israel a king " higher
 
 THE ORACLES. 
 
 than Agag," what he would be understood to mean was 
 that this happy and wealthy race is to take a higher 
 position than even that which Amalek had held, and 
 to exercise a wider sovereignty. None will be able 
 to stand before them. One by one they will all be 
 subdued, and compelled to submit to the king of 
 Israel as their suzerain or overlord. 
 
 There may be, and probably is, another allusion in 
 this dynastic name. For the word Agag, like the 
 English name Hugh, means " high." And it would 
 be quite in accordance with the manner and spirit of 
 Hebrew poetry to introduce even into its loftiest 
 strains a pun upon this name, and to play with the 
 meaning of the word in a double sense. In all 
 probability, therefore, besides alluding to the historic 
 position of Amalek, Balaam intended an allusion to the 
 literal significance of the word " Agag," and meant to 
 convey that the king of Israel would be superior even 
 to the king whose hereditary name was High — 
 "higher than High ;" for it is one of the characteristic 
 traits of Hebrew poetry to relieve its most solemn 
 utterances with a playful touch of this kind, and to 
 bring in a pun which, however vulgar and poor it may 
 sound to us, seemed vastly witty and suggestive to the 
 simplicity of the ancient Eastern world. 
 
 In closing his Oracle the Prophet once more 
 addresses himself directly to the Hebrew host :
 
 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 " Blessed are they that bless thee, and cursed are they 
 that curse thee." But though he speaks as to Israel, 
 his words were doubtless meant for Balak and his 
 princes, — meant to warn them against seeking some 
 more treacherous and accommodating diviner than 
 himself, who, for a sufficient reward, would utter the 
 curse against Israel which he refused to utter. Such 
 a curse would only " come home to roost." If Balak 
 were wise, he would relinquish his vain attempt 
 against the people whom the Lord had blessed, and, 
 by allying himself with them, win some share in their 
 prosperity and peace. 
 
 The whole of the Third Oracle is now before us ; 
 and if we look back and consider it as a whole, there 
 is one question which can hardly fail to occur to us. 
 Balaam was, as we have seen, a genuine prophet, and 
 faithfully delivered the message which God put into 
 his mouth. And yet, after all, were his predictions 
 fulfilled, did his words come true ? When did the 
 Hebrew nation enjoy that lavish prosperity and 
 abundance, or achieve the vast military success which 
 he foretold for them ? Not certainly for some four or 
 five hundred years r after Balaam had gone to his 
 own place. Under the Judges Israel was divided, 
 plundered, enslaved ; and though, in the closing years 
 of David's reign and the opening years of the reign of
 
 THE ORACLES. 113 
 
 Solomon, it touched the top of happy prosperous hours, 
 and achieved a military predominance over all the 
 adjacent kingdoms, yet this period of marvellous 
 wealth and power formed but a brief episode in its 
 history, an episode quite out of tune with the general 
 strain of its annals, and was succeeded by ages of 
 discord, strife, poverty, captivity, and subjection. 
 Take their history as a whole, and it is impossible to 
 affirm that Balaam's suggestive emblems portray and 
 forecast it, impossible to assert that their buckets 
 habitually streamed with the fair sweet waters of 
 abundance, or that they shewed either a strength like 
 that of the buffalo, eating up the nations round about 
 them, or the fierce victorious courage of the lion and 
 the lioness when they hunt or when they crouch over 
 and defend their prey. Yet Balaam was inspired to 
 use these emblems ; it was the Spirit of God that 
 came upon him and moved him to utter predictions 
 which no candid reader of the Hebrew story can 
 confidently affirm to have been fulfilled in the 
 exact literal sense in which they were uttered and 
 understood. 
 
 What shall we say to these things, then ? Shall 
 we shuffle and equivocate, and say that Balaam's 
 words had a sufficient fulfilment in the brief period of 
 national glory under David and Solomon, when it is 
 plain that the Prophet intended them to apply to and 
 
 H
 
 1 14 THE CHRONICLE OF BALLAM. 
 
 characterize the whole career of Israel, or that, if he 
 had any special period in his eye, it must have been 
 the immediate future ? Or must we sorrowfully 
 admit that God was not as good as his word, and 
 only kept his promise to the ear, to break it to the 
 hope ? 
 
 Before we impale ourselves on either horn of that 
 dismal dilemma, let us at least ask whether it is not 
 our theory of Inspiration, our notion of what really 
 made a man a prophet, which is at fault. In my 
 judgment it is gravely at fault if it has taught us to 
 insist on infallibility as an invariable adjunct of 
 inspiration, or to find the chief function of the prophet 
 in his ability to predict the future, to trace and 
 interpret the shadows which coming events cast before 
 them. That which really constitutes a man a prophet 
 is not so much foresight as insight — insight into 
 the ways of God with men. Dr Robertson Smith 
 goes so far as to say * that " the possession of a single 
 true thought about Jehovah, not derived from current 
 religious teaching, but springing up in the soul as a 
 word from Jehovah Himself, is enough to constitute a 
 prophet, and lay on him the duty of speaking to 
 Israel what he has learned from Israel's God." And 
 all who have studied the subject admit, I believe, so 
 much as this, — that the chief function of the prophet 
 1 "The Prophets of Israel," p. 1S2.
 
 THE ORACLES. u 5 
 
 is to grasp the great moral principles on which God 
 governs the world, and so to master them as to be 
 able to apply them to the special conditions of men 
 and of races of men. No doubt a profound insight 
 into these principles involves some degree of foresight, 
 and enables a man to predict what the issue of a 
 certain course of action must be, — just as some of us, 
 simply because we believe in the moral government of 
 the world, foretold, even when the third Napoleon 
 seemed to be the greatest political force in Europe, 
 that his empire must speedily crumble into dust ; just 
 as we now predict that the vast and despotic military 
 and bureaucratic systems which are pressing the very 
 life out of many of the nations of the Continent must 
 soon be broken up, or that Ireland will never be well 
 governed until Irishmen have learned to govern them- 
 selves. But this foresight springs from insight, and 
 rests upon it. And many a prophet has laid a firm 
 grasp on the moral principles of the Divine Govern- 
 ment, and has been able to say without doubt or 
 hesitation that, if men pursue a certain course, they 
 must infallibly reach a certain end, who yet has not 
 been able to read with perfect accuracy what the 
 moral conditions of men were, or to foresee the moral 
 changes through which they would pass. Fallible and 
 mistaken in these inferior points a man may be, and 
 yet remain a most true prophet if only he has
 
 n6 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 mastered the moral principles by which the world is 
 ruled, and can see that obedience to them must lead 
 to prosperity and peace, while disobedience inevitably 
 entails adversity and strife. 
 
 There is an illustration of this point in the Bible 
 which seems to have been " written large " in order 
 that we might not fail to mark the limits of the 
 prophetic power. Jonah's famous prediction, " Yet 
 forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown : " was 
 that fulfilled or was it not fulfilled ? The message 
 undoubtedly came from God ; and God took some 
 pains, it has been commonly thought, to ensure its 
 faithful delivery. Jonah disliked both his mission, 
 and the upshot of his mission ; but he was compelled 
 to go upon it. Did God, then, keep the word He 
 spoke by the reluctant lips of Jonah, or did He not 
 keep it 1 Those who think, as Jonah seems to have 
 thought, that prediction is the chief work of a prophet, 
 and that his crowning honour is to have his pre- 
 diction verified in every jot and tittle, must of course 
 admit that, on this occasion at least, God did shew 
 himself to be like a man who lies or a son of man 
 who repents. But for us, who believe that the main 
 function of the prophet is to declare the moral 
 principles which determine the fate of men and 
 nations, Jonah's insight into these principles was far 
 more gloriously vindicated, and the word of God was
 
 THE ORACLES. 117 
 
 far more profoundly fulfilled, in the salvation of 
 Nineveh than it would have been in its destruction. 
 What Jonah saw was that it is righteousness — not 
 wealth, not culture even, nor military organization — 
 which redeems and exalts a nation, while wickedness 
 dooms and destroys it. And when he had taught 
 that great moral principle to a vast and populous city, 
 so taught it that all the inhabitants of that city 
 " turned every one from his evil way," repenting of 
 and renouncing the wickedness which was destroying 
 him, was not his principle verified, his mission 
 vindicated, to the uttermost ? was not God the more 
 abundantly glorified ? did not the prophet, if only he 
 could have seen it, win a veritable and transcendent 
 victory ? 
 
 In like manner Balaam had grasped the principle 
 that a righteous life infallibly conducts men to the 
 true prosperity and peace. It is this principle, this 
 conviction, which underlies the glowing imagery of his 
 Oracles and gives them force. Was it not a true 
 principle, a principle on which we see God acting 
 along the whole course of human history ? In grasp- 
 ing and fearlessly announcing this principle, which 
 the superficial current of events so often seems to con- 
 tradict, so often conceals therefore from the carnal and 
 inobservant eye, he proved himself to be a genuine 
 prophet, a man really taught and inspired of God.
 
 n8 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 In applying this principle, however, he may, since 
 inspiration does not necessarily carry infallibility with 
 it, have fallen into errors of detail. It may have 
 been — I think it was — the ideal, not the actual, Israel 
 which he saw in his visions from the Almighty, for it 
 was on this ideal Israel that most of the prophets 
 fixed their eyes. And hence he describes them as 
 a people dwelling apart from other nations in an 
 unapproachable, an unassailable, sanctity, obeying 
 purer laws, pursuing higher aims, and even affirms 
 that there is no distress in Israel because no iniquity 
 is to be descried in Jacob. In so far as the actual 
 Israel rose toward this fair and blameless ideal, they 
 did enjoy the very blessings of abundance, victory, 
 peace, which Balaam so lavishly promised them, as 
 every page of their subsequent history testifies ; while 
 in so far as they fell away from this ideal, blended 
 with the nations from whom they ought to have dwelt 
 apart, fell back on the idolatries of their Syrian 
 fathers or gave place to the current iniquities of their 
 age and of neighbouring races, they lost the bless- 
 ings promised to righteousness, and reaped the distress 
 and impotence of which wickedness is the natural 
 root. 
 
 If, then, it be the main function of the prophet to 
 grasp and apply great moral principles, we may say 
 with perfect honesty and candour that Balaam's
 
 THE ORACLES. 119 
 
 oracles were more truly and profoundly verified than 
 if every letter of his forecasts had come true. The 
 chronicles of Israel are but an expanded commentary 
 on the ethical principles which he laid clown, — as, 
 indeed, are the chronicles of every nation if only we 
 had wit and grace to read them aright, or even the 
 history of every individual man. For we must not 
 fail to observe that in this canon of interpretation, 
 which is a key to all the prophecies of Holy Writ, we 
 have also the key to the mysteries of our individual 
 experience and fate. Whether in the story of a man 
 or of a race, Righteousness is the true redeeming and 
 uplifting power ; Unrighteousness the secret of all 
 miseries, adversities, and distresses. And it is only 
 as we grasp and obey the righteous laws on which the 
 universe is ruled, and by which therefore our indi- 
 vidual lot is shaped, that we can become either true 
 prophets or true men, and rejoice in the abundance of 
 peace. 
 
 Fourth Oracle. 
 
 Balaam's Fourth Oracle is a series of prophetic 
 utterances rather than the development of a single 
 theme such as we have heard from him heretofore. 
 It deals successively with the fate of Israel, Moab, 
 Edom, Amalek, the Kenites, the Assyrians, and
 
 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 perhaps even with that of the Macedonians. It is 
 divided into sections by the phrase, " And he took up 
 his parable and said ; " and is united only by the fact 
 that the career and prospects of the other races of 
 which it treats are viewed purely in their relation to 
 the history and destiny of the chosen people. 
 
 Naturally, therefore, and of necessity, by virtue of 
 the motive which prompted it and the intention with 
 which it is fraught, the predictive element is far more 
 dominant and conspicuous in this Fourth Oracle x than 
 in any of those which we have already considered, 
 although, as we have seen, the predictive is by no 
 means the highest element in prophecy. Here we 
 have clearly defined forecasts, forecasts which project 
 their long shadows through century after century, 
 forecasts which, if not justified by the event, must 
 recoil with discredit on the head of the prophet who 
 utters them. The fate of no less than six well-known 
 Oriental races is involved in them, and of four of 
 these races there was, so far as we can see, not the 
 slightest necessity that Balaam should speak. He 
 needlessly multiplies his difficulties, therefore, if he 
 were not a true prophet, and himself places in our 
 
 1 It will not be necessary, therefore, from our point of view, to 
 discuss this Oracle at any length, though there is much in it to 
 engage the attention of the commentator and historian, since, being 
 mainly predictive, it throws comparatively little light on the 
 character of the man .
 
 THE ORACLES. 
 
 hands means for his detection and disgrace, with a 
 confidence which we cannot but admire, or a reckless- 
 ness which proves him to have been beyond the reach 
 of shame. 
 
 The whole Oracle, indeed, is volunteered, and seems 
 even to have been thrust on unwilling ears. The 
 Prophet's mission was already discharged. Again and 
 again he had faithfully warned the king of Moab that 
 he had better charge the buffalo, whom even trained 
 and daring hunters of wild beasts avoid when they 
 may, or rouse the lion when he couches over his prey, 
 than assail the people whom the Lord had blessed. 
 The warning had moved Balak to an impotent anger 
 which, since he feared to vent it in violence, lest 
 Balaam might return a curse for a blow — and he knew 
 that whom Balaam cursed was cursed — found such 
 poor relief and expression as could be obtained by 
 smiting his hands together, and in breathing out rude 
 sarcasms on the scrupulous piety with which the Pro- 
 phet served a Lord who held him back from honour 
 and reward. 1 Unmoved alike by the irony and the 
 anger of the King, or moved only to the pity and awe 
 of one who sees a headstrong man rushing on his fate, 
 the Prophet accepts his dismissal, and replies only 
 that, before he departs he will " advertise," or 
 " advise," Balak " what this people shall do to thy 
 
 1 Chapter xxiv. verses 10, 11.
 
 122 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 people in later days " : i.e., he will tell Balak 
 advisedly, or with a view to advice, what the ultimate 
 relation of Israel to Moab will be, that so, with full 
 knowledge of the final issue, the King may deter- 
 mine what shall be the present attitude of Moab to 
 Israel. 
 
 With this brief exordium, he breaks into an inspired 
 song and delivers his Oracle ; of which the first section 
 runs as follows (Chap. xxiv. verses 15-19) : — 
 
 Thus sayeth Balaam, the son of Beor, 
 
 And thus saith the man whose eyes are open ; 
 
 Thus sayeth he who heareth the words of God, 
 
 And knoweth the knowledge of the Most High ; 
 
 He who seeth the vision of the Almighty, 
 
 Prostrate, but with opened eyes : 
 
 I see him, though he be not now ; 
 
 I behold him, though he be not nigh : 
 
 There cometh a star out of Jacob, 
 
 And out of Israel there riseth a sceptre, 
 
 A .id smiteth in pieces both flanks of Moab, 
 
 And shattereth all the sons of tumult : 
 
 And Edom is his possession, 
 
 And Seir, his enemies, 1 is his possession, 
 
 And Israel shall do valiantly ; 
 
 Jacob shall have dominion over them, 
 
 And shall destroy them that escape out of their cities. 
 
 In his Third Oracle Balaam had foretold that the 
 
 king of Israel should be " higher than Agag," i.e., 
 
 " higher than High," higher than the most eminent 
 
 1 His enemies; i.e., both Edom and Seir=the Edomites who dwell 
 in Seir.
 
 THE ORACLES. 123 
 
 prince of his time. And now, in the abrupt 
 mysterious tones of one who strains his eyes to behold 
 a bright but distant vision, he declares that this high 
 victorious King, shining with the pure but remote 
 splendour of a star, and wielding a sceptre so potent 
 and imperial that none of " the sons of tumult," none 
 of those who delight in war, will be able to withstand 
 it, is not to be looked for in the immediate future, 
 that his advent is still far off; but that, though his 
 coming be not " nigh," he will come, and come to 
 smite Moab in pieces on both flanks, to reduce to 
 subjection even those inveterate foes to Israel — the 
 Edomites, and to take possession of Mount Seir, their 
 home and stronghold among the rocks. 
 
 Now this prediction of the Sceptre and the Star 
 has been read in a Messianic sense both by Jewish 
 and Christian commentators ; the Jews of our Lord's 
 time even drew from it a title for their Messiah, and 
 called Him Bar-Cochab, or " the Son of the Star." 
 And this Messianic reference is of unquestionable 
 authority if nothing more is meant by it than that 
 all the symbols and predictions of Hebrew royalty 
 find their last and highest fulfilment in the Christ ; 
 and that it was very natural, therefore, that the piety 
 of after ages should place the star on his brow and 
 the sceptre in his hand. But if it be meant that 
 Balaam saw the figure and day of Jesus Christ afar
 
 124 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 off, predicted bis personal advent, and consciously 
 hailed Him as the Star and Sceptre of Israel, we 
 must demur. To import these specific meanings into 
 general terms, to isolate certain images and to inter- 
 pret them in a sense alien and opposed to the main 
 scope of the prophecy in which they are found, is to 
 treat the most sacred of books with less respect than 
 we accord to almost any other writing; it is to degrade 
 the Bible into a series of arbitrary signs and perplex- 
 ing conundrums which every man may read in a 
 different sense, rather than to accept it as a revelation 
 of Divine truth to the reason and the conscience of 
 man. 
 
 The Star and the Sceptre are natural and common 
 emblems of imperial splendour and power. They are 
 used in this sense in every considerable literature in 
 the world. And we must take them in this sense 
 here. We pass into the region of mere speculation 
 and conjecture if we assume Balaam to have meant 
 anything more than that, in the dim and undetermined 
 future, a Ruler was to arise in Israel — or, still more 
 probably, a line of rulers, a dynasty — under whom 
 the Hebrew race would conquer its most inveterate 
 foes, rise to an uncontested supremacy, and exercise 
 an unchallenged dominion over them. The Oracle 
 itself rebukes us if we attempt to impose a more 
 precise, or a more definitely, Messianic significance
 
 THE ORACLES. 125 
 
 upon it. For when did Jesus of Nazareth smite 
 Moab on both flanks, assume Mount Seir as his 
 possession, and destroy those who escaped out of their 
 cities ? On the other hand, taken in its natural 
 sense, Balaam's prediction was very sufficiently ful- 
 filled when David carried his victorious arms through 
 Moab and Edom, shattering these and other sons of 
 tumult with what seems to us a ferocious severity, and 
 when, under Solomon his son, Jacob had full and 
 unbroken dominion over them. 1 
 
 But Balaam is not content to foretell the defeat of 
 Edom and Moab. He looks round on the whole circle 
 of Israel's foes, and singles out the first and fiercest of 
 them for his next denunciation. Taking up his 
 parable, he says (Chap. xxiv. verse 20) : 
 
 Arnalek is the first of the nations, 
 But his end shall be destruction. 
 
 The Amalekites were, we must remember, the great 
 military clan of the Desert, and had recently subdued 
 most of the adjacent clans by force of arms. They 
 stood " first " among them all. But, from Balaam's 
 point of view, their pre-eminence was a bad pre- 
 eminence. For they had also been " first " in their 
 hostility to Israel. They had attacked the Israelites 
 almost as soon as they had broken out from the 
 
 1 2 Samuel viii. 2 ; eomp. 2 Chronicles xxv. 11, 12.
 
 126 THE CHRONICLE OE BALAAM. 
 
 Egyptian house of bondage, at the very commencement 
 of their long pilgrimage through the wilderness, 1 and 
 had only been discomfited and repelled after a long 
 and hazardous conflict. They had repeated the attack 
 forty years afterward, and had driven back the Children 
 of Israel when they first attempted to enter the 
 Promised Land. 2 For this unprovoked and persistent 
 hostility Moses had solemnly devoted them to destruc- 
 tion ; nay Jehovah Himself had said unto Moses, " I 
 will utterly put out the remembrance of Amalek from 
 under heaven." Balaam had probably heard of the 
 doom pronounced upon them, and now repeats and 
 confirms it. How seriously this doom was understood 
 in Israel, what grave importance was attached to its 
 execution, we may infer from the fact that the 
 prophet Samuel, nearly five hundred years after this 
 doom was pronounced, formally commissioned Saul to 
 destroy the Amalekites; and when Saul returned from 
 the slaughter declaring that he had " utterly destroyed 
 all the people with the edge of the sword," reserving 
 only the king, the Agag of his day, for his personal 
 captive, the Prophet himself, 3 as one engaged in a 
 religious service, "hewed Agag in pieces before the 
 Lord." 
 
 But Israel had friends as well as foes, and among 
 
 1 Exodus xvii. 8-16. 2 Numbers xiv. 44-45. 
 
 3 1 Samuel xv. 32, 33.
 
 THE ORACLES. 127 
 
 these friends there were none who had served them 
 more faithfully and efficiently than the Kenites, who 
 seem to have derived their name either from Kain, 
 their tribe-father, or from Kain, the city in which 
 they dwelt. Led by Jethro, one of their prince- priests 
 and the father-in-law of Moses, they had cast in their 
 lot with the chosen people, guided them through the 
 desert, in which — -so the sacred historian gratefully 
 acknowledges — they were as " eyes " to them, and had 
 received from Moses the assurance, " What goodness 
 the Lord shall do unto us, the same will we do unto 
 you." As they had elected to share the lot of Israel, 
 they should share it to the end : this is the substance 
 of the next section of Balaam's Oracle, which runs 
 thus : when he looked on the Kenites, he said (Chap. 
 xxiv. verses 21, 22), 
 
 Strong is thy dwelling-place, 
 
 And thy nest fixed in the crags ; 
 
 For surely Kain shall not be destroyed 
 
 Until Asshur shall carry thee away captive. 
 
 The prediction is susceptible of more than one inter- 
 pretation ; but the most probable seems to be that 
 which finds in it an allusion to the former home of 
 the Kenites, and makes it declare that as they had 
 left their inaccessible haunt amid the crags of Horeb, 
 to attach themselves to the fortunes of Israel when 
 Israel itself was wandering and homeless and poor,
 
 128 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 they should be installed in a still more enduring and 
 impregnable home now that they had placed them- 
 selves under the shield of Jehovah. In the Hebrew 
 there is a pun on the word hen, or " nest," and the 
 word from which the .Kenites derived their name, 
 which gives a special prominence to the thought that 
 the warm safe nest of this friendly race should remain 
 unrifled and undisturbed until, so to carry out the 
 figure, the Hebrew tree amid whose branches it was 
 placed should itself be cut down and carried away to 
 a strange land. In any case, on any reading, the 
 main drift of the forecast is that the fate of the 
 Kenites was bound up with that of the Israelites, and 
 that they should continue to share in the good fortune 
 of the men to whom they had committed themselves, 
 until, at last, even these should be conquered and 
 enslaved by the fierce and hasty Assyrians. And in 
 this its main drift the forecast was fulfilled. The 
 Kenites did continue in the Holy Congregation to the 
 end, and "never wanted a man to stand before the 
 Lord " until the Congregation itself was broken up 
 and dispersed. 1 
 
 With the mention of that tremendous name 
 Asshur, which in after centuries came to import so 
 much to the whole Eastern world, a still vaster and 
 
 1 Jeremiah xxxv. 19.
 
 THE ORACLES. 
 
 1 29 
 
 more dreadful scene breaks in upon the Prophet's 
 soul, musing on things to come ; a scene in which 
 enormous empires rise and fall ; a scene of which he 
 catches only brief glimpses indeed, and gives us only 
 broken and indefinite outlines, but by which he 
 himself is so profoundly moved and shaken that he 
 opens the final section of his Oracle with a groan. 
 " Alas," he cries (Chap. xxiv. verses 23, 24) — 
 
 Alas ! who shall live when God doeth this % 
 
 But ships shall come from the coast of Chittim, 
 
 And shall humble Asshur and humble Eber: — 
 
 And he also shall be destroyed. 
 
 The Prophet is thus profoundly torn and moved, 
 partly, perhaps, because he himself came from the 
 mountains and plains of Aram, in which the great 
 empires of Nineveh and Babylon were to take their 
 rise and find their seat ; but mainly because, as he 
 looks forward through the years, he sees that the star 
 of Jacob is to set and the sceptre of Israel is to be 
 broken ; that the righteous nation is to be over- 
 whelmed by the powers of unrighteousness. Nay, as 
 he gazes on the vision which passes before his eyes, 
 he beholds storm after storm of ruin and disaster 
 breaking on the world. Even the proud and mighty 
 Assyrian — and Eber is here but another name for 
 Asshur — is to be humbled and overthrown by forces 
 borne on ships that come from, or come by, Chittim, 
 
 I
 
 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 i.e., the isle of Cyprus (Chittim = Citium, the capital 
 of Cyprus), by which island all ships passing from the 
 West to the East must needs pass : a prediction very 
 sufficiently fulfilled when the great empires of the 
 East were overrun by the Macedonian Greeks under 
 Philip and Alexander the Great. 
 
 Nor is even this all : but the very Power which 
 humbles Assyria and the East is itself doomed to a 
 similar destruction ; for this, as the Hebrew syntax 
 proves, is the force of the final line in the Oracle, 
 " And lie also shall be destroyed." 
 
 First he sees the Hebrews, with the faithful 
 Kenites, carried away captive into Assyria ; then he 
 sees the mighty Assyrian empire itself humbled and 
 brought low by a still mightier Power, of which all 
 that he can discern is that its forces approach in ships 
 from the West ; and then even this great Power falls 
 to pieces under a pressure too distant and vague for 
 him to define. Is it any wonder that as he gazed on 
 a spectacle so vast and dark his heart quaked within 
 him, and the groan was forced from his lips, " Woe, 
 woe ! who shall live when God doeth this ? " For it 
 was not the mere terror of the spectacle which shook 
 him, but the disorder, the lawlessness, the unreason- 
 ableness of it. There was no principle in it. He 
 could get no clue to it. It was alien to his experi- 
 ence, a shock to his most cherished beliefs. For all
 
 THE ORACLES. 131 
 
 his beliefs were built up on the conviction that the 
 world was governed by God, and that the Judge of all 
 the earth must not only do right, but get right done. 
 Yet how could it be right that the one people in 
 whom he had descried no iniquity, and whose happy 
 fortune he had just foretold, should be conquered and 
 enthralled by an empire founded on injustice and 
 mere brute force ? What hope was there for mankind 
 if the vista of the future were closed by a scene of 
 universal ruin, nation rising after nation only to be 
 beaten down by wave after wave of destruction ? Was 
 life worth living, was righteousness worth pursuing, if 
 this were to be the end of all ? 
 
 Thus, at least, we might have moralized had we 
 stood in Balaam's place, and gazed into the gloomy 
 horizon which bounded his view. And thus we are 
 disposed to interpret his groan, " Who shall live 
 when God doeth this ? " But whether he meant all 
 this, and whether this hopeless and despairing outlook 
 in any measure detracted from his faith in the ultimate 
 victory of righteousness and truth, and so contributed 
 to his subsequent disloyalty to God, it is impossible 
 for us to say. All we are told is that when the 
 " vision from the Almighty " had faded from his soul, 
 and his oracular lips had ceased to utter the " words 
 he heard from God," and to convey " knowledge from 
 the Most High," Balaam rose, up, and went away,
 
 132 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 and turned toward his 'place; and Balak also went 
 his way. The phrase, however, does not imply — as 
 many have taken it to imply, especially those who 
 take pleasure in making Scripture seem to contradict 
 itself — that the Prophet returned to his home at 
 Pethor, among the mountains of Aram. It is a 
 common idiom in the Hebrew, and means no more 
 than that both he and Balak went each where he was 
 now free to go, where he was disposed to go. At the 
 same time, from Balaam's words in Verse 14," And 
 now, behold, / go unto my people," it does seem 
 probable that he left the presence of the king of Moab 
 fully intending to bend his face homeward. If that 
 were his intention, all that needs to be said is that, 
 like many other men before his time and since, he 
 changed his intention, and did not change it for the 
 better. For from other sources we learn that, on 
 second thoughts, he joined the Midianites, Balak's 
 allies, with whom from the first he seems to have been 
 more at home than with the Moabites ; and that he 
 afterwards suggested to them the vile expedient by 
 which the men of Israel were seduced from their 
 allegiance to Jehovah, and so brought down on them 
 the curse which he had refused to pronounce. Nay, 
 from the course of his subsequent history, it would 
 seem probable that he became the recognised votes 
 and counsellor of the Midianite clan, and cast in his lot
 
 THE ORACLES. 133 
 
 with them ; as it is quite certain — unless we are to 
 reject Scriptures quite as authentic as this Chronicle 
 can be — that he remained with them till, in the war 
 of vengeance against Midian which Moses commanded, 
 this great but mean man, this true yet false prophet, 
 was taken captive and judicially slain. 
 
 And so our Chronicle comes to a close. By its aid 
 we have followed Balaam from his distant home in 
 Mesopotamia, through the adventures of his long 
 journey ; we have stood with him on the mountains of 
 Moab, as he watched " till knowledge came upon his 
 soul like flame," and have seen his soul illuminated, 
 not by " magic fires at random caught/' but by " true 
 prophetic light." We have stood by him as " with 
 tranc'd yet open gaze, fixed on the desert haze," like 
 " one who deep in heaven some airy pageant sees," he 
 has told us how, " in outline dim and vast," " the 
 giant forms of empires on their way to ruin " cast 
 their awful shadows on his heart. And now we must 
 close the Chronicle, and turn to the supplementary 
 Scriptures which carry on the tale or indicate the 
 character of his life, in the hope that they may throw 
 some new light on the facts we have considered. 
 
 But already we have seen enough of him to know 
 that, though a great man, Balaam was by no means 
 one of the greater prophets. The very visions and
 
 134 THE CHRONICLE OF BALAAM. 
 
 trances, in virtue of which we often ascribe greatness 
 to him, are themselves the proof that he does not take 
 the highest rank in the goodly fellowship. We are 
 apt to lay too much stress on these strange and 
 exceptional experiences, these ecstasies in which the 
 spirit that is in man is carried out of and above itself, 
 these visions in which the secrets of the future pass 
 before his eye in visible form, and to attach too great 
 an importance to them ; as, indeed, we are apt to 
 think too much of all rare aud splendid mental 
 endowments, and too little of the yet nobler moral 
 gifts which are open to every son of man. And, 
 therefore, we need to remember that as in the New 
 Testament St Paul lays down the canon, that self- 
 consciousness and self-control are never lost by the 
 true prophet, so also the great prophets of the Old 
 Testament never paraded their ecstasies before their 
 fellows, never appealed to visions and trances as 
 authenticating their inspiration or augmenting their 
 authority. 1 By their self-possession, by the sobriety 
 of their bearing, no less than by the truth and power 
 of their words, they are clearly marked off from the 
 whole tribe of heathen soothsayers and diviners, and 
 of the ministrants at Oracular shrines, who were held 
 to be under the influence of the god in proportion as 
 they lost composure and self-control. In the very 
 
 1 Cf. " The Prophets of Israel," By W. Robertson Smith.
 
 THE ORACLES. 
 
 '35 
 
 Book of Numbers, 1 too, Jehovah Himself is represented 
 
 as thus discriminating between the higher and inferior 
 
 orders even of prophets who are genuinely inspired : 
 
 " If there be a prophet among you " (i.e., among the 
 
 Children of Israel, who then possessed, as we know, 
 
 no prophet of any great mark save Moses), " I, the 
 
 Lord, do make myself known unto him in a vision, 
 
 and do speak unto him in a dream. My servant 
 
 Moses is not so, who is faithful in all My house. 
 
 With him I speak mouth to mouth, even visibly, and 
 
 not in dark speeches, and the similitude of the Lord 
 
 doth he behold." Faithful service in God's house, 
 
 then, and fellowship of spirit and aim with Him, are 
 
 far higher gifts than prophetic dreams and trances, 
 
 ecstasies and visions ; and these are open to us all : 
 
 they are gifts which all who ask may have, which all 
 
 who seek may find. For what is there, save our own 
 
 unwillingness, to hinder any one of us from seeing and 
 
 serving God in all we do ? what is there, save our own 
 
 worldliness and selfishness, to prevent any one of us 
 
 from a constant and growing communion with Him, 
 
 and an ever-augmenting knowledge of his will ? For 
 
 all lowly, but faithful and loving, souls there is 
 
 immense comfort in St Paul's words : " Though I 
 
 have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries 
 
 and all knowledge, . . . but have not charity, 1 am 
 
 nothing." 
 
 1 Numbers xii. 0-8.
 
 PAET II. 
 THE SUPPLEMENTARY SCRIPTURES. 
 
 We have now studied the Chronicle from end to end ; 
 and if it has not thrown so much new light on the 
 character of Balaam as we had hoped to gain from it, 
 it must at least have served to sharpen and define our 
 conceptions of the man, and so to set the problem of 
 his character more fairly before us. And as we now 
 turn to the Scriptures concerning him which lie 
 outside this Chronicle, I do not see how we can 
 better prepare ourselves for studying them than by 
 summing up, in a few brief sentences, the impression 
 Avhich the Chronicle itself has left upon us. 
 
 Upon the whole, then, I think it has left a very 
 favourable impression. In its earlier sections, indeed, 
 we found some faint hints that Balaam wanted, that 
 at least he was quite willing, to curse the people whom 
 lie was compelled to bless ; and that if he loved 
 righteousness, he also loved the wages of unrighteous- 
 ness : while his loud and frequent vaunts of loyalty to 
 the Divine Will suggested that an obedience which 
 protested so much might not be altogether beyond 
 suspicion. In his conferences with the ambassadors
 
 i 3 8 BALAAM. 
 
 of Balak, he seemed to be letting " I dare not " wait 
 upon " I would " ; while in his journey to Moab, and 
 above all in his adventure with the Angel and the Ass, 
 we saw only too much reason to fear that " I would " 
 was beginning to get the better of "I dare not," and 
 that he was plotting how to gratify Balak without 
 openly rebelling against Jehovah. But from this 
 point onwards, from the moment in which the dumb 
 ass rebuked the madness of the Prophet, we found 
 nothing to allege against him, but much to approve 
 and admire. In all his intercourse with Balak he 
 shewed " an incorrigible and losing honesty," a 
 veracity, a fidelity to the words which the Lord had 
 put into his mouth that never wavered, although it 
 would have been easy for him to palter with words in 
 a double sense, and to utter oracles as musical in the 
 ear of his listeners, and as false to the hopes which 
 they inspired, as were many of those which proceeded 
 from the shrines of Delphi and Dodona. 
 
 His last oracle has little value for us save as it 
 proves him to have been a veritable seer, able to 
 penetrate the future and foretell things to come. 
 Here he utters definite forecasts, which project into a 
 far-distant future, and so gives us an opportunity to 
 determine whether or not he was endowed with the 
 power he claimed and was believed to possess. Israel, 
 he says, is to conquer all its enemies, to rise into an
 
 THE SUPPLEMENTARY SCRIPTURES. 139 
 
 uncontested supremacy and exercise an unchallenged 
 dominion over them. Edom is to be smitten on both 
 flanks, Amalek to be destroyed. The faithful Kenites, 
 who had attached themselves to the fortunes of Israel 
 when Israel was destitute and helpless, are to dwell in 
 a home still more secure than the nest in the rocks 
 which they had left to cast in their lot with that of 
 the chosen people. The Assyrians, who, in the remote 
 future, are to subjugate and enthrall both the Hebrews 
 and the Kenites, will themselves be humbled by some 
 great Western Power ; and even this Power — the 
 Macedonian — is in its turn to be destroyed under a 
 pressure too vague and distant for him to define. 
 These predictions are so definite and precise that any 
 one who cares may bring him to book upon them ; 
 and they are so far beyond the reach of that prophetic 
 strain to which age and a wide experience of the ways 
 of God with men sometimes attain that, if they were 
 fulfilled — and we have seen that they tvere fulfilled — 
 it is impossible to deny • that Balaam was a true 
 prophet even in the vulgar sense of that word, and 
 must have received his knowledge from the Most 
 High. 
 
 But it is in his earlier oracles that both the true 
 character of the man and the real greatness of the 
 prophet come out ; for that which makes men good is 
 the very quality which makes prophets great. It lies
 
 i4o BALAAHf. 
 
 not in foresight, but in insight ; not in forecasting the 
 exact form and pressure of the time to be, but in the 
 power to grasp the moral order of the universe with a 
 loyal heart. It is in the mastery of ethical principles, 
 and not in mere intellectual capacity or illumination, 
 that a prophet's highest glory consists. And, judged 
 by this admitted canon, it must be confessed that in 
 his oracles Balaam takes a high place in the goodly 
 fellowship, though not by any means the highest. 
 From the first of these remarkable utterances we 
 gathered that it was the holiness of Israel by which he 
 was attracted and impressed, even more than by their 
 numbers or their power. We gathered that he had 
 learned, what many Christian men and statesmen have 
 not learned even yet, that Righteousness is the true 
 strength of a nation, not wealth, nor dominion, nor 
 culture even. It is because he sees that righteousness 
 is the end and aim of Israel that he longs to share 
 their ideal, to live their life, to die their death, and 
 feels that nothing short of a life conformed to the 
 Divine law can bring him peace at the last. 
 
 This conviction culminates in his Second Oracle, in 
 which, therefore, we find our most solid and valuable 
 contributions to an adequate conception of the man. 
 For it is here that we meet with three striking- 
 sentences which should largely influence our final 
 estimate of him, although hitherto, so far as I am
 
 THE SUPPLEMENTARY SCRIPTURES. 141 
 
 aware, no emphasis has been laid upon them. First, 
 of all he tells us that no iniquity is to be descried 
 in Jacob, and that hence no distress is to be seen in 
 Israel} And how could he more impressively 
 announce his persuasion that while Sin is the source 
 of weakness and misery, Righteousness is the one 
 source of strength, happiness, and peace, whether to a 
 man or to a nation ? Still more striking and sugges- 
 tive is the sentence in which he disavows a power 
 commonly ascribed to him, and confesses that when 
 Jehovah has blessed he cannot reverse the blessing. 2 
 For this was precisely what a soothsayer was expected 
 to do, what it was universally believed that he could 
 do. "What was he good for if he could not curse men 
 who, because they were strong in wealth or power, 
 were held to be in favour with Heaven ? A sooth- 
 sayer who could not control events as well as foresee 
 them, who could not shape as well as forecast the 
 future, who could not evade or overrule the benign 
 intention of a god by magic arts or by calling in some 
 higher celestial influence, was not a soothsayer at all 
 to the vulgar, or even to the princely 3 mind of that 
 age. And, therefore, to find a soothsayer confessing 
 that he cannot reverse as well as predict the currents 
 of human destiny is to find a man so frank and 
 
 1 Numbers xxiii. 21. 2 ibid, xxiii. '20. 
 
 3 Ibid. xxii. 6.
 
 r42 BALAAM. 
 
 honourable, so true to himself, to God, and to men, as 
 to abjure a most potent art, an almost unrivalled 
 power over the conduct and fortunes of his fellows, 
 rather than trade ou their superstitions and fears. 
 Balaam never shews a more righteous and disinterested 
 spirit than in this costly sacrifice on the altar of truth. 
 But most striking of all is the sentence in which he 
 ascribes the righteousness and consequent blessedness 
 of the elect people to the fact that there was no 
 augury in Jacob, nor any divination in Israel ; 
 that instead of trying, as he had done, to surprise or 
 force the secrets of the future, they waited until in 
 due time it was told to Israel what God doeih} For 
 this was to contemn the very gift of which he had 
 been most proud. It was to confess that the main 
 study and aim of his life had been one which rather 
 diverted him from a righteous and patient obedience 
 to the will of God than conducted him to it. No 
 more remarkable confession ever fell from a diviner's 
 lips than this censure on the art of divination ; and in 
 making it Balaam rose into a far higher and nobler 
 mood than when, with tranced but open eye, he saw 
 visions from the Almighty, and there fell upon his 
 inward ear words from God. 
 
 In his Third Oracle, although in delivering it he 
 seems to have been more utterly possessed by the 
 
 1 Numbers xxiii. 23.
 
 THE SUPPLEMENTARY SCRIPTURES. 143 
 
 Divine afflatus than before, and though the Spirit of 
 God came upon him with overmastering force, Balaam 
 simply repeats, and repeats in the same figures and 
 phrases ho had previously employed, his old affirma- 
 tion that Righteousness, and Righteousness alone, is 
 the secret of strength and peace. He does not now 
 so much as go out to look for auguries. God has 
 shewn him his will, and that is enough ; no omen 
 could persuade him of any change in that high and 
 constant Will. He is content to re-affirm the truth he 
 has already affirmed ; only now he is more sure of it 
 than ever, puts his whole soul into the affirmation of 
 it, and is more profoundly conscious that he has 
 " the mind of the Spirit" in declaring that Righteous- 
 ness is the one power which redeems and uplifts 
 men, unrighteousness the secret and cause of all their 
 
 3 O 
 
 miseries. 
 
 These are the more notable and significant results 
 of our study of the Chronicle of Balaam, and on the 
 whole the Scriptures which lie outside it do but 
 expand the hints and develop the germs of character 
 which we have found in the Chronicle itself; though 
 it must be acknowledged that, while one of them lends 
 new lustre to the loftier aspects of the man, most of 
 them add to its baser aspects shades so dark and 
 repulsive as to explain why his character has been 
 regarded as a well-nigh insoluble enigma.
 
 144 BALAAM. 
 
 I. Let us take the adverse Scriptures first, the 
 Scriptures which darken and degrade our conception 
 of him. 
 
 (1) We have gathered from the Chronicle that 
 Balaam ivanted, or at best was quite willing, to curse 
 Israel. The faint hints and suggestions of this evil 
 bent and disposition of his mind which the Chronicle 
 contains would not, however, have counted for much. 
 We might have doubted our construction of them had 
 they not been confirmed in the most explicit way, in 
 the most damning sense, by at least three passages of 
 Holy Writ. Thus in Deuteronomy xxiii. 4, 5, we 
 read that no Moabite was to be admitted into the 
 congregation of Israel, " because they met you not 
 with bread and with water in the way when ye came 
 forth out of Egypt ; and because they hired Balaam, 
 the son of Beor ... to curse thee. Neverthe- 
 less the Lord thy God ivould not hearken unto 
 Balaam, but the Lord thy God turned the curse into a 
 blessing because He loved thee." Of the implication 
 of these words there can be little doubt. Read 
 sincerely, without any prejudice for or against the 
 man, they surely charge Balaam with having en- 
 deavoured to extort the consent of Jehovah to a curse 
 he was eager to pronounce ; while they ascribe it 
 purely to the love of Jehovah for Israel that He would 
 not hearken to the prayers of Balaam, but turned the
 
 THE SUPPLEMENTARY SCRIPTURES. 145 
 
 curse he would have willingly uttered into a blessing 
 he was reluctant to pronounce. It seems impossible 
 to infer less from them than this : that had Balaam 
 been left to follow his own impulse, to take his own 
 course, it was anything but a benediction which he 
 would have pronounced over the camp of Israel, and 
 that the spirit of the hireling contended in his breast 
 with the spirit of the prophet. 
 
 This implication is still further confirmed by two 
 subsequent passages. In his last pathetic appeal to 
 the tribes of Israel, Joshua sought to rekindle their 
 fidelity to Jehovah by recounting the mercies of the 
 Lord and the wonders He had shewed them ; and in 
 recounting these wonders of mercy he reminds them 
 of an interposition which some of them could hardly 
 have forgotten. He says (Joshua xxiv. 9, 10) : 
 " Then Balak, the son of Zippor, king of Moab, arose 
 and warred against Israel, and sent and called Balaam, 
 the son of Beor, to curse you : but / ivould not 
 hearken to Balaam ; therefore he blessed you still : 
 so I delivered you out of his hand." And in 
 Nehemiah xiii. 1, 2, we are told that on a certain 
 day there was read to the Jews who had returned 
 from the Captivity that passage from Deuteronomy 
 cited in the last paragraph ; " wherein was found that 
 the Ammonite and the Moabite should not come into 
 the congregation of God for ever, because they met 
 
 T 9
 
 146 BALAAM. 
 
 not the children of Israel with bread and with water, 
 but hived Balaam against them that he should curse 
 them : howbeit our God turned the curse into a 
 blessing." When they had heard this sentence from 
 " the Book of Moses," adds Nehemiah, they instantly 
 separated themselves from the mixed multitude which 
 had crept into the Congregation. 
 
 We may fairly say, therefore, that not only is 
 Balaam branded as a hireling by these supplementary 
 Scriptures, aud charged with having wished, and even 
 tried, to curse the seed of Abraham ; but that this 
 conviction both of his cupidity and of his hostility to 
 Israel was the standing and dominant conviction of 
 the Jews concerning him for more than a thousand 
 years. 
 
 (2) We found in the Chronicle some reason to fear 
 that Balaam had respect to reward, that he hankered 
 after a house full of silver and gold ; that, if he loved 
 righteousness, he also loved the wages of unrighteous- 
 ness. And this fear has been confirmed by the 
 passages just cited in which he is stigmatized as a 
 hireling. But, unhappily, there are other Scriptures 
 which, if we accept them as inspired, or even as bear- 
 ing honest witness to historic facts, put this point, this 
 gross and heavy fault, beyond the reach of doubt. 
 In the so-called Second Epistle of St Peter (Chap. ii. 
 15, 16), for example, certain "children of a curse"
 
 THE SUPPLEMENTARY SCRIPTURES. 147 
 
 are spoken of as having forsaken the path of righteous- 
 ness to go astray, "following the way of Balaam, the son 
 of Beor, who loved the hire of wrongdoing, but was 
 rebuked for his transgression : a dumb ass spoke with 
 man's voice, and stayed the madness of the prophet." 
 I am not unmindful of the questionable authority of 
 this Epistle. For three centuries after it was written 
 it was excluded from the Sacred Canon ; and probably 
 enough it may be cast out from the Canon ere long, 
 at least by those who walk by the faith which demands 
 evidence for things not seen rather than by that which 
 is the substance of things hoped for. But no scholar 
 will deny that it is a very ancient document, or that 
 it follows an accepted Jewish tradition in the charge 
 it alleges against the son of Beor. On the other hand, 
 we must cheerfully admit that St Peter, or the 
 falsarius who writes in his name, accords the sacred 
 title of " prophet " to Balaam even while he charges 
 him with that love of money which is a root of all 
 evil ; and even goes so far as to call his wrong-doing 
 a " madness," a craze discordant with his general 
 character, of which he could hardly have been guilty 
 had not his true nature been jangled and out of tune. 
 Doubtful as may be the authority of this Scripture, 
 therefore, we may say that it sums up, with some 
 fairness, nearly all that we know of the man, neither 
 concealing the good that was in him nor ex- 
 tenuating that which was evil.
 
 148 BALAAM. 
 
 Even the severest criticism, however, can find little 
 of any weight to allege against the authenticity of the 
 Epistle of St Jude ; and in this Epistle (Verse 11) it 
 is said of those who revile whatsoever things they 
 know not, " Woe unto them ! for they went in the 
 way of Cain, and ran riotously in the error of 
 Balaam for hire." St Jude, therefore, not only 
 brings the old charge against Balaam and ascribes to 
 him a mercenary spirit, a willingness to let out his 
 art of divination on hire ; he also anticipates our 
 next point, and implies in him a certain sensuality of 
 spirit. For in this verse, " Lust stands hard by hate." 
 Cain is here the emblem of fierce and cruel hate, say 
 the critics ; Balaam that of carnal indulgence : those 
 who ran riotously in his error being men — and even 
 in the Christian Church there have always been men, 
 the Antinomians to wit, that have turned the grace of 
 God into licentiousness — who made their piety a cloak 
 for sensual depravity, and blackened the very name of 
 Religion by the immoralities which they held it to 
 justify or condone. The reference may be only to 
 that vile expedient which Balaam counselled, and by 
 which, as we are about to see, the men of Israel were 
 lured into the flagrant orgies of Baalpeor ; yet surely 
 that was an expedient which it could never have 
 occurred to any man of pure heart or pure life to 
 advise.
 
 THE SUPPLEMENTARY SCRIPTURES. 149 
 
 (3) For the next allegation which Scripture brings 
 against him is perhaps the worst of all. The very 
 Chapter (xxv.) which follows the Chronicle in the 
 Book of Numbers tells the sad and shameful story 
 of how the fair women of Midian came down to 
 the camp of Israel, and tempted the men of Israel 
 to join in the licentious rites by which Baalpeor 
 was worshipped ; and how, for this sin, the anger 
 of the Lord was kindled so that He sent a plague 
 upon them, and " those that died of the plague were 
 twenty and four thousand ;" but it in no way 
 connects the name of Balaam either with the 
 sin or its punishment. Probably it was not known 
 at the time that it was he who had dug this 
 pit for their feet. But in a subsequent Chapter 
 (Numbers xxxi. 16) the dismal secret is disclosed, and 
 the whole guilt of this foul device is fastened upon 
 him : for, in the war of vengeance against MidiaD, 
 Moses commanded that even the women should be 
 slain, " because they caused the children of Israel, 
 through the counsel of Balaam, to commit impurity 
 against the Lord in the matter of Peor, and there was 
 a plague among the congregation of the Lord." To 
 those who bow to the authority of Scripture a charge 
 so plainly made needs no confirmation ; yet it is con- 
 firmed in the most explicit terms, and on an authority 
 no less than that of our Lord Jesus Christ Himself : 
 
 K
 
 i 5 o BALAAM. 
 
 for in the epistle which he sent to the Church at 
 Pergamos by his servant John (Revelation ii. 14), He 
 sharply rebukes as many as " held the teaching of 
 Balaam, who taught Balalc to cast a stumbling-block 
 before the children of Israel, to eat things sacrificed 
 to idols and to commit fornication''' 1 
 
 So that, despite his splendid fidelity to the words 
 which God put into his mouth, and his utter refusal 
 to curse the people whom God had blessed, he did 
 curse them most effectually after all, by a deed which 
 spoke louder than any words. "The expedient he 
 pitched upon," says Bishop Butler, " was that concern- 
 ing which Solomon afterwards observed that it had 
 cast down many wounded, yea, many strong men 
 had been slain by it, and of which he himself was a 
 sad example when his wives turned away his heart 
 after other gods." And so moved is the good bishop, 
 whose mind was as a rule singularly thoughtful and 
 composed, by so foul and sordid a sin in a man other- 
 wise so noble and great, that, after relating it, he 
 breaks out into the exclamation, " Great God, what 
 inconsistency, what perplexity is here !" And, in- 
 deed, the sin was so vile, and the tragedy which 
 avenged it so terrible, that we find more than one 
 echo of it even in the later prophets. Hosea, for 
 instance (Chap. ix. 10), "dwells with special interest 
 1 C'omp. 1 Corinthians x. 8,
 
 THE SUPPLEMENTAR V SCRIPTURES. 1 5 1 
 
 on the first love of Jehovah to his people when He 
 found Israel like grapes in the wilderness, when He 
 knew them in the thirsty desert, before the innocence 
 of the nation's childhood was stained with the guilt of 
 Baalpeor," and "they separated themselves unto 
 Shame " (a prophetic synonym for Peor), and became 
 as " abominable " as the god they served : while 
 Isaiah (Chap. ix. 4) caught and reproduced the 
 thunders of the " day of Midian," on which God took 
 vengeance on the sensual race by which that early 
 innocence was debauched. 1 
 
 It is when we bring together such passages as 
 these that we begin to comprehend the bitter and 
 unsparing indignation with which the Bible, and 
 especially the New Testament, glows against the 
 Prophet of Pethor, speaking of him with a severity 
 utterly unlike to the benign generosity of most of 
 its verdicts on human character even when the 
 character of which it speaks is of no singular or 
 remarkable excellence. His sins were as sordid, as 
 base, as foul, as his virtues Avere eminent and his 
 endowments rare ; and they suffer by force of contrast. 
 That a srood man should be so bad, and a great man 
 so mean, this is the wonder, this the shame. For 
 great gifts entail grave responsibilities, and rare 
 
 1 Unless, indeed, with some commentators, we find in this "day 
 of Midian " a reference to the story told in Judges vii.
 
 152 BALAAM. 
 
 virtues should raise a man above vulgar temptations. 
 The Bible is always, and justly, severe on those who 
 pervert high gifts to base uses, and prostitute the 
 very credit of Virtue in the service of vice. Balaam's 
 great sin was that, knowing and loving the right, he 
 nevertheless did wrong. He sinned, not simply 
 against an external law and an external authority, but 
 against the God within him : for while he had, and 
 boasted that he had, the Spirit of God, and that in a 
 measure in which few men of his time possessed it, he 
 forgot that it was a Spirit of holiness and charity as 
 well as a Spirit of wisdom and knowledge. He 
 sinned against the Holy Ghost : and this sin against 
 the Holy Ghost is the one unpardonable sin — un- 
 pardonable at least in this world, since it is incorrig- 
 ible by any discipline which this world affords. 
 
 I do not deny that there may have been palliations 
 of his guilt of which the Divine Mercy took note, or 
 that that Mercy may long since have recovered him to 
 a more steadfast and victorious pursuit of righteousness ; 
 " for to this end was the gospel (of that Mercy) 
 preached even unto the dead, — that they might be 
 judged according to men in the flesh, but live accord- 
 ing to God in the sj^irit." 1 And even we, who are 
 apt to be as unmerciful in our judgment of our 
 fellows as though we stood in no need of mercy for 
 1 1 Peter iv. 6.
 
 THE SUPPLEMENTARY SCRIPTURES. 153 
 
 ourselves, know by observation, if not also by 
 experience, that violent spiritual excitements react 
 dangerously upon the soul, inducing a torpor of its 
 higher faculties, and leaving it perilously open to 
 temptations from the flesh : and therefore we can 
 admit that, after the strain of over-powering inspira- 
 tion, the trances and ecstasies in which Balaam saw 
 his visions from the Almighty and delivered the 
 oracles of the Most High, he may have yielded to 
 temptations which he would have resisted in moods 
 less morbid, less agitated and depressed ; for it is one 
 of the profoundest yet most patent mysteries of our 
 nature that, when the Spirit of God departs from us, 
 an evil spirit is only too likely to usurp his seat, and, 
 alas ! to find it ready swept and garnished for him. 
 We confess, too, that the moment in which the main 
 ambition of a life breaks down is a moment at which 
 a man is prone to sink into despair ; and that, in his 
 despair, he may be so transported from himself as to 
 be wholly unlike himself : and hence we can under- 
 stand that if, as seems probable, Balaam had fondly 
 cherished an ambition to abandon his recluse life, 
 to mingle with men, and to become the honoured 
 counsellor of a king or a clan, the sudden failure of this 
 ambition may, for a time at least, have led him to hate 
 the very virtues to which his failure was due, and to 
 lift the yoke from passions which he had hitherto held
 
 1 54 BALAAM. 
 
 in check. And we can also understand that his faith 
 in the moral government of the world may have been 
 perilously shaken when he foresaw, as in his last 
 vision he did foresee, that even the people Jehovah 
 had blessed, even the one race in which he could 
 descry no sin, the unique nation which lived for 
 righteousness, was ultimately to be carried away 
 captive, and to share the fate of empires founded 
 on rapine and maintained by blood. 
 
 All this we can understand and allow for ; all this 
 we are bound to make allowance for ; but, allow for 
 it as we will, the unsophisticated conscience of every 
 candid man must surely condemn Balaam as a sinner 
 beyond others, and pronounce his guilt to be as rare 
 and strange as his virtues and his gifts. Our one 
 hope for him lies in the fact that he suffered for his 
 sin in the flesh, that he received the punishment of it 
 here and now, and was not permitted to add to his 
 guilt by flaunting it in the face of the sun. Of all 
 fates that can befall a transgressor the worst is the 
 impunity which makes him bold in transgression. 
 And from this fate Balaam was mercifully spared. 
 For, in the war of vengeance against Midian, he was 
 taken captive by the w T arriors of Israel, together with 
 the kings or sheikhs of that clan, tried, and condemned 
 to a judicial death (Numbers xxxi. 8, in the Hebrew, 
 and Joshua xiii. 22). "Justice did not suffer him to
 
 THE SUPPLEMENTA R Y SCRIP TURES. 1 5 5 
 
 live." He was taken in the trap he had set for others, 
 and fell into the pit which he himself had digged, — 
 making by his death, let us hope, such poor atonement 
 as was still possible for his crime against God and man. 
 
 Sins so sordid, base, and foul as those which we 
 have now seen brought home to him compose a terrible 
 indictment against the Prophet in whom we have 
 found so much to admire, — inspirations so lofty, gifts 
 so rare, and a loyalty to the words which God put 
 into his mouth so disinterested and steadfast. As we 
 ponder the indictment and dwell upon its counts, we 
 may be tempted to forget his redeeming virtues, the 
 qualities which we have admired in him and approved. 
 But the Bible will not suffer us to do him this in- 
 justice ; for among these supplementary Scriptures 
 there is one which not only confirms all the good 
 impressions of him which we have derived from the 
 Chronicle, but raises him even higher in our thoughts. 
 It is the passage which we are now to consider. In 
 Micah vi. 5-8, we read : " my people, remember 
 now what Balak king of Moab consulted, and what 
 Balaam, the son of Beor, answered him, from Shittim 
 to Gilgal, 1 that ye may discern the righteous acts of 
 the Lord. 
 
 1 Ewald conjectures with much probability that "from Shittim to 
 Gilgal " is a marginal note which has crept into the text.
 
 156 BALAAM. 
 
 [Balak loquitur.] Wherewith shall 1 come to meet 
 the Lord, and bow myself before the God of the high 
 place ? Shall I come to meet him with burnt-offer- 
 ings, ruith yearling ccdves ? Will the Lord take 
 pleasure in thousands of rams, in myriads of rivers 
 of oil ? Shall L give up my firstborn for my trans- 
 gression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my sold ? 
 
 [Balaam loquitur.] He hath shewed, thee, man, 
 what is good : and what doth the Lord require of thee 
 but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly 
 with thy God ? " 
 
 There seems no reason to doubt that in these verses 
 we have a colloquy which actually took place between 
 the king of Moab and the prophet of Pethor, although 
 the Chronicle contains no report of it. But as it has 
 been questioned by at least one English scholar of 
 distinction (Cheyne in loco), who, however, does not 
 allege any argument in favour of his conclusion, it is 
 necessary that we should glance at the reasons ou 
 which we rely in assuming that we are indebted to 
 Micah for a scrap of ancient history which, but for 
 him, we should have lost. In brief, these reasons are 
 as follows : — 
 
 (1) The weight of authority is on our side. The 
 literary instincts and spiritual insight of such men as 
 Bishop Butler, F. D. Maurice, Cardinal Newman, 
 Robertson of Brighton, and Dean Stanley, especially
 
 THE SUPPLEMENTARY SCRIPTURES. 157 
 
 when backed by the verdict of critics so learned and 
 accomplished as Ewald and Kalisch, are not to be 
 lightly over-ridden ; and all these take this passage 
 as reporting a conversation between Balak and Balaam. 
 
 (2) It is admitted all round that the verse which 
 introduces this passage (Verse 5) is patient of the 
 construction we put upon it, and lends itself more 
 easily and naturally to it than to any other. When 
 we are told of what Balak consulted, and how Balaam 
 ansivered him, we naturally expect to find in the 
 verses that follow some account of the question and 
 its reply : and in these following verses there is a 
 personal tone (note the " man " of Verse 8), a con- 
 versational tone, which answers to that expectation. 
 
 (3) Such supplementary Scriptures as this are 
 common in the Bible ; we have already considered a 
 good many of them by which our conception of 
 Balaam's character has been deepened and enlarged. 
 And there are many similar passages. For example, 
 it is no more wonderful that Micah should make this 
 addition to the Chronicle than that Hosea (Chap. xii. 
 3, 4) should tell us that Jacob " prevailed " over the 
 ausel with whom he strove at Peniel, because "he 
 wept and made supplication unto him," although no 
 mention is made of his tears and supplications in the 
 Book of Genesis ; or than that the author of the first 
 Book of Chronicles (Chap. vii. 21, 22) should relate
 
 158 BALAAM. 
 
 how certain men of Gath, while making a raid upon 
 their cattle, came down upon the children of Ephraim 
 in the land of Goshen, and slew them with the sword, 
 nearly exterminating the whole tribe ; and how 
 Ephraim their father mourned for them many days, 
 and his brethren came to comfort him ; although no 
 mention of this catastrophe is made in the Book of 
 Exodus. It is no more wonderful than that St Paul 
 should report how the Lord Jesus used to say (Acts 
 xx. 35) : " It is more blessed to give than to receive," 
 although that generous maxim is not recorded in any 
 one of our Gospels ; or than that the author of the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews (Chaps, v., vii.) should add so 
 largely to our knowledge of Melchisedek, Prince of 
 Salem, and, in Chapter xi., give many new and 
 picturesque touches to some of the best known 
 patriarchs and heroes of Israel. 
 
 (4) There are local touches and undesigned coin- 
 cidences in this passage which fall in with our assump- 
 tion and confirm it. What, for example, could be more 
 natural than that Balak, who led the Prophet from 
 one sacred grove on the hill-tops to another, and 
 drenched the altars of so many high places with the 
 blood of his sacrifices, should conceive of Jehovah as 
 " the God of the high place" and anxiously inquire 
 how He might be placated ? In the Chronicle, again, 
 Balaam speaks familiarly of leaving the sacred groves
 
 THE SUPPLEMENTARY SCRIPTURES. 159 
 
 to meet Jehovah, and of Jehovah's coming to meet 
 him (Chap, xxiii. 3, 4). So familiar is the phrase 
 with him that he abbreviates it into a technical term, 
 and once, at least (Chap, xxiii. 15), he speaks to 
 Balak simply of going to meet, leaving him to infer 
 that it was the Lord whom he expected to meet, and 
 quite sure that he would know how to take the 
 phrase. Micah preserves this singular expression, 
 though in the Hebrew he uses a different verb, and 
 makes Balak ask, " Wherewith shall I come to meet 
 the Lord ? Shall I come to meet him with burnt- 
 offerings ? " Nor must we omit to note that, in this 
 passage, Balak, king of Moab, offers even to give up 
 his first-born for his transgression, the fruit of his 
 body for the sin of his soul. For the custom of mak- 
 ing these dreadful human sacrifices in dreadful 
 emergencies seems to have been a Moabitish custom, 
 and to have held its ground many centuries after 
 Balak had left the scene. In 2 Kings iii. 2G, 27, we 
 read of a king of Moab, whose name the recently dis- 
 covered " Moabitish Stone " has made familiar to 
 many of us, — we read how Mesha, king of Moab, 
 sorely bestead by the armies of Judah and Israel, not 
 only proposed to sacrifice his first-born to the offended 
 gods, but actually " took his eldest son, that should 
 have reigned in his stead, and offered him for a burnt- 
 offering upon the wall."
 
 160 BALAAM. 
 
 And (5) the speeches here ascribed to Balak and 
 Balaam are in character with the men. There is an 
 imperious and yet a reckless and prodigal tone in the 
 demand that Micah puts into the mouth of the King 
 which is quite in harmony with all we know of him. 
 He who sent messengers to Balaam saying, " Let 
 nothing, I beseech thee, hinder thee from coming unto 
 me, for ... I will do whatsoever thou shalt say " ; 
 he who pursued Heaven with fierce and pertinacious 
 importunity from altar to altar and hill to hill ; he 
 who, even after he had smitten his hands together in 
 impotent anger, and had cried out on the Prophet, 
 " Thou shalt never curse them again nor bless them 
 again ! " could yet command and beseech him to 
 make one more attempt to wring a curse from the 
 reluctant Power on high — may well have huddled one 
 desperate offer and demand on the top of another 
 as Micah makes him do. While Balaam, who loved 
 and admired righteousness, who was true to the words 
 he received from God at all risks and all costs, who 
 was simply fascinated by the holiness of Israel and 
 longed to share their lot, live their life, die their 
 death, and who knew that it was to their compara- 
 tive sinlessness they owed their strength and their 
 peace, was surely not unlikely to have conceived such 
 an ideal of righteousness as Micah here attributes 
 to him.
 
 THE SUPPLEMENTAL Y SCRIPTURES. 1 6 1 
 
 For all these reasons, then, 1 reasons which, when 
 combined, form an argument, I think, of irresistible 
 cogency, we may take this passage as supplementing 
 the story contained in the Chronicle, as preserving a 
 colloquy between Balak and Balaam which, but for 
 Micah, would have remained unknown to us. 
 
 The exact point in the Chronicle in which we are 
 to insert this colloquy is not easy to determine. Dean 
 Stanley thought that Balak saluted Balaam with this 
 question when he first met him on the border of 
 Moab. And it may have been so. It may be that 
 in his eagerness to receive supernatural help against 
 his dreaded foe, the King, who had pledged himself to 
 do whatever the Prophet should demand, may have 
 offered to go all lengths in order to secure the inter- 
 position he craved. But there is a tone of desperation 
 in his question which, to my mind, accords better with 
 the assumption that it was at the close of his interview 
 with the Prophet, rather than at its commencement, 
 that the baffled monarch grew so excited and so pro- 
 fuse. In Micah's sketch of him he has the look and 
 bearing of one who snatches at a last and fatal 
 expedient, of one well nigh driven to despair. Thrice 
 already, and on three several heights, he had offered 
 
 1 For the opposite conclusion Mr Cheyne alleges nothing but the 
 assumption that those who see in this passage Balak's question and 
 Balaam's reply, have "probably not realised the amount of per- 
 sonification which exists in the prophetic writings."
 
 1 62 BALAAM. 
 
 oxen and rams in the hope that he might propitiate 
 the strange God whom Balaam served, and of whom 
 he seems to have conceived as Himself but a celestial 
 Balaam, who might be lured to change his mind by- 
 bribes, if only the bribe were large enough and 
 cunningly adapted to his special bent. And thrice his 
 bribes, his sacrifices, had been rejected, and a blessing 
 had been uttered instead of the hoped for curse. Was 
 there nothing more that he could do ? no other 
 expedient that he could try 1 Would more and more 
 abundant burnt-offerings avail ? If not, would flocks 
 of rams by the thousand and rivers of oil by the ten 
 thousand ? If not, would even the last and dearest 
 and most dreadful sacrifice of all avail — shall I give 
 my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my 
 body, the hope of my dynasty, the flower of my stem, 
 for the sin of my soul ? The man was maddened 
 with disappointment, with a vague and nameless fear, 
 with cruel anxiety and still more cruel suspense. The 
 dread lest his power should be broken, his name 
 blotted out, his fair cities ravaged, his tribe destroyed, 
 drove him out of and beyond himself; and in his 
 momentary exaltation no sacrifice seemed too costly 
 by which the dark and awful doom which brooded 
 over him might be averted. 
 
 And surely we may say that as the Lord had 
 opened the mouth of a dumb ass to rebuke the
 
 THE SUPPLEMENTARY SCRIPTURES. 163 
 
 madness of the Prophet, so now he opened the mouth 
 of the Prophet to rebuke the madness of the King. 
 It was not inevitable that Moab and Israel should 
 come into conflict. Let the King be just and fear not. 
 It was not bribes nor offerings that God required of 
 him ; but only that he should walk quietly and 
 sincerely by conscience, by the inward light, and 
 faithfully discharge the plain moral duties which all 
 men recognize and approve. 
 
 Nothing can be finer than the Prophet's reply, 
 whether in spirit or in form : — "He hath shewed thee, 
 man, what is good : and what doth the Lord 
 require of thee but to do justly, to love mercy, and to 
 walk humbly with thy God ? " Nothing could more 
 perfectly express that profound belief in Righteousness 
 which, as we have seen again and again, was a 
 characteristic of Balaam, or shew more impressively 
 how pure, simple, and large his ideal of Righteousness 
 was. 
 
 And yet, though this ideal is one which may be 
 reached by any man who trusts and obeys the finer 
 instincts of the soul and discerns the moral significance 
 of the relations in which he stands, how wonderful it 
 was that a heathen diviner of that distant time should 
 have risen to an ideal so pure and lofty! A thousand 
 years before the philosophers of Athens had begun to 
 inquire after " the first fair " and " the first good,"
 
 1 64 BALAAM. 
 
 this unknown Prophet of an obscure race flashes into 
 sight for a moment, and, lo, he has not asked the 
 question only, but gained an answer to it which 
 the accumulated experience and discoveries of 
 subsequent centuries has but confirmed ! Such wis- 
 dom was not then to be found, no, not even in Israel 
 itself, nor for centuries afterward. Now and then, 
 indeed, in after years, a few of the noblest and most 
 penetrating minds in Israel caught glimpses of the 
 truth proclaimed by Balaam. Samuel, for instance, 
 saw and said that " to obey was better than sacrifice, 
 and to hearken than the fat of rams." David affirmed 
 that the sacrifices of God are not bullocks and goats, 
 but a broken spirit and a contrite heart. And most 
 of the later prophets maintained that to keep the 
 commandments of God was better than to lavish 
 hecatombs on his altar. But the people of Israel 
 never accepted this Divine message ; as, indeed, how 
 should they when the very prophets who exalted 
 obedience above offerings, and mercy above sacrifice, 
 were nevertheless very zealous for the service of the 
 altar and the temple 1 It was not till Christ came 
 that ritualism was superseded by morality, and men 
 really learned that pure and undefiled worship before 
 God our Father is to minister to the afflicted and to 
 keep themselves unspotted by the world. But since 
 He came and dwelt among us the lesson has been
 
 THE SUPPLEMENTARY SCRIPTURES. 165 
 
 learned, though it has been often forgotten ; and the 
 wisest of our own day, even though they permit 
 themselves to speak of the Scriptures of life as 
 " Hebrew old clothes," or " faded Jewish stars," still 
 tell us, by life as well as by pen, that to do justice, to 
 love mercy, and to walk humbly with God, is the 
 whole duty and chief good of man. 
 
 In placing obedience above ordinances, then, 
 character before worship, right-doing before ritualism, 
 Balaam anticipated the teaching of Christ Himself; 
 and even a Carlyle, though taught by Christ, was no 
 wiser than he : and so prophet touches hand with 
 prophet across an interval of four thousand years. 
 The truth he taught is indeed one " which all the ages 
 tell ;" it is commended to us by philosopher as well as 
 saint, by the most modern as well as by the most 
 ancient wisdom ; and yet it needs no commendation, 
 since it at once commends itself to our best and purest 
 instincts. 
 
 Obedience is better than worship, nay, is the true 
 worship ; all ordinances of outward service were 
 intended to cherish and express this inward obedience, 
 and are valuable only as they help to confirm us in 
 our obedience to the will of God ; God requires of us 
 nothing more than the justice, the compassion, the 
 humility which our own reason and conscience require 
 of us, so that God's requisition on us is, after all, only 
 
 L
 
 1 66 BALAAM. 
 
 our own requisition on ourselves, — in all these ways, 
 and many more, we may state the truth anticipated 
 by Balaam so many centuries ago. 
 
 No doubt it is a truth which cuts up all mere 
 ritualism, sacramentarianism, sacerdotalism, by the 
 root. Priests, sacraments, rites, are of use and fulfil 
 their end only in so far as they teach and subserve a 
 pure and noble morality. When once they are loved 
 and venerated for their own sake ; when once they are 
 held 'to be the vital substance or the main part of 
 Religion ; and, much more, when they are made 
 a substitute for Morality or are exalted above it, 
 they become hateful to God and injurious to men. 
 For what the Lord our God requires of us is not that 
 we should reverence and obey a priest, take sacraments, 
 observe rites ; but that we should act with justice, 
 shew mercy, and walk humbly with Him. What He 
 requires of us is not even that we should attend the 
 services of the Church, or read our Bibles, or assent to 
 Creeds ; all these are simply of no use to us save as 
 they help to cherish in us a lowly spirit and a merci- 
 ful heart, and to make our life righteous and kindly 
 and pure. 
 
 On the other hand, we must be on our guard 
 against the error of those who, when once they grasp 
 the truth that real Religion is of the inward life, and 
 does not consist in the observance of outward rites and
 
 THE SUPPLEMENTARY SCRIPTURES. 167 
 
 forms, feel as if they were relieved from all the burden 
 and strain of Religion, and address themselves to what 
 they take to be an easier course with a light heart. 
 To them, the words of Balaam come with all the force 
 of an enfranchisement. Their feeling is, " We may 
 fling off all these tedious and binding forms, then. 
 We need observe no rite, attend no service, take no 
 sacrament, join in no worship. We have nothing to 
 do but to live a just, kindly, and reverent life !" Ah, 
 but what a But is there ! Have they at all con- 
 sidered what it is to which they so lightly address 
 themselves ? 
 
 That we should do justly is a reasonable as well as 
 a Divine demand ; for it is a demand which our own 
 reason and conscience make upon us. But how much 
 is involved in it ? how hard, how all but impossible, is 
 it for even the best of men to meet it ? To do justly 
 is to render to every man his due. It covers all our 
 domestic, social, and political relations, and demands 
 that in every one of these we should do the thing that 
 is right. And we do not need a large experience to 
 discover how difficult it is, in the complex and often 
 conflicting claims to which we lie open, so much as to 
 know what justice requires of us ; and how much 
 more difficult it is to do it in the teeth of our natural 
 indolence, cupidity, and selfishness. 
 
 To love and shew mercy, again, is as reasonable as
 
 BALAAM. 
 
 to do justice; for we ourselves constantly stand in 
 need of the sympathy and compassion of our fellows, 
 and are bound to shew to them the mercy that we need 
 from them. But let any man set himself to keep this 
 reasonable precept, and it will not be long before he 
 discovers how hard it is to shew men a pity which 
 shall not alienate or offend them ; how hard it is to 
 do an effective kindness even to one neighbour, and 
 how doubly hard so to do it as not to injure either 
 him or Mb neighbour. Nothing takes more wisdom 
 than to exercise a charity which shall neither hurt nor 
 degrade the man who receives it ; and even if we do 
 him no harm, we may only too easily be doing harm 
 to others by seeming to slight them, or by breeding in 
 them a craving or a pauperized spirit. And all this 
 while I am assuming that we are willing to deal 
 gently and kindly with our fellows, to pity, forgive, 
 and assist them. Yet there are but few of us who 
 are willing to shew mercy and forgive when once our 
 self-love has been wounded, or our angry and revenge- 
 ful passions have been aroused. In fine, it is difficult 
 to say which is the harder, to shew mercy and to 
 forgive from the heart, or to forgive and help so wisely 
 and graciously as to do good rather than harm. 
 
 Nothing, again, can be more reasonable than that 
 we should walk humbly with God. Our life is itself 
 a mystery, open to all the accidents of pain, misfortune,
 
 THE SUPPLEMENTARY SCRIPTURES. 169 
 
 sorrow, disappointment, loss, bereavement ; and it runs 
 down into the still darker mystery of death. We pass 
 swiftly from eternity to eternity, our immortal spirits 
 hampered and confined in mortal frames, not knowing 
 what may befal us from hour to hour of our brief 
 pilgrimage, exposed to forces over which we have no 
 control, our companions falling around us at every 
 step, reminded at every turn of our ignorance, our 
 weakness, our perishableness. Who should thankfully 
 accept a Divine guidance if not we ? Who should 
 humbly acknowledge their need of a Divine support 
 and consolation if not we, and their absolute 
 dependence upon it ? And yet how proud we are, 
 how self-confident, how forgetful of our Divine Guide, 
 Redeemer, Comforter ! How apt to follow our own 
 guidance or that of some leader as blind as ourselves, 
 and to depend on our own strength or to lean on some 
 reed as weak as ourselves, which breaks and pierces 
 our hand so soon as we fairly commit ourselves to it ! 
 Let no man, then, think lightly of this requisition, 
 or lightly address himself to so great and perilous an 
 enterprise. To do justly, to love mercy, to walk 
 humbly with God, is the hardest, as it is also the 
 noblest, of achievements. How can it be other than 
 most hard when it summons us to nothing less than 
 to achieve the very ideal of human life, the loftiest 
 moral ideal which the wit of man has been able to
 
 i 7 o BALAAM. 
 
 frame or the wisdom of God to reveal ? He who 
 would attain the true end and chief good of life must 
 be prepared to endure hardness, and should be 
 thankful for any and every help within his reach. 
 He needs the Church ; he needs the Bible ; he needs 
 the sacraments and the exercises of worship ; he needs 
 the teaching of those who have had a longer ex- 
 perience of time and change, of the world and men, 
 than he himself, and of those who by special gifts or 
 special studies are more fully acquainted with the 
 Word and Will of God. If he is wise, so far from 
 dispensing with any of these aids to a just, kindly, 
 and humble spirit, he will thankfully accept and use 
 them all. 
 
 But if the task to which we are called be hard — 
 and who can doubt that to bend the stubborn and 
 depraved will of man to the claims of Justice, Mercy, 
 and Reverence, is far harder than to observe any 
 ritual or present any sacrifice ? — it is as blessed as it is 
 hard. For, after all, nothing but justice lives and 
 thrives in the long run, and nothing so wins upon our 
 fellows as a kindly and sympathetic spirit ; and how, 
 amid all the shocks of change and blows of circum- 
 stance, can any man be at peace unless he humbly 
 commit himself to the guidance of Omniscience and 
 cast himself on the support of the Almighty ? There 
 is no rest but only here. It is as true to-day as it
 
 THE SUPPLEMENTA R Y SCRIPTURES. 1 7 i 
 
 was four thousand years ago, that our real wealth is 
 within us. All else changes and passes away. For- 
 tunes built on injustice crumble into dust. Fame won 
 by a selfish use of power turns to disrepute. Fortress 
 and palace and tower are even less substantial than 
 the baseless fabric of a vision, for that may leave some 
 traces of itself on an immortal mind. The whole 
 vast pageant of human life melts away moment by 
 moment. But the justice, the kindness, the rever- 
 ence which we have cherished and made our own are 
 beyond the reach of change, aud will abide with us 
 for ever ; and he to whom it has been given to do 
 justly, to shew mercy, to walk humbly with God, 
 has all that even God Himself can enrich him Avith. 
 For what is there really worth having that we can ask 
 of God save that which He requires of us ? Though 
 he have nothing else, yet he hath all who, living a 
 just, gentle, and reverent life by the grace of God, has 
 God Himself for his guide along the dark and per- 
 plexing ways of life, God for his support, God for his 
 eternal home and reward. 
 
 These general considerations will serve, I hope, to 
 bring out the meaning and force of Balaam's reply to 
 the demand of Balak, to shew how wide is its scope, 
 how lofty and pure the ideal which it placed before 
 the perturbed and desperate King. And if our study 
 of it has deepened our admiration of his high
 
 172 
 
 BALAAM. 
 
 prophetic gifts, his ethical penetration and grasp, we 
 cannot but wonder the more that the man who could 
 conceive a moral ideal so pure and lofty should him- 
 self so miserably fall short of it. For Balaam did not 
 do justly in so far as he loved the wages of un- 
 righteousness ; nor did he shew a gentle and generous 
 spirit who, for the sake of hire, strove to curse the 
 people he was bound to bless ; nor did he walk 
 humbly with God who, despite the Divine inspiration 
 and command, counselled the foul expedient by which 
 the men of Israel were drawn to transgress the law 
 they had received by Moses. And so the whole pro- 
 blem, in all its mystery, comes back upon us once 
 more ; a problem which, since it is now fully stated, 
 and we have all its terms before us, we must forth- 
 with do our best to solve.
 
 PAET III. 
 THE CONCLUSION. 
 
 We have now studied all the Scriptures which relate 
 to Balaam, and if our study has added but few new 
 features to his character, it has served, I hope, to 
 bring out his features more clearly, to cast higher 
 lights and deeper shadows upon them, and to define 
 and enlarge our conceptions both of the good and of 
 the evil qualities of the man. The problem of his 
 character — how a good man could be so bad and a 
 great man so base — has not yet been solved ; we are 
 as far perhaps from its solution as ever : but some- 
 thing — much — has been gained if only we have the 
 terms of that problem more distinctly and fully before 
 our minds. To reach the solution of it, in so far as 
 we can reach it, we must fall back on the second 
 method of inquiry which, at the outset, I propose to 
 employ. We must apply the comparative, method to 
 the history and character of Balaam ; we must place 
 him beside other prophets as faulty and sinful as him- 
 self, and in whom the elements were as strangely 
 mixed as they were in him : we must endeavour 
 to classify him, and to read the problem of his life in 
 the light of that of men of his own order and type.
 
 174 BALAAM. 
 
 Yet that is by no means easy to do without putting 
 him to a grave disadvantage. For the only prophets 
 with whom we can compare him are the Hebrew 
 prophets ; and Balaam was not a Hebrew ; he was 
 not bound, and therefore he must not be judged, by 
 their law ; he had no part in the special election and 
 grace vouchsafed to them. And, again, it is not easy 
 for us to judge even them fairly. They were men of 
 another race and an inferior dispensation to ours ; 
 they are separated from us by the lapse of long 
 centuries ; the conditions of their life were different 
 from those with which we are familiar ; and all this 
 adds immensely to our difficulty in framing any just 
 estimate of them. We should be guilty of a monstrous 
 injustice were we to apply the standards of to-day 
 even to the English statesmen and men of letters of a 
 hundred to a hundred and fifty years ago ; to Fox, 
 Chatham, Walpole, not to mention such creatures as the 
 Duke of Newcastle and Lord Bute ; to Dr Johnson, 
 Steele, Goldsmith, Addison, Pope, Swift, and still more 
 to the poor wits and scholars of Grub Street and the 
 Dunciad. But how much more monstrous would be 
 the injustice of applying the only standards with which 
 Ave are thoroughly familiar to the Oriental statesmen 
 and prophets of from two to four thousand years ago ? 
 Throughout our endeavour to form an estimate of 
 Balaam's character, then, we must, if we would be
 
 THE CONCLUSION. 175 
 
 just to him, make large allowance for the inevitable 
 and immense differences of race, condition, custom, 
 and aoe, which divide him from us ; while even in 
 our comparison of him with Hebrew prophets we must 
 make still further allowance for the fact that he was 
 not of the seed of Abraham, and possessed none of 
 those advantages of the Jew over the Gentile by which 
 St Paul affirms 1 that the former was benefited " much 
 every way." 
 
 It has been the fashion to speak of Balaam as com- 
 bining in himself, to a rare and unexampled, if not to 
 an impossible, degree, functions, qualities, and impulses 
 the most contradictory and opposed. Nevertheless, 
 while admitting that few men have combined in a 
 single nature so many different and opposed charac- 
 teristics, I am prepared, not to affirm only, but to 
 demonstrate, that we find in him no contradictory 
 qualities save such as may be found in other prophets 
 of the Old Testament, and, I might almost say, none 
 but such as are common to man. 
 
 1. One of the first combinations by which the 
 student of Balaam's career is startled and perplexed 
 is, that one and the same man should be " a diviner, 
 seeking omens and auguries, and interpreting them 
 after the approved methods of the ancient East, and 
 yet a prophet who heard the words of God and saw 
 
 1 Romans iii. 1, 2.
 
 176 BALAAM. 
 
 visions from the Almighty ; a soothsayer, affecting to 
 forecast, if not to control, human destinies, and yet a 
 seer familiar with the ecstasies of the prophetic trance, 
 to whom the inspiration of the Almighty gave under- 
 standing of things to be." 1 Yet a thousand years 
 after his time Micah affirms 2 not only that the recognised 
 prophets of Israel exercised the arts of soothsaying 
 and divination, but even that these prophets " divined 
 for money," — the very sin charged upon Balaam, — 
 while yet " they leaned upon Jehovah, and said, Is 
 not Jehovah with us ? No evil can fall upon us." 
 Nor, strange as it may seem, is it hard to see how 
 these two functions came to be conjoined ; how what 
 we should call Religion and Superstition came to be 
 blended in a single mind. 
 
 The soothsayer, the diviner, was not then the im- 
 postor he has now become. In those early ages he 
 was sincerely convinced that the will of God was 
 disclosed in omens and auguries ; in the flight of birds, 
 for example, as they rose to the right hand or the 
 left, in the movements and conjunctions of the planets, 
 in the falling of the lot, in the state of the sacred 
 entrails of beasts offered in sacrifice, in the intuitions 
 of the thoughtful and forecasting mind, in portents, in 
 dreams, and in the unwonted ecstasies of sensitive and 
 
 1 See page 1. 2 Micah iii. 7, 11.
 
 THE CONCLUSION. 177 
 
 holy souls. 1 Conscious of the unity of the universe, 
 observing how all things play into each other and 
 form parts of a connected whole — like the alchymists 
 and wizards of the Middle Ages, he believed that the 
 fates of men and of nations might be read in these 
 and similar omens by those who had acquired the art 
 of interpreting them. The sagacity of birds and 
 beasts, for instance, their quick sense of approaching 
 changes in the physical world, naturally led him to 
 infer that, from their cries and motions, dumb yet 
 speaking hints might be collected of every kind of 
 change that was at hand, and to attribute to them a 
 certain prescience even in human affairs. And if by 
 the study of these ominous phenomena the diviner 
 could foresee things to come, why might he not also 
 advise courses of action by which the blows of adverse 
 change might be evaded, and those who consulted 
 him might put themselves in a posture to benefit by 
 vicissitudes which, to the uninstructed, would bring 
 only sorrow and fear and loss ? Why might he not 
 thus in some measure control events as well as foresee 
 them, shape as well as forecast the future; and by 
 persuading men to adapt themselves to the will of 
 God, secure for them the blessing of his favour, a 
 
 1 " Astrology was the only form in which the ancients could give 
 ' scientific ' shape to their belief that terrestial life is governed by 
 cosmical conditions." — Sim cox.
 
 1 7 8 BALAAM. 
 
 heart unvexed by fear of change, a heart made bold 
 and confident by the sense of being at one with Him, 
 admitted to the secrets of his counsel, familiar with 
 the determinations of his providence ? 
 
 If, in addition to this devout belief in omens as 
 indicative of the Divine Will, we remember that the 
 man who was prophet as well as diviner made it " the 
 chief business and market of his time " and studies to 
 discover the moral principles by which the world is 
 governed, and cherished a steadfast and growing belief 
 in the ultimate victory of those principles, let ap- 
 pearances contradict it as they would, we shall no 
 longer wonder that to a diviner such as Balaam, to a 
 man thus devoutly seeking to acquaint himself with 
 the will of God, God should at times reveal his will in 
 dreams, in visions, in thoughts and words clothed with 
 an authority which convinced him that they were the 
 immediate gift of Heaven. To whom should the God 
 of all wisdom speak if not to these earnest seekers 
 after the highest wisdom ? To whom should He reveal 
 his righteous will if not to these ardent lovers of 
 righteousness ? 
 
 To us, indeed, who no longer look, and no longer 
 need to look, for intimations of his will, to dream or 
 oracle or seer, it may be easy to denounce this faith 
 in omens and auguries as rank folly and superstition ; 
 but before we brand Balaam as superstitious, before,
 
 THE CONCLUSION. 179 
 
 at least, we condemn him for his superstition, let us 
 remember that even to-day it is hard to find any man 
 of Eastern race who does not blend this faith in 
 omens, in auspicious and sinister signs and influences, 
 with his religion, however pure and simple his religion 
 may be. Let us remember that there are few even 
 of the Western races, however long they may have 
 held the Christian faith, who do not cherish the same 
 superstition, often in grosser forms than he, as we 
 have only to travel in Italy or Spain to discover. 
 Let us remember that even here in England, the very 
 focus of civilization and Christianity as we esteem it, 
 whole classes are imbued with it, that hardly any 
 class is wholly free from it ; that our sailors still have 
 their lucky and unlucky days ; that our peasants and 
 maidservants still consult the wise women or the 
 fortune-teller ; and that even among those who hold 
 themselves too wise to need the aid of Religion there 
 are at least some who are the dupes of the mesmerist 
 and the spiritualist, or who pet and dandle some private 
 superstition of their own. Or, if we would learn once 
 for all that the most sincere and earnest piety is not 
 incompatible with the superstition of divination, let us 
 remember that John Wesley, one of the most sensible 
 and practical as well as one of the most devout of men, 
 " the first to reject what was extravagant, the last to 
 adopt what was new,"used to guide his conduct, whether
 
 180 BALAAM. 
 
 in the ordinary events or in the great crises of his life, 
 by drawing lots, or by watching the particular texts at 
 which his Bible fell open. 1 
 
 With these facts well in mind, we shall be in no 
 haste to conclude that Balaam was an impostor, or 
 even that he was without true religion and piety, 
 because he sought to ascertain the will of God by the 
 study of omens and portents ; nor shall we pronounce 
 him unworthy to be a prophet, and to receive words 
 and visions from the Almighty, simply because he was 
 versed in the arts of divination, arts too, be it re- 
 membered, the inferiority of which he was forward to 
 acknowledge the very moment he recognized it. 2 
 
 Nor is it in the least difficult to adduce a case 
 parallel to his even from the goodly fellowship of the 
 Hebrew prophets. The character of Saul, the first 
 king of Israel, presents us with a problem as profound 
 and perplexing as that of Balaam himself — a problem 
 of which our great poet Browning has given us so 
 admirable a study that I have often wondered why he 
 has not made the Prophet of Pethor the hero of one 
 of his poems. For Saul was not chosen to be King 
 simply because of the beauty of his person, or because 
 of his superior stature. There were rare capacities, 
 royal gifts, " in the choice young man and goodly " 
 
 1 Green's "Short History of the English People," chap. x. 
 '-' See comment on Numbers xxiii. 23.
 
 THE CONCLUSION. 
 
 whom Samuel anointed to be " ruler over the Lord's 
 inheritance ; " capacities for the highest spiritual, as 
 well as for the highest political and military functions. 
 And once at least we know that he too saw visions 
 from the Almighty, and heard words from the Most 
 High. While the royal chrism was still fresh upon 
 him, when he turned his back to go from Samuel, as 
 he went down the hill to Gibeah, " behold, a company 
 of prophets met him, and the Spirit of God came 
 upon him," as it came upon Balaam, 1 " and he 
 prophesied among them." For a time he rose into 
 his truest and highest self. God gave him another 
 heart, and he became a new man. 2 Yet what was his 
 after life but a long rebellion against the God who 
 had thus exalted him, until the Spirit of the Lord 
 departed from him, and an evil spirit troubled him ? 3 
 How low must he have fallen, how far from all 
 righteousness, who, after having known Samuel, the 
 grave and reverend founder of the schools of the 
 prophets, and after having himself received inspirations 
 from on high which quickened him to ecstasy, stooped 
 to the meanest, the most venal and imposture-ridden, 
 form of divination — a form so base and mercenary 
 that he himself had forbidden it on pain of death — 
 and consulted the witch of Endor, a poor wretch who 
 fooled and plundered rustics by her spells and incanta- 
 
 1 Num. xxiv. 2. 2 1 Sam. x. 1-13. 3 Ibid. xvi. 14 
 
 M
 
 i8 2 BALAAM. 
 
 tions, her mock apparitions, her ventriloquial illusions' 
 Yet, who that reads David's " Song of the Bow," his 
 elegy over the fallen king, can doubt the original 
 greatness of the man, or pronounce him a wholly 
 unworthy organ of the Divine Spirit ? But if Saul 
 were a prophet, why not Balaam ? 
 
 2. A second anomaly in the character of Balaam 
 by which we are staggered and perplexed is, that he 
 should be at once a good man and a bad : " a man of 
 God who, in the face of all threatening and allurement, 
 professed that he could not go beyond the word of the 
 Lord his God, to do a small thing or a great, and who, 
 in the teeth of his own most clamorous interests and 
 desires did consistently speak the words that God put 
 into his mouth ; and yet a man of God who was dis- 
 obedient to the word of the Lord/' who sought to 
 evade the duty with which he was charged, and, while 
 faithful to the letter of the Divine command, was 
 unfaithful to its intention and spirit. 1 And yet the 
 very words in which I have stated this anomaly 
 remind us of the unnamed Hebrew prophet 2 who, in 
 
 1 See pages 1, 2. 
 
 - 1 Kings xiii. Any one who reads this Chapter attentively will 
 rind many points of close similarity between the history of this 
 Prophet and that of Balaam, in his bearing before the hostile king, 
 in the predictions he uttered, in the very terms in which he refused 
 the reward offered him by Jeroboam, in his temptation and fall ; 
 while in the contemptible old prophet who lied unto his "brother," 
 and betrayed him to his death, he will recognise a far worse man
 
 THE CONCLUSION. 183 
 
 the days of Jeroboam, cried out against the altar at 
 Bethel : for he too delivered the message which God 
 had put into his mouth with the most splendid fidelity, 
 risking his very life, and yet could not be true to the 
 charge, " Eat no bread (in Bethel), nor drink water," 
 and lost his life, not by his fidelity to the Divine 
 command, but by his infidelity to it. It is he, and not 
 Balaam, who was originally described as " a man of 
 God who was disobedient to the word of the Lord." 
 
 And if Balaam is to be condemned as a sinner 
 above all men because, though he saw visions and 
 heard words from God, he nevertheless wanted to 
 curse the people he was bound to bless, and studied 
 how he might evade the spirit of the injunction he 
 had received from the Most High, what are we to say 
 to Jonah who first tried to flee from the presence of the 
 Lord rather than deliver the warning to Nineveh with 
 which he was charged, and then was " very angry " 
 with God because He did not destroy " that great 
 city in which were more than six score thousand little 
 children, and also much cattle," and who seems to have 
 thought less of the destruction of that vast multitude 
 of living men than of that of the quick-springing 
 sourd which sheltered his head from the heat of the 
 sun? Was not this a prophet of like passions with 
 
 than the son of Beor. Such a reader will do well to peruse also the 
 sequel of this strange story in 2 Kings xxiii. 15 20.
 
 BALAAM. 
 
 the other, as mean and selfish, but not as great, 
 although the son of Amittai was a Hebrew, and lived 
 in the light of a period nearly a thousand years 
 subsequent to that of Balaam ? 
 
 Nay, more : are Balaam and Jonah the only two 
 men, or even the only two good men, who, while 
 seeing and approving the better course, have taken 
 the worse ; who have left the path of righteousness to 
 fall into the pit of transgression ? Do none of us ever 
 attempt to evade the pressure of unwelcome duties and 
 commands, and seek how to take our own way and to 
 gratify our own desires without altogether breaking 
 with God and his law ? Is even that special device of 
 keeping a command in the letter, yet violating it in 
 the spirit, wholly unknown in what we justly call "the 
 religious world," since its denizens are at least as 
 worldly as they are religious, and may be equally 
 sincere both in their worldliness and their religion ? 
 We have only to recall men whom we ourselves have 
 known to find many parallels to that combination of 
 good with evil qualities which we have observed in 
 Balaam ; we have only to examine our own hearts 
 to find a key to the anomaly which perplexes us in 
 him. 
 
 3. But let us pass from these general considerations, 
 and take up the two specific sins with which Balaam 
 is charged, the two special anomalies which have made
 
 THE CONCLUSION. 1S5 
 
 him an enigma to us ; and see, here again, whether 
 we cannot classify him, whether we cannot match him 
 with other prophets as favoured and yet as faulty as 
 himself; whether even we cannot find in ourselves 
 the very complexities which puzzle us in him. 
 
 One of the sins brought home to him with extra- 
 ordinary force and bitterness in the New Testament 
 Scriptures is his venality. And it is impossible to 
 study his career, and to note his ardent love and 
 admiration of righteousness, yet not be struck with 
 surprise and shame at discovering that he loved the 
 wages of unrighteousness, and was capable of prosti- 
 tuting his rare and eminent gifts for hire. Still, do 
 we not find this same strange and pitiful combination 
 of piety and covetousness in Jacob, who was surnamed 
 Israel, " the Prince with God," and from whom the 
 whole seed of Abraham have derived their name, and 
 perhaps something more than their name? No candid 
 student of his history can deny that, even from the 
 first, Jacob shewed a singular appreciation of spiritual 
 things, a singular ambition for spiritual primacy and 
 honour. Nor can any man who accepts the Bible 
 record of him doubt that dreams and visions of the 
 most ravishing beauty, pregnant with the most 
 profound spiritual intention and promise, were vouch- 
 safed him ; or that, at least when he blessed his sons 
 from his dying bed, his eyes were opened to behold
 
 BALAAM. 
 
 things that were to befall them and their children 
 years and centuries after he himself had been gathered 
 to his fathers. Even the oracles of Balaam do not 
 surpass the long series of dooms and benedictions 
 which Jacob was then moved to utter. 1 Yet what 
 was his whole life but, on the one side, a constant 
 endeavour to enrich or secure himself at the cost of 
 others, by superior craft or superior force ; and, on 
 the other side, a Divine discipline by which that 
 worldly and grasping spirit was chastened out of him, 
 in order that his genius for religion might have free 
 play? 
 
 And, again, who can deny that this love of money, 
 this covetousness which is idolatry, this selfish and 
 grasping spirit, is of all sins that which always has 
 been, and is, most common and prevalent in the 
 Church, and even among sincerely religious men ? 
 It clothes itself with respectability as with a garment, 
 and walks often unrebuked, often flattered even and 
 admired, in almost every assembly of the saints. 
 How many of us are there who, if we love righteous- 
 ness, also hanker after the wages of unrighteousness, 
 after the opulence, the gratifications, the success which 
 can only come to us through a selfish and worldly, i.e., 
 a sinful life ! No transgression is more common than 
 this among spiritual men, though none is more fatal 
 1 Genesis xlix.
 
 THE CONCLUSION. 187 
 
 to the spiritual life, since none renders a man more 
 impervious to the rebukes of conscience or the warn- 
 ings of the Word and Spirit of God. 
 
 Or take that other and grosser crime which we have 
 seen brought home to Balaam, the sensuality that 
 made the foul device by which the early innocence of 
 Israel was debauched, familiar, or at best not impos- 
 sible to him. Is it difficult to find a parallel to that ? 
 It would not be fair, though many would think it fair, 
 to cite the example of David's well-known sin ; for no 
 sin was ever more deeply repented than his, as few 
 have been more terribly avenged. But think of 
 Solomon ; think of the beauty and promise of his 
 youth. Recall his choice of a wise and understanding 
 heart above all the luxuries of wealth and all the 
 flatteries of power. Read his wonderful prayer when 
 he dedicated himself and all the resources of his 
 kingdom to the service of Jehovah, and invoked a 
 blessing on all who at any time and from any place 
 should turn to the Temple and call on the name of 
 the Lord. And then remember that this most re- 
 ligious king, this great prophet who " spake three 
 thousand proverbs and whose psalms were a thousand 
 and five," 1 to whose heart God gave a largeness like 
 that of the sea, 2 sank into the very sin of sensual 
 idolatry with which Balaam betrayed Israel, suffering 
 1 1 Kings iv. 32. - Ibid. iv. 29.
 
 1 88 BALAAM. 
 
 his wives and concubines to turn away his heart from 
 the Lord his God, till at last he fell from his harem 
 into his grave, an unloved tyrant, a jaded voluptuary, 
 and probably a believer whose faith was shot through 
 and through with a pessimistic scepticism. 
 
 Nor is this craving for sensual indulgence one of 
 those defunct sins against which we need no longer 
 strive. After covetousness, in its more or less pro- 
 nounced forms, no sin is more common than this even 
 in the Church ; though this, not being a respectable 
 sin, cannot be carried to such lengths or be so openly 
 pursued. 1 
 
 These, indeed, are the two sins against which we 
 are most constantly warned in the New Testament; 
 and it is both curious and instructive to mark that be- 
 tween these two sins the writers of the New Testament 
 see an occult connection, as if they were close neigh- 
 bours, however far they may seem to stand apart, twin 
 transgressions, although they wear so little likeness to 
 each other. St Paul ranks the sensual and the 
 covetous in the same category more than once, 2 and 
 
 1 It is curious to note that eveu in the first uninspired homily 
 of which we have any record, the so-called " Second Epistle of 
 Clement," the church of Corinth (in the second century) is rebuked 
 for so "holding the essential sinfulness of matter as to deny the 
 resurrection of the body, and to minimise the sinfulness of fleshly 
 lusts." And no one can have forgotten the severity with which St 
 Paul rebuked their fathers for the selfsame sin. 
 
 - 1 Cor. v. 10, and vi. 9.
 
 THE CONCLUSION. 189 
 
 hardly ever warns us against uncleanness without 
 immediately adding a warning against covetousness j 1 
 and the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, 2 after 
 bidding us honour the bed undefiled, instantly adds, 
 " Be ye free from the love of money, content with 
 such things as ye have." But if there be this occult 
 connection between these two forms of self-pleasing, 
 we need not be surprised to find both in the man in 
 whom we find one of them ; while, if even Solomon, 
 to whom " the Lord had appeared twice," command- 
 ing him " concerning this very thing, that he should 
 not go after other gods," 3 nevertheless suffered many 
 strange women to turn away his heart after many 
 strange gods, we cannot much wonder that in a far 
 ruder age, and under far less pure and happy con- 
 ditions, Balaam did not keep himself unspotted by 
 this transgression. 
 
 I am not unaware that we rarely find so many 
 anomalies, so many " jarring contrasts of incompatible 
 qualities " in a single character as we have discovered 
 in that of Balaam ; nor do I wish to forget that we 
 have had to look in many quarters to discover cases 
 parallel with his. It is no part of my duty, or of my 
 aim, either to make light of his transgressions, or to 
 contend that there is no problem to solve before we 
 
 1 Eph. v. 3; Col. iii. 5. 2 Heb. xiii. 4, 5. 
 
 :! 1 Kings xi. 9, 10.
 
 i 9 o BALAAM. 
 
 can frame any reasonable estimate of the man. That 
 a man so great in virtues and gifts should fall into 
 vices so vulgar and glaring must always, I hope, re- 
 main in some measure a mystery to us. But I sub- 
 mit that in thus comparing him with Jacob and 
 Solomon, with Saul and Jonah, we do, to a large 
 extent, discover the class to which he belongs, and 
 reduce our problem to more practicable dimensions. 
 For these too were men of rare and eminent gifts, 
 gifts which, as Browning says, " a man may waste, 
 desecrate, yet never quite lose ;" they were men 
 chosen by God for distinguished and honourable 
 service, men who were moved, taught, and chastened 
 by his wise and holy Spirit ; and yet, among them, 
 they display the very vices and disgrace themselves by 
 the very transgressions which we recognize and 
 deplore in him. 1 And taking him for all in all, 
 remembering and making due allowance for his age, 
 his blood, his breeding, his temptations, I for one 
 should hesitate to pronounce him a worse man on the 
 whole than Saul, or Solomon, or Jonah. They had 
 
 1 "Is there not reason to doubt whether a natural predisposition 
 to the cardinal virtues is the best outfit for the prophet, the artist, 
 or even the preacher ? Saints from of old have been more readily- 
 made out of publicans and sinners than out of Pharisees, who pay 
 tithes of all they possess. The artist, the writer, and even the 
 philosopher, equally need passion to do great work ; and genuine 
 passion is ever apt to be unruly, though by stronger men eventually 
 subdued." — Morison's " Macaulay," p. 57.
 
 THE CONCLUSION. 191 
 
 advantages denied to him. He had disadvantages — 
 defects of will and taints of blood, a bias of hereditary 
 habit, a license of custom, a force of temptation — un- 
 known to them. If God could use and inspire them, 
 why should He not call and inspire him ? If God 
 could make large allowance for them, and chasten 
 them from their sins, and make their hearts perfect 
 with Him before all was done, why should Balaam be 
 " cast as rubbish to the void " ? Why may not the 
 same just and merciful God have long since clothed 
 him in the righteousness which he loved and desired, 
 chastening him, in this world and in the next, from 
 the taints which marred a character in much so hisrh 
 and noble, and not suffering a soul so capable and 
 precious to perish everlastingly ? 
 
 To the ordinary reader of the Bible, who has not 
 carefully observed how graciously, and for what high 
 ends, God condescends to use even the most imperfect 
 and unlikely instruments, the main difficulty of this 
 narrative springs, I suppose, from the fact that the 
 pure Spirit of God came upon and possessed a man in 
 whom there was so much that was impure, opening his 
 eyes on visions so far-reaching, quickening in him 
 powers so rare, and lifting him to the conception of a 
 moral ideal so lofty. They can understand that, as 
 we read in the Book of Wisdom (vii. 27), " Wisdom 
 in all ages, entering into holy souls, maketh friends of
 
 192 BALAAM. 
 
 God and prophets ;" but they are staggered at the 
 thought that this holy and divine Wisdom should 
 enter into souls not holy, or even unholy. That 
 difficulty has been in great part removed, I trust, by 
 the cases I have already cited. But that it may be 
 removed altogether, that it may be made clear and 
 indubitable that God does deign to employ and 
 inspire men far worse than Balaam, it may be worth 
 while to refer to the gifts conferred upon the members 
 of the Corinthian Church in Apostolic times, and to 
 cite an instance which will put an end to all doubt. 
 
 The Corinthian converts were not by any means 
 the pure and sinless persons we are apt to imagine all 
 the members of the primitive Church to have been. 
 They indulged themselves in a license which St Paul 
 had to rebuke with unsparing severity, admitting to 
 their fellowship licentious and covetous men, 1 wrang- 
 ling about meats, shewing off their gifts in church with 
 emulous vanity, pouncing greedily on the food spread 
 on their common table, capable even of being 
 " drunken " at the supper of the Lord. 2 And yet St 
 Paul says of them 3 that, when they came together, 
 every one of them had a psalm, or a teaching, or a 
 revelation, or a tongue, or an interpretation ; and 
 implies that they possessed among them all the gifts 
 of the Spirit, — words of wisdom and knowledge, in- 
 
 1 1 Cor. v. 11 ; vi. 15-20. - 1 Cor. xi. 21. s Ibid. xiv. 26.
 
 THE CONCLUSION. 193 
 
 spirations of truth, the faith which removes mountains, 
 power to heal, power to rule, power to work miracles, 
 power to prophesy. 1 
 
 Yet even this is nothing as compared with the 
 case of Caiaphas, the High Priest. It is almost im- 
 possible to conceive a worse man than the bad bold 
 ecclesiastic who wore the robes of Aaron and sat in 
 Moses' chair. It is on him mainly that we must lay 
 the sfuilt of the Crucifixion, of the death of Him who 
 knew no sin but went about doing good. And yet 
 when this bad bold priest stood up in the hesitating 
 Sanhedrin, and said, with a scorn he took no pains to 
 conceal : " Ye know nothing at all, nor consider that it 
 is expedient that one man should die for the people, and 
 that the whole nation perish not " ; we are expressly 
 told : " And this spake he not of himself, but being 
 high priest that year, he prophesied, — prophesied that 
 Jesus should die for that nation, and not for that 
 nation only, but that he might also gather into one 
 the children of God who were scattered abroad.'" 2 So 
 that the divinest prophecy of all time fell from lips as 
 foul as any that ever breathed ! 
 
 And why should we marvel at this grace and con- 
 descension as at some strange thing ? We should 
 rather take comfort from it and hope. Does not the 
 Spirit of God strive with the spirit of every man, 
 1 1 Cor. xii. 10. " John xi. 49-52.
 
 194 
 
 BALAAM. 
 
 however guilty and depraved he may be, quickening 
 in him pure memories and aspirations, gracious 
 impulses and motions, seeking by all means to redeem 
 him to the love and pursuit of righteousness ? What 
 hope would there be for us, what hope for the world, 
 if God put his pure Word and his cleansing Spirit 
 only into hearts already clean ? Would his Word 
 dwell in our hearts, or his Spirit abide with us ? 
 Instead of marvelling at the grace shewn to Balaam, 
 and to men even more sinful than he, it behoves us 
 rather to adore that grace, and to draw from it the 
 inspiration of a hope that He who sitteth above the 
 heavens, and in whose sight even the heavens are not 
 pure, will come down and dwell in us if only, despite 
 our manifold offences against Him, we are of a humble 
 and a contrite spirit. 
 
 It might well seem as if it were impossible to carry 
 our argument further ; but there is still another stage 
 to which we must pursue it, and that perhaps the 
 most satisfactory and conclusive of all. For all the 
 men who have hitherto been cited — Jacob, Saul, 
 Solomon, Jonah — belong to a dubious class ; there is 
 not one of them whose character and fate have not 
 been long and often disputed. I myself have heard it 
 gravely discussed from the pulpit whether it were 
 possible to entertain any hope of Solomon's ultimate
 
 THE CONCLUSION. 195 
 
 salvation ; and few of the " evangelical " clergy would 
 hesitate, I suppose, to pronounce a damnatory verdict 
 on Saul, although he was a king : Jacob is condemned 
 every day by every bluff John Bull who prides him- 
 self, not always with sufficient reason, on his honesty 
 and straightforwardness ; and Jonah, who was perhaps 
 as irritable as poets are said to be, is set down as but 
 a sorry and peevish specimen of the prophetic race, to 
 whom judgment may have long since been meted out 
 in the very measure in which he himself meted it to 
 others. I do not hold with these verdicts. Those 
 who do hold with them seem to me to be singularly 
 destitute of the historical spirit, and still more 
 strangely forgetful of what they themselves are like. 
 But they are common verdicts. And to me it appears 
 that our argument would gain much in force if, 
 instead of disputing these verdicts, we were to con- 
 sider the examples of men who are universally 
 recognized as good and great, but who, nevertheless, 
 had to endure that very conflict between the good and 
 evil qualities of their nature which we have marked 
 in Balaam. They may have conquered, and he may 
 have been defeated in the strife ; but, none the less, 
 if that strife was obviously waged in their hearts, 
 waged so strenuously and bitterly and long that even 
 to them the issue of the conflict must often have 
 seemed uncertain, we cannot be amazed that this
 
 196 BALAAM. 
 
 heathen diviner should have been torn by it, or even 
 that he should have succumbed to the powers of evil ; 
 he cannot any longer seem to us either an impossible 
 monster or an insoluble enigma. 
 
 And it is only too easy to adduce such examples. 
 I suspect, indeed I am sure, that, if only we could 
 read their inner history, we should find that all the 
 best men who have ever breathed, save only He who 
 was more than man, were agitated, and often all but 
 overthrown, in this inward war. Few men are more 
 generally recognized as heroically good and great, and 
 none, I suppose, has been favoured with a greater 
 abundance of the visions and revelations which have 
 altered the face and the heart of the world, than St 
 Peter and St Paul. Yet not only did these two 
 chiefest apostles share in the agony of this mysterious 
 conflict, but in their history we can trace its main 
 crises, and note how it extended to the very close of 
 their career. 
 
 Take, first, the case of St Peter. Was not he a man 
 of two minds, and therefore unstable in his ways — 
 unfaithful to the Word with which he was charg-ed, 
 and to the Spirit that inspired and sanctified him ? 
 The story of that fall, in which one of the boldest of 
 men played the coward, one of the truest turned false, 
 one of the best plunged into an almost incredible sin 
 is too well known to need comment. And yet who
 
 THE CONCLUSION. 197 
 
 would not hesitate to say that Balaam sinned more 
 heinously when, against the clear dictate of conscience, 
 and the direct command of God, he tempted Israel 
 into the licentious idolatries of Midian, than did the 
 Apostle who, iu the hour of his Master's utmost need, 
 denied all knowledge of Him, all concern in Him, 
 with oaths and curses. 
 
 " Yes," it may be said, " but Peter bitterly repented 
 and nobly retrieved that sin. When once it was for- 
 given him, he became a new man, unfaltering in his 
 loyalty to Christ, steadfast as the Rock after which 
 he was named. You never catch him tripping again, 
 never find him untrue to the Spirit of Christ when 
 once that Spirit had descended upon him at Pente- 
 cost." That, I know, is the common impression of 
 him, and is often heard from men who profess to be 
 students of the New Testament, — to the mere amaze- 
 ment of all who really study it. For not only has 
 this conception of St Peter no warrant in the New 
 Testament Scriptures ; it is absolutely contradicted 
 by them. Many years after Pentecost, St Peter sinned 
 against the Holy Ghost as heinously as he had before 
 sinned against the Son of Man. By an express and 
 immediate vision from Heaven, he had been taught to 
 call no man, whether Gentile or Jew, common and un- 
 clean. Obedient to the heavenly vision, he had 
 preached the Gospel to Cornelius the centurion, and 
 
 N
 
 BALAAM. 
 
 admitted him, uncircumcised, into the Church. He 
 had even persuaded the Christian Jews at Jerusalem 
 to grant this liberty to all their non-Jewish brethren. 
 And yet more than fifteen years after Pentecost, when 
 he came to Antioch, though at first he entered into 
 full brotherly communion with the Gentile converts of 
 that city, afterward, when certain men came from 
 Jerusalem with whom he wished to stand well, " he 
 drew back and separated himself " from them, " fear- 
 mo- them that were of the circumcision." St Paul 
 had to withstand him to the face ; to tell him that he 
 stood self-condemned : and even to launch at this 
 inspired Apostle the tremendous charge of "hypocrisy," 
 which our Version mercifully modulates into " dis- 
 simulation." l 
 
 Could we have any clearer proof than this that St 
 Peter was still a man of two minds, still capable of 
 betraying the cause of his Master and of sinning 
 against the Spirit of all truth and holiness ? that the 
 brave man might still play the coward, and fear men 
 more than God ? There may be no truth in the 
 legend which relates how, to escape the persecution of 
 Nero, St Peter fled from Rome, but had hardly got be- 
 yond the Gate when he met the Lord carrying his 
 cross, and asked Him, " Lord, whither goest Thou ? " 
 and that Jesus replied, "I go to Rome, to be crucified 
 
 1 Gal. ii. 11-14.
 
 THE CONCLUSION. 199 
 
 again, for thee." Whereupon the Apostle returned 
 to Rome, was seized, tried, condemned to the cross ; 
 but, at his own request, was crucified head down- 
 wards, because lie held himself unworthy to die in the 
 same manner as the Lord. But if the legend be not 
 true, it is well invented ; it is characteristic of the 
 man, of the cowardice with which his ardent courage 
 was streaked, of the noble humility and devotion with 
 which he retrieved the errors into which he fell. The 
 legend may not be true ; but the story of his 
 " hypocrisy " at Antioch, of his sin against the Spirit 
 by whom he was inspired, of his disobedience to the 
 revelation vouchsafed him, is true past all doubt. 
 And that being so, how can we accept Balaam's 
 disobedience, his sin against the Spirit which came 
 upon him, as fatal to all claim to a sincere good- 
 ness ? 
 
 Take, secondly, the case of St Paul. The seventh 
 chapter of his Epistle to the Romans, which was 
 written when he was nearly sixty years of age, when 
 therefore he had been a Christian and an Apostle 
 some twenty years, has always been read in an auto- 
 biographical sense : i.e., it has been assumed that in 
 this Chapter St Paul generalized the fact of his own 
 spiritual experience. Nor do I see how it can be read 
 in any other sense when we remember the constant 
 allusions which he makes to an inward conflict in him-
 
 2oo BALAAM. 
 
 self resembling that depicted here. For here he tells 
 us only a little more at large what he elsewhere con- 
 fesses again and again : viz., that within the narrow 
 continent of his single being he found two laws, two 
 minds, two men at strife, insomuch that he could not 
 do the good he would, but the evil which he would 
 not that he did ; and groans, a wretched captive, to 
 be delivered from the body of this death. And it is 
 not a little remarkable that St Paul, of all men, 
 should have been conscious of this terrible struggle, 
 and should have depicted it more fully and more 
 pathetically than any other of the Apostles ; for as we 
 study his life, though we constantly detect the signs 
 of this struggle in it, even the eyes of malice can 
 detect no proof that he at any time yielded to the 
 inferior law, mind, or man which he recognized in 
 himself. If, as he confesses, he did the evil he hated, 
 yet which of us has discovered any evil in him, albeit 
 the workings of that mighty and passionate spirit are 
 laid bare to us with an unparalleled frankness, and we 
 know him more intimately than we know any of our 
 neighbours \ Yet he knew himself even better than 
 we know him ; and if he was conscious of this inter- 
 necine war in which he was perpetually being worsted 
 and " brought into captivity to the law of sin," how 
 can we possibly doubt that God may inspire and 
 employ in his service men in whom the spirits of good
 
 THE CONCLUSION. 
 
 and ill wage a constant strife ? How can we possibly 
 deny that there may have been much that was 
 genuinely good in Balaam, although there was much 
 also that was unquestionably evil ? 
 
 By another autobiographical confession of about the 
 same date, though it refers to an earlier period in his 
 history, St Paul enables us to run the parallel closer 
 still. In his Second Epistle to the Corinthians he 
 tells us that, fourteen years before he wrote to them, 
 he was caught up into the third heaven, into Paradise, 
 where he saw visions so glorious, and heard such 
 " unwordable words," that, in his ecstasy, he could not 
 be sure whether he was in the body or out of it. But, 
 he goes on to say that, lest he should be overmuch 
 lifted up by the exceeding greatness of these revela- 
 tions, there was given him a stake in the flesh, a 
 messenger of Satan sent to buffet him. So intolerable 
 was the agony of this trial, that he thrice besought the 
 Lord that it might depart from him. Yet it did not 
 depart. He had to rest, and he was able not to rest 
 only but to rejoice, in the assurance, " My grace is 
 sufficient for thee : for strength is made perfect in 
 weakness." x It is impossible for us to read these 
 verses without being reminded of the abundance of 
 visions and revelations vouchsafed to Balaam, and of 
 the well-nigh unutterable words he heard from the 
 Almighty, 2 and of the danger of being lifted up by 
 
 1 2 Cor. xii. 1-10. 2 See especially Num. xxiv. 15-24.
 
 202 BALAAM. 
 
 them, in which, as we have seen, he stood, 1 — his 
 exposure to the assaults of an evil spirit when the 
 Spirit of God departed from him. And if he fell in 
 the strife in which St Paul overcame, if the grace 
 conceded to him did not prove sufficient for him, if in 
 his case strength, so far from being made perfect, was 
 lost in weakness, still it behoves us to remember the 
 immense disadvantage at which he stood as compared 
 with the Apostle of the Gentiles : for then we shall 
 frankly admit that his position was most perilous — a 
 position in which even St Paul himself might have 
 fallen ; we shall confess that there may have been 
 much that was good in the man, although he suc- 
 cumbed to, instead of defeating, the messenger of 
 Satan sent to buffet him. His very elation at being 
 so highly favoured among men may have contributed 
 to his fall ; and the abundance of his revelations may 
 have lifted him up only to cast him down. 
 
 On the whole, then, I think we may claim to have 
 classified our Prophet — to have brought him within 
 the recognized limits of humanity. We have found 
 similar combinations of contradictory qualities in seers 
 of whom we have a right to expect more than from 
 him — in Jacob, in Saul, in Solomon, in Jonah— but 
 who succumbed to the selfsame temptations before 
 Avhich he fell ; while even in St Peter and St Paul we 
 
 1 See comments on Num. xxiv. 3, 4, and 15, 16.
 
 THE CONCLUSION. 
 
 have seen the very conflict between good and evil in 
 which he was engaged, although, by the grace of God, 
 they overcame in that inward strife in which he was 
 overthrown. And hence we cannot admit that he lies 
 beyond either the limits of our humanity or the pale 
 of our sympathies. He was a man of like passions 
 with us, spirit of our spirit as well as flesh of our flesh, 
 though he was at once greater and baser, better and 
 worse, than most of us. We recognize our own image 
 and likeness in him, though in him its lines are both 
 larger and darker than they are in us ; and we can 
 hail him as a comrade in the war in which we too are 
 enlisted, although we have to sigh over him as he lies 
 defeated, and in some measure disgraced, upon the 
 field which we still occupy. He is not altogether 
 unworthy a place in our ranks, or even of the great 
 Captain of our warfare. He did valiant service once, 
 and stood with splendid fidelity in a post of honour 
 and of danger which many of us might have deserted. 
 And if at last he proved a recreant and a traitor, we 
 must not forget either the noble service he once 
 rendered, or that he was not drilled and led and 
 sustained as we are now. If we should prove faithful 
 to the last, it will not be because we are better and 
 braver than he, but because we come of a purer strain, 
 or have enjoyed a more auspicious training, or have 
 received a more sufficient grace. And hence we may
 
 204 BALAAM. 
 
 look back on him with pity, not unmixed with 
 admiration, if it be also touched with shame and 
 regret. 
 
 Lest, however, in thus classifying Balaam I should 
 suggest to some of my readers a far larger and more 
 difficult problem than that of his personal character, 
 it may be well to add a few words — and they shall be 
 very few — on a question which is sure to present 
 itself, sooner or later, to every thoughtful mind. The 
 question, which looks very difficult and perplexing at 
 first, is this : How comes it to pass that God should 
 have selected for special gifts and special service men 
 who were capable and guilty of such heinous faults 
 and crimes as Jacob, Saul, David, Solomon, Jonah, 
 and even Peter himself ? Difficult as the question 
 seems, the answer to it is very simple, very obvious, 
 and springs straight from facts with which we are all 
 familiar. For, obviously, no man has ever told widely 
 and deeply on the world in whose nature there was 
 not a certain largeness, force, volume. Men con- 
 spicuous for energy, capacity, power, are the only 
 instruments by which God can move and raise the 
 p-reat mass of their fellows. But is it not human to 
 err ? Are not even the best men still human ? And 
 if great men err, will they not err greatly, and shew 
 the same force of character when they do evil that
 
 THE CONCLUSION. 205 
 
 they bring to the doing of that which is good 1 If, 
 then, God elects for the service of the world the only 
 men who are able to serve it, must He not inevitably 
 choose men who, when they sin, will sin heinously and 
 conspicuously, and who can be chastened from their 
 sin only by the heavier strokes of his rod, only 
 by the sharper and more steadfast discipline of his 
 providence ? 
 
 It only remains that we gather up and lay to heart 
 the lesson of this great yet wasted life, — a life not 
 wholly wasted, however, if it serve to teach us and our 
 fellows lessons of wisdom and humility, and help to 
 make us more faithful in few things than Balaam was 
 in many. For though we see no vision and utter no 
 oracle, we lie open to his temptations, and may fall 
 into his sins. We may combine his love of righteous- 
 ness with his hankering after the wages of unrighteous- 
 ness, or his admiration of holiness with his unclean 
 addiction to sins of the flesh. We must be in danger 
 of falling into these sins, despite our piety, or we 
 should not be so often and gravely warned against 
 them. 
 
 Many lessons are suggested by this narrative, and 
 at some of them we have already glanced ; but none 
 springs from it so directly as this warning against that 
 combination of covetousness or sensuality with religion 
 
 o
 
 206 BALAAM. 
 
 of which evert the Church has yielded so many 
 examples. This was the warning which Bishop 
 Butler drew from the story of Balaam and which was 
 in his mind when, in his measured and weighty 
 phraseology, he affirmed that it is impossible to justify 
 men's " so strong attachment to this present world. 
 Our hopes and fears and pursuits are in degrees 
 beyond all proportion to the known value of the 
 things they respect." And, as he reminds us, there 
 are many to whom this excessive addiction to the 
 gains and gratifications of the present time would be 
 impossible did they not beguile their conscience with 
 religious equivocations, subterfuges, palliations, and 
 partial regards to duty, like those of Balaam. Like 
 him, they are apt to protest too much, and to do too 
 little ; to boast of the fidelity with which they meet 
 some part of the demands which God makes upon 
 them — their scrupulous observance of the Sabbath to 
 wit ; or their devotion to the worship and sacraments 
 of the Church, their diligence in reading the Bible, 
 the orthodoxy of their belief, or even their breadth 
 of thought, their wide toleration, their superiority to 
 creeds and forms ; while yet they neglect the 
 weightier matters of the law, and do not make it 
 their chief and ruling aim to do justice, to shew 
 mercy, and to walk in a constant dependence and 
 fellowship with God.
 
 THE CONCLUSION. 207 
 
 They will not openly rebel against Him. Oh, no ! 
 But " they are for making a composition with the 
 Almighty." These commands which jump with their 
 inclinations, or which do not too severely cross their 
 inclinations, they will sedulously observe. " But as 
 to others ; why, they will make all the atonements in 
 their power ; the ambitious, the covetous, the dissolute 
 man, each in a way which shall not contradict his 
 respective pursuit ; " but they will not wholly renounce 
 the special sin they have a mind to, or, at best, they 
 will not give it up at once, but wait for a more 
 convenient season. 
 
 Yet herein, he continues, they stand self-condemned, 
 like Peter at Antioch. For no man is so bad but that 
 " after having had the pleasure or the advantage of a 
 vicious action " — or course of action — " he would 
 choose to be free from the guilt of it," and die the 
 death of the righteous, even if he has not been at the 
 pains to live their life. And this of itself " shews a 
 disturbance and an implicit dissatisfaction in vice. If 
 we inquire into the grounds of it, we shall find that it 
 proceeds partly from an immediate sense of having 
 done evil, and partly from an impression that this 
 inward sense will, one time or another, be seconded by 
 a higher judgment, upon which our whole being 
 depends." It is to quell or allay this inward dissatis- 
 faction that men palter and equivocate with them-
 
 2o8 BALAAM. 
 
 selves, and would fain persuade themselves that they 
 may atone for moral delinquencies by attention to 
 religious duties ; forgetting that religion itself is 
 but a means to which a pure and complete morality 
 is the end. 
 
 This is, substantially, the lesson which one of the 
 sagest of Englishmen, who had carefully studied the 
 character of Balaam, drew from the story before us. 
 Nor do I see how we are to improve upon it. It is 
 the true moral of our narrative, and only needs such 
 modification as we may each make for himself, to 
 come home to every man's experience and conscience 
 and heart. 
 
 TL'UNBILL AND Sl'KAlt-. I'KI.M I.K-. 1 I'INiaKc; li. 
 
 i,
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 AA 000 808 328