Week 8 Numbers 18-34
Balaam appears suddenly. He’s a kind of diviner with a reputation for extrasensory capabilities, a guy variously skilled in secrets of the supernatural world. But the Moabite king hires him to do one thing only: speak an incantation against Israel. Curse them with harm and misfortune.
As far as the bible’s circle of people-to-respect goes Balaam is way out in the border lands. Maybe not as totally persona non grata as it’s possible to be, but definitely a non grata-grade guy.
And Balaam had no special commitment to the Lord. He was a shaman with access to a range of magical phenomena – maybe demonic powers, maybe ancestral spirits or otherworldly enchantments, like that. His toolbox might have held as many deities and spirits as a Percy Jackson-novel. The fact that a spirit spoke to Balaam probably didn’t surprise him. Whether he knew just whose voice it was is something different.
But the Lord made him his spokesman, even though Balaam was an unwilling voice (I get the feeling he blessed Israel against his own judgment, his own preference, and his own financial interests).
So far in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers the Lord is mostly (a) very interested in Israel, and (b) very interested in good-quality people. That much I’ve gotten used to. So Numbers 22, 23, and 24 is a reminder that the Lord is under no restrictions about who or what kinds of people he works with. The Lord engages whoever, for whatever his own reasons are.