Numbers23chapter 23

Numbers 23:1-3

Balaam opens with sevens, seven altars and seven oxen and seven rams, raised on a high place of Baal where Balak had taken him at 22:41. John Gill observes that Israel had one altar and that the patriarchs raised one at a time, so the multiplied altars belong to Balaam's own trade rather than to the worship of the God he is about to meet. Albert Barnes reads his going aside to a bare height as watching for an omen he could interpret by the rules of his art, and 24:1 later says he stopped seeking enchantments.

Numbers 23:4-6

God meets him, and the first thing Balaam says is an inventory of what he has spent, seven altars with a bullock and a ram on each. Matthew Henry reads that as a man presenting a bill and expecting the gift to buy the answer. Verse 5 gives the sentence the whole chapter runs on, the Lord put a word in Balaam's mouth, which repeats at 23:16 and which Balaam himself had promised Balak at 22:38. The prophet for hire becomes a channel for words he did not choose.

Numbers 23:7-8

He takes up his parable, and the first oracle opens by quoting the contract back, come curse me Jacob, and come defy Israel. The answer in verse 8 is the Abrahamic promise turned on the man who paid for it, since Genesis 12:3 had said God would curse him that curseth the seed of Abraham. Deuteronomy 23:5 says the Lord turned the curse into a blessing, and Joshua 24:10, Nehemiah 13:2 and Micah 6:5 all recall this hill as the day it happened. Aram and the mountains of the east put his home far to the northeast, which Albert Barnes identifies with the Aram of the two rivers named at Deuteronomy 23:4.

Numbers 23:9

The vantage was chosen for cursing and it produces a description. The people shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations, states from outside what Exodus 19:5 and Leviticus 20:24 had stated from within, that this nation is severed from the rest. Matthew Henry adds that Israel held that standing until they mingled among the heathen, which Psalm 106:35 says of them and which Numbers 25:1 records happening two chapters after this hillside.

Numbers 23:10

Who can count the dust: The dust of Jacob answers Genesis 13:16 and 28:14, where the seed was promised as the dust of the earth, so a hired seer recites the covenant back to Moab. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown take the fourth part of Israel as one of the four camp standards of Numbers 2, which makes him count a quarter of the camp and find it past counting. Then he asks for the end of a righteous man without asking for the life, and Numbers 31:8 records how he did die, killed with the sword among the kings of Midian.

Numbers 23:11-12

Balak paid for a curse and heard a blessing, and his question is the question of a man who thought he had bought an outcome. Balaam's reply is exactly true, and he had already said it at 22:38 before he left home, and he took the fee and came. John Gill reads the answer as a show of scruple from a man under compulsion.

Numbers 23:13-15

Balak's remedy is a shorter view. He wants Balaam to see the utmost part of the camp and not the whole of it, on the theory that a smaller sight will yield a smaller word. Albert Barnes renders the field of Zophim as the field of watchers, a lookout on the ridge of Pisgah. This is the Pisgah where Deuteronomy 34:1 sets Moses to see the land he will not enter, so two men stand on one hill and look at the same people on opposite errands.

Numbers 23:16-17

The second meeting uses the words of the first, met him and put a word in his mouth, so the mechanism holds although the address has changed. Balak stands by his burnt offering again and asks what the Lord has spoken. John Gill notes that verse 6 said all the princes of Moab and that this verse says only the princes of Moab, and he passes on the older reading that some of them had gone home.

Numbers 23:18-19

The line the chapter is known for comes out of the mouth of a man being paid to reverse it, and it answers Balak's whole method. Moving a prophet to a fresh hill assumes God can be worked on the way a man is worked on, and verse 19 says the assumption fails at the root. 1 Samuel 15:29 says the same of the Strength of Israel, while 15:11 and 15:35 in that same chapter say the Lord repented that he had set up Saul, and both sentences stand in the canon with readers holding them together in different ways. Malachi 3:6, Titus 1:2 and Hebrews 6:18 carry the line forward.

Numbers 23:20-21

Albert Barnes points out that the Hebrew of verse 20 reads simply I have received to bless, with commandment supplied by the translators. Verse 21 says God has not beheld iniquity in Jacob, and it is said of the camp that murmured through chapters 11 to 14 and that joins itself to Baal-peor at 25:3. Matthew Henry takes the word of idolatry, absent since the calf, and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown take it as an apostasy not yet so complete that God would abandon them. The shout of a king uses the word Leviticus 23:24 uses of the silver trumpets, the sound that announced the King present in the camp.

Numbers 23:22-23

brought them out of Egypt: The oracle grounds Israel's strength in what God did, God brought them out of Egypt, and the figure of the horn follows from that. Adam Clarke says plainly that the animal behind the strength of an unicorn is uncertain and that the one-horned creature of heraldry has no counterpart in nature, and later readers commonly take the reem as the wild ox. Verse 23 puts Balaam's own trade out of work, since Albert Barnes reads the two words as augury and soothsayer's token, the terms of the craft that Joshua 13:22 uses when it calls Balaam the soothsayer.

Numbers 23:24-26

Genesis 49:9 gave the lion to Judah alone, and here the whole people rises as the lion. Albert Barnes suggests the omen Balaam was watching for may have been a real lion coming up out of the Jordan thicket, which would set the picture before his eyes before it reached his mouth. Balak's request now falls from a curse to silence, neither curse them at all, nor bless them at all, which is a man asking for less because he has stopped expecting more.

Numbers 23:27-30

The third station is the top of Peor, and the name carries the rest of the book. Baal-peor is the god of that hill, Numbers 25:3 says Israel joined himself unto Baal-peor in the chapter after next, and Numbers 31:16 says the counsel behind it was Balaam's. He is standing on the ground where his advice will accomplish what his oracles cannot. Seven altars go up a third time and the offering is made again, and chapter 24 opens with Balaam giving up the search for enchantments.