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Come and study the Holy Scriptures with us as Fr. Stephen DeYoung teaches verse-by-verse on the podcast The Whole Counsel of God. Fr. Stephen holds a Ph.D. in Biblical Studies and is an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

chapter 24 now when balaam saw it was good before the lord to bless israel he did not go as he was accustomed to do to see he could find omens but he turned and set his face toward the desert so again if he was talking to the real god before why would he stop doing it now that that interpretation makes no sense sorry orthodox study bible right clearly he was not clearly he was talking to other spirits and at least balaib has figured out like why am i wasting my time i end up saying what what yahweh wants me to say anyway so he uses elohim through Moses, which could be gods, plural, it could be. So here, right, he is talking about, he's saying it's before the Lord, he's going to be before Yahweh to bless Israel. So he says, I'm not going to bother going and consulting, right? Then Balaam raised his eyes and saw Israel encamped according to their tribes and the spirit of God came upon him. Then he took up his parable and said, Balaam, the son of Baor, declares, the man who truly sees declares. Now, this is interesting. This one starts out differently. What's his excuse been the last couple of times? Hey, man, I'm the messenger. I'm just a go-between, right? So this one he starts with, no, this is me. This is Balaam. This is what Balaam says. This is what Balaam the seer says. The one who hears the sayings of God declares, the one who saw the vision of God in a dream, a revelation seen by him. how beautiful are your dwellings o jacob your tents o israel like wooded valleys offering shade and like gardens by the rivers like tents the lord pitched like cedars beside the waters a man shall come forth from his seed and he shall rule many nations and his kingdom shall be more exalted than gog and his kingdom shall increase okay so after he goes through the whole no this is me this time this is what i think right i'm blessed uh we go into a little bit of this future again right so we already had this lion thing set up and now we have a man right is going to come from him eventually who is going to rule many nations okay now this has to be this has to be We're in the Torah. But this has to be talking about the Messiah. Because David did not rule many nations. Solomon did not rule many nations. Solomon's son didn't even rule many tribes. So there wasn't a pillar in any of the kings.

Right. None of them ruled many nations. So this very clearly has to be a prophecy of what would come to be known as the Messiah. The reason I'm reiterating this is, our scholar friends, this whole Messiah idea is an idea that develops after David in the exile. They come up with this idea like, oh, David is going to come back or one of his descendants is going to come back and save us. Right? And just us. But that's not this. Even if you want to try and argue, despite a complete lack of evidence, that this was added after the exile, right? It still talks about him ruling many nations. It doesn't talk about him coming and restoring Israel. And you notice there's no mention here of Israel falling into disobedience and going into exile and coming back, right? And there are parts of the Torah that talk about that. Deuteronomy talks about that in detail. but there's nothing about that here which you would expect if this was being inserted right it was being inserted after the exile they would insert something about the exile in terms of the prophecy of this person coming so this is something that's here very early right this is one of the important things in the book of numbers remember way back when we did the introduction to numbers i was like nobody reads numbers but there's some good stuff in here this is this is one of those bits all right so this is very clearly a messianic prophecy if you put that together with the lion for the last one you've got someone from judah

God led him out of Egypt, and he has the glorious appearance of a unicorn. He shall consume the nations of his enemies and deprive them of their strength. He shall shoot the enemy with his missiles. I understand that the original meaning of missiles was different than what we think. But this translation, hypothetically, was done less than 20 years ago. Can we just say arrows? Javelins, if you want to be fancy. Now, here's another important bit. He lies down and rests like a lion, and like a lion's cub, who shall rouse him? Those who bless you are blessed, and those who curse you are cursed. Now, a couple parts of this. So we get the lion symbolism coming back, right? And a lion's cub, meaning this man who's going to come, who's going to rule the nations, who's going to conquer the nations, who's going to come from the tribe of Judah. and there is actually an icon that has this inscription and it is of jesus as an infant curled up and sleeping on a mat it's one of the more adorable icons frankly you don't hear that often i don't be adorable in the sense of adoration it's usually called like he who crouches like a lion like it's a reference to this and this verse is on there he lies down and rest like a lion like a lion's cub who shall rouse them and it shows infant jesus sleeping on a mat but then notice how those who bless you are blessed and those who curse you are cursed so the first time that we saw that phrasing was with abraham right when god made the promises to abraham he said those who bless you abraham will be blessed those who curse you will be cursed Now this is applied Who is this applying Who is the you here The you here is the person We were just talking about Right The man we were just talking about So let's talk about the Messiah Those who bless the Messiah will be blessed And those who curse the Messiah will be cursed Please explain this to your congressman And or senator this is about christ so obviously the original language there does not have the word unicorn has ox yeah yeah so uh most of and there's a reason for that that's actually a better translation than unicorn uh so what it actually has in the original it's referring to an arox you know what an arox is they're now extinct kind of halfway between an ox and a buffalo like a water buffalo yeah they're now extinct and so when the King James

Bible was being translated they didn't know exactly what an arox was that's where the whole tradition of translating it as unicorn came from they were like it's like the glory of unicorn well that must be some kind of fabulous beast some kind of fabulous creature and so they just went with unicorn as a fabulous creature and it's mythological creature but so ox is actually closer to what the original was getting at right but uh the rx because of its size and strength that was an image of sort of power right and authority and so that's the idea that's being right transmitted here if you look at the context that makes sense he has the glorious appearance of an arox right he'll consume the nations deprive them of their strength it's the idea of right this powerful powerful creature and to this day big game hunters will tell you the actual most dangerous animal try and hunt is a water buffalo they kill a lot more people we always think about lions and right you know yeah hippos hippos are like number two yeah but so yeah rx of the ancient world this is this powerful dangerous majestic sort of creature okay so now we get another big blessing and more of this prophetic about the future. Then Balak was angry with Balaam. Seriously, bro? Strike three. And he struck his hands together. He's not applauding. And Balak said to Balaam, I summoned you to curse my enemy. And look, you actually blessed him for a third time. Now, therefore, flee to your place. I said, I would honor you, but in fact, the Lord deprived you of glory, right? So this Yahweh you keep prophesying for, right? He's why you're not getting paid. Flee to your place means get out, right? And get out quickly because I am not happy. So Balaam said to Balak, did I not also tell your messengers whom you sent to me, saying, if Balak were to give me his house full of silver and gold I could not go beyond the Lord's word to do good or evil of my own will whatever the Lord may say this I shall speak so now indeed I am going to my place come I will counsel you counsel you as to what this people will do to your people in the latter days right so he says hey look man I told you guys to buzz off remember originally you had to cajole me i didn't want to come i didn't you know this you may be and

hey this is what happens right so he's like but i'll leave i'll leave i'll head home and he says why don't you walk with me for a minute and i'll tell you some more so now he's got some more coming right this is this is free bonus right he's not even getting paid for this one this is just so he took up his parable and said balaam the son of baor declares, the man who truly sees declares, the one who hears the sayings of God declares, and the one who knows the knowledge of the Most High, and who saw the vision of God in a dream, a revelation seen by him. I will show him, but not now. I bless him, but he is not near. A star shall rise out of Jacob, and a man shall rise out of Israel. He shall break in pieces the rulers of Moab, and plunder all the sons of seth okay so we get a little more now okay but now notice the parallelism here so the reason they have this as poetry is that the hebrew is actually poetic and the way hebrew poetry works it generally doesn't rhyme that's how our poetry at least the bad poetry i wrote when I was a disaffected, depressed teenager. All rhymed because it was bad. But so they didn't use rhyming. They sometimes used alliteration. So you can look at like Psalm 119 is structured around the Hebrew alphabet where all the lines start with the same letter. They do do that sometimes. But primarily, the primary structure of Hebrew poetry is that it's written in a series of parallelisms. right so sort of two lines that go together like couplets and those couplets take two primary forms one is called i'm going to use all the fancy words one is called synthetic parallelism right and synthetic parallelism that means you're both lines are saying the same thing but in different words so they sort of build on each other right sort of one reinforces the other or clarifies the other uh the other is dialectic parallelism which means they are opposites so an example of that would be you know the righteous man will flourish right like the cedars of lebanon but the wicked man will perish and be forgotten right so that's not saying the same thing that's saying right but there's still a couplet the wise man this the foolish man that right you know that kind of thing as opposed to so

this is synthetic parallelism right says a star will rise a star shall rise out of jacob and a man shall rise out of israel right so jacob and israel remember were two names for the same person right so these are directly parallel but one describes him as a star and one describes him as a man so what are stars in genesis and biblically right they're divine spirits right so here we have in this description of the Messiah right he is described as being both a divine being and a man we don't get the details of all that worked out right obviously I'm not saying this is the Council of Chalcene but we get an intimation of that right That this is not just a human who's going to be really good at making war or a really good king, right? But that this is... a divine man a man who is connected to heaven to the divine realm in a special way minimally and now right we also get the further detail that it's not just oh he's going to defeat and conquer the nations it's you in particular balak he's going to smash moab and notice also he says this is in the future this isn't right now this isn't even soon right this is you know at least 12 centuries potentially more right for this time that this is going to happen um but so there's already this idea of the messiah but that it is far off and that's why we don't see a lot about the messiah in the torah because what one of the numbers right Most of this text, when we read stuff that's not narrative, what's it been about? It's been about very practical stuff in the life of the people at that time, right? This isn't yet a practical thing for them. Remember, God said he would reveal it to them when the time came closer, right? This isn't going to happen while anybody involved is still alive, right, remotely. Generations and generations and generations later. So we don't need to go into detail about this, right? But it's still a reality, and it is still out there. Verse 18, Edom shall be his inheritance, and also his enemy shall be his inheritance. But Israel acts with strength. He shall rise up out of Jacob and destroy the survivors of the city. The city here, that's talking about not only Moab, but the Edomites catch some strays here. That they're also going to be conquered.

Now, we're going to see why this is so interesting. Because when we get into Deuteronomy, God doesn't have any problem with the Edomites. He doesn't want the Israelites fighting with the Edomites at this point. So again, we're leapfrogging into the distant future. Right? And so what we're getting here, in terms of what God is saying to Balak through Balaam, is this is way down the road, but this is talking about the destiny. What is the sort of the destiny of Israel? What is the destiny of Moab, right? Where are these two stories going? And the story of Moab is going to destruction, right? And so is Edom, by the way. They're not there yet, but that's where they're headed, where there is also this destiny coming for Israel. Right. Now, we know the rest of the Hebrew Bible. Okay, so the rest of the Old Testament. So Israel going to having the Messiah, right, and conquering the nations and all this. Is that going to be a nice straight arc? Nice upward arc? No, right? That's going to involve, that's going to go sort of up and then down for a long time. And a long time. And then even further down. And then, right, and then come back up. Which means that, at least potentially, because God is revealing this through Balaam to Balak, right, Moab's trajectory can change. This isn't implying necessarily that Moab was going to have an equally smooth downward arc. Things could change. Repentance could happen. And Edom's line of arc and Moab's line of arc are going to be very different, in fact. Edom is going to do pretty well for a long time, actually, and then fall. Whereas Moab is just going to be in a perpetual state of collapse for a long time until it finally does. So this is not destiny in the sense of like, this is what's predestined to happen, right? This is where everything's heading, ineluctably, because there's going to be, right? Now the Messiah is for sure, God knows that, he's going to come do that. But what's going to happen between this moment and the Messiah is up to Israel. Could have been a nice smooth upward arc, potentially. God knew it wouldn't be, but he didn't make it not be. Those are two different things. Then seeing Amalek, he took up his parable and said, Amalek was first of the nations, but their seed shall perish. Their seed shall perish, meaning they're going to get wiped out completely. There's not going to be an Amalek. We've already seen the Amalekites. Remember, God already said that they tried to wipe out Israel at Mount Sinai. then seeing the Kenites he took up his parable and said your dwelling is strong

and if you should put your nest in a rock and become dwellings of craftiness for Beor nevertheless the Assyrians shall take you captive so Assyrians is interpreting

Yeah, well, Asher is the city that the Assyrians were named after. So the Assyrians, the Assyrian Empire did not exist yet. And if you want to say again, this was put it after the exile. Well, they didn't exist anymore after the exile. But yeah, so the Kenites were living in part of Edom, essentially. Verse 23, then seeing Og, he took up his parable and said, now uh og's dead right og's dead so this isn't talking about og himself this is talking about this is talking about the area the region that northern region that we talked about how big how pagan it was oh oh who shall live whenever god may bring these things to pass now these things shall come to pass from the hand of the kiddians and they shall also maltreat asher and the hebrews but they themselves with one accord shall perish so do you guys have something other than kiddians right yeah mesopotamians the idea is this is this is pointing to the babylonians and one of the important things about this is that's a really obscure weird way to refer to babylonians so again if this is after the exile we know all about the babylonians you just refer to Babylon right you wouldn't bother with ever and and all this right so Balaam rose and departed and returned to his place Balak also went to his own place so some last comments on this last part right remember Balaam is called there we're going to destroy these Israelites on behalf of the Moabites, the Edomites, these other people who live in the transjordan. And what he ends up doing is not only blessing Israel and not only revealing the blessings that lie in the future for Israel, but here at the end, cursing all those people in the transjordan who tried to curse israel right so the whammy sort of gets reflected right back onto them um and this this is within the pagan understanding too that this is what this is a possibility right because we have in various cursing in various imprecatory texts uh texts that are involve curses that were either red or in some cases there were actually imprecation bowls were a thing for a while in the ancient Near East where you'd have a clay bowl and they would write the curse like around the rim like in a circle and you would read it and then smash it. The idea being, you know, the person you're whammying, right?

It's going to get smashed like the pottery. but we have so we have a bunch of these texts and some of them are not actually like putting the evil eye or putting a curse on somebody some of them are to like return to sender curse it so like if you thought someone had cursed you you could go to someone like balaam or someone right and be like how do i like reverse the curse how do i like rebound the whammy and they would give you something you know like an incantation whatever to do back that would send it back on the person who hit you with it right and so this is sort of that at a grand scale right not only does israel get blessed but the curse that they tried to put on israel ends up rebounding right rebounding on them so there is there would have this would have been something balak would have understood right that just happened to him but we're gonna end here for tonight um i don't know where we are time wise but when we come back next time uh we will find out that balak does not give up so easily he's you know he's done with balaam uh for now but uh but he he has some ideas and balaam was involved in some of those ideas but We'll talk about that more next time.

Listen next time as Father Stephen DeYoung continues his study of the scriptures on the whole counsel of God. Father Stephen's email address is wholecouncil at ancientfaith.com That's wholecouncil at ancientfaith.com Thank you.