1 interest. His home is beyond the Euphrates, amongst the mountains where the vast streams of Mesopotamia have their rise. But his fame is known across the Assyrian His position. desert, through the Arabian tribes, down to the very shores of the Dead Sea. He ranks as a warrior chief (by that combination of soldier and prophet, already seen in Moses himself) with the five kings of Midian. He is regarded throughout the whole of the East as a Prophet, whose blessing or whose curse is irresistible, the rival, the possible conqueror of Moses. In his career is seen that recognition of Divine Inspiration outside the Chosen People, which the narrowness of modern times has been so eager to deny, but which the Scriptures are always ready to acknowledge, and, by acknowledging, admit within the pale of the teachers of the Universal Church the higher spirits of every age and of every nation. His character. 3 His character, Oriental and primeval though it be, is delineated with that fineness of touch which has rendered it the storehouse of theologians and moralists in the most recent ages of the Church. Three famous divines have from different points of view drawn out, without exhausting the subtle phases of his greatness and of his fall. The self-deception which persuades him in every case that the sin which he commits may be brought within the rules of conscience and revelation ; the dark shade cast over a noble course by standing always on the ladder of advancement, and by the suspense of a worldly ambition never satisfied; 5 the combination of the purest form of religious belief with a standard of action immeasurably below it: these have given to the story of Balaam, the son of Beor, a hold over the last hundred years which it never can have had over any period of the human mind less critical or less refined. One feels a kind of awe in the gradual preparation with which he is brought before us, as if in the foreboding of some great catastrophe. The King of the civilised Moabites unites with the Elders, or Sheykhs, of the Bedouin Midianites, to seek for aid against the powerful nation who (to use their own peculiarly pastoral image) 'licked up all that were round about them, as the ox licked up the grass of the field' of Moab. Twice, across the whole length of the Assyrian desert, the messengers, with the Oriental bribes of divination in their hands, are sent to conjure forth the mighty seer from his distant home.2 In the permission to go when, once refused, he presses for a favourable answer, which at last comes, though leading him to ruin, we see the peculiar turn of teaching which characterises the purest of the ancient heathen oracles. It is the exact counterpart of the elevated rebuke of the Oracle at Cuma to Aristodicus, and of the Oracle of Delphi to His journey. Glaucus.3 Reluctantly, at last he comes. The dreadful apparition on the way, the desperate resistance of the terrified animal, the furious determination of the Prophet to advance, the voice, however explained, which breaks from the dumb creature that has saved his life, all heighten the expecThe first in- tation of the message that he is to deliver. When Balaam and Balak first meet, the short dialogue, preserved not by the Mosaic historian but by the Prophet Micah, at once exhibits the agony of the King and the lofty conceptions of the great seer. 'O my people, ' remember what Balak, King of Moab, consulted, and what 'Balaam, the son of Beor, answered. "Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the High God? 'Shall I come before Him with burnt offerings, with calves of a 'year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, terview of Balaam and Balak. 6 4 1 'or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my first'born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of 'my soul?" So speaks the superstitious feeling of all times, but, in a literal sense, of the Royal house of Moab, always. ready, in a national crisis, to appease offended Deity by the sacrifice of the heir to the throne. The reply is such as breathes the very essence of the Prophetic spirit, such as had at that early time hardly expressed itself distinctly even within the Mosaic Revelation itself. He hath showed thee, O man, 'what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to 'do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy 'God?' The divinations. If this is, indeed, intended to describe the first meeting of the King and the Seer, it enhances the pathos of the struggle which continues through each successive interview. Sometimes the one only, sometimes both together, are seen striving to overpower the voice of conscience and of God with the fumes of sacrifice, yet always failing in the attempt, which the Prophet had himself at the outset declared to be vain. The eye follows the Two, as they climb upwards from height to height along the extended range, to the 'high 'places '2 dedicated to Baal, on the 'top of the rocks,'-' the 'bare hill' close above it,—the 'cultivated field '4 of the Watchmen (Zophim) on the top of Pisgah,5-to the Peak where stood the sanctuary of Peor, that looketh towards the waste.' It is at this point that the scene has been caught in the well-known lines of the poet— O for a sculptor's hand, That thou might'st take thy stand, Thy wild hair floating on the eastern breeze, Fix'd on the desert haze, As one who deep in heav'n some airy pageant sees. 1 Comp. 2 Kings ii. 27 (see Mr. Grove on 'Moab' in Dict. of the Bible). This coincidence seems of itself sufficient to show that this passage of Micah vi. is not, as some have supposed, a merely general statement, but is intended for the dialogue between Balaam and Balak. 2 Bamoth, Num. xxii. 41. 3 Shefi, ib. xxii. 3, 9. Sadeh, ib. xxiii. 14. * Num. xxiii. 28; Deuteronomy, xxxiv. 1. In outline dim and vast, The giant forms of Empire on their way They tow'r and they are gone. Yet in the Prophet's soul the dreams of avarice stay.1 Behind him lay the vast expanse of desert extending to the shores of his native Assyrian river. On his left were the red mountains of Edom and Seir opposite were the dwellingplaces of the Kenite, in the rocky fastnesses of Engedi ; further still was the dim outline of the Arabian wilderness, where ruled the then powerful tribe of Amalek; immediately below him lay the vast encampment of Israel, amongst the acacia groves of Abel Shittim,-like the watercourses 2 of the mountains, like the hanging gardens beside his own river3 Euphrates, with their aromatic shrubs, and their wide-spreading cedars. Beyond them, on the western side of Jordan, rose the hills of Palestine, with glimpses through their valleys of ancient cities towering on their crested heights. And beyond all, though he could not see it with his bodily vision, he knew well that there rolled the deep waters of the great sea, with the Isles of Greece, the Isle of Chittim,—a world of which the first beginnings of life were just stirring, of which the very name here first breaks upon our ears. These are the points indicated in the view which lay before the Prophet as he stood on the Watchers' field, on the top of Pisgah. What was the vision which unrolled itself as he heard the words of God, as he saw the vision of the Almighty, 'falling '4 prostrate in the prophetic trance, 'but having the ' eyes' of his mind and his spirit 'open'? The outward forms still remained. He still saw the tents below, goodly in their array; he still saw the rocks, and hills, and distant desert: but, as his thought glanced from height to height, and from valley to mountain, the future fortunes of the nations who dwelt there 'Keble's Christian Year, 2nd Sunday after Easter. 2 Nachal, Num. xxiv. 6. 3 Nahar, Num. xxiv. 6. The same word as in 1 Sam. xix. 24. Comp. Jos. Ant. iv. 6, § 12. unfolded themselves in dim succession, revolving round and from the same central object. From the midst of that vast encampment he seemed to discover streams, as of water flowing to and fro over the The Vision. valleys, giving life to the dry desert and to the salt sea.1 He seemed to descry a form as of a mighty lion2 couched amidst the thickets, or on the mountain fastnesses of Judah, 'and none should rouse him up ;' or the wild bull '3 raging from amidst the archers of Ephraim, trampling down his enemies, piercing them through with the well-known arrows of the tribe. And yet again, in the more distant future, he saw, but not now,'-he 'beheld, but not ' nigh,'-as with the intuition of his Chaldean art,-'a Star,' bright as those of the far Eastern sky, 'come out of Jacob;' and 'a sceptre,' like the shepherd's staff that marked the ruler of the tribe, 'rise out of Israel :' and then, as he watched the course of the surrounding nations, he saw how, one by one, they would fall, as fall they did, before the conquering sceptre of David, before the steady advance of that star which then, for the first time, rose out of Bethlehem. And as he gazed, the vision became wider and wider still. He saw a time when a new tempest would break over all these countries alike, from the remote East,-from Assur, from his own native land of Assyria, 'Assur shall carry thee away captive.' But at that word another scene opened before him, and a cry of horror burst from his lips: 'Alas! who shall live when God doeth 'this ? ' For his own nation, too, was to be at last overtaken. For ships shall come from the coast of Chittim,'—from the island of Cyprus, which, as the only one visible from the heights of Palestine, was the one familiar link with the Western world —and shall crush Assur, and shall crush Eber "the people 'beyond the Euphrates," and he also shall perish for ever.' We know not to what precise events these words allude. Num. xxiv. 7, as in Ezek. xlvii. 8. 2 Ibid. 9. The earliest known event to which this could refer was the attack on the colony of Sardanapalus in Cilicia by the Cyprian fleet. Euseb. Chron. Arm. i. pp. 26, 27. For the general relations of Cyprus to the East, see Sharpe's Egypt, i. 193. |