The theology of the balaam oracles: a pagan diviner and the word of god

ience as well as in theory, the more meaningful and precious such

language becomes to us still? Is it an accident that we still use

such phrases as 'walking with God' to convey a depth of spiritual

experience which is far removed from primitive idolatry? To the

men [and we may add, to the women!] of the Old Testament God

was real. They knew Him. And the clearest way they could ex-

press it was in the language of human personality and activity, not

in cold metaphysical jargon. All honour to them! If we knew God

better, we might find our tidy theological formulations less than

adequate. God has a way of breaking loose. [Final emphasis

added.]²

Similarly, though in a slightly different approach, van Imschoot

explains the purpose of anthropomorphisms.

Nevertheless, since the God of the Old Testament is a person-

al being, totally different from and sovereignly raised above all

other beings, and since He is, as we shall see later, eternal,

immutable, all-powerful, omnipresent, it is clear that He is

neither corporeal nor material. The innumerable anthropomor-

phisms of the sacred books do not prove the contrary; they are

meant to throw light on the personal character of the living God

who manifests Himself to men as God the redoubtable, butt also

as God the accessible and compassionate.<sup>3

l</sup> France, The Living God, pp. 18-19.

² Ibid., p. 19.

³ Van Imschoot, Theology of the Old Testament, I, 49; cf.

pp. 27-28.

392

"God has a way of breaking loose!" Tie is the Mighty!

this instance the word El is the subject of the exclamation, "What God has

done!" Since the act in view is one of might, of power, of strength, the

use of E1 is altogether fitting. "Look!" Balaam says, "Look! at what the

Mighty has accomplished!" And this is the whole point of the Balaam

incident, after all. The Balaam episode does not center on Moses, for he

is unaware of the events as they transpire. It may be said to center on

the donkey only in the minds of little children. Balak is an observer, and

Balaam is only a mouthpiece. The story in a word: Look at what the

Mighty has done for His own!

The fifth use of El in our corpus is in the third oracle (Num.

24:3). Here the word El is in parallel construction with the word Shaddai

(on which see below); and both are used to describe the source of Balaam's

revelation. The element of power, might, and majesty all have their

proper role.

The sixth use of El in our passages is in Numbers 24:8, which

is a restatement of 23:22, but with development. In this verse, there is

the description of the ferocity of the animal. It is to be observed in both

this and the former passage, the use of the horns (= strength) is for the

people. That is, the strength and power that is theirs is in their Mighty

One.

393

This is very similar to the fifth, except that another element is added:

El yon (on which, see below). The final use of El is in the seventh oracle

(Num. 24:23). The question is asked, Who can live except the Mighty One

ordain it? The Mighty One is sovereign! This is the climax of the or-

acles. This is the meaning of this grand designation of the sovereign God.

It is in Him that we live and. move and have our very being. He is the

Mighty One. The distribution of the word El throughout the oracle corpus

serves to show the unity of the oracles corpus as well as to demonstrate

the theological concern encased therein: Israel's God is the Mighty One.

The precise meaning of the word ,Shaddai perhaps is settled

only in the mind of Jacob who writes, "the explanation of Shadday as "the

mountain one' can be regarded as established."¹ For many scholars this

word is so debated that they transliterate rather than attempt to translate

it. Good, for instance, admits, "I am not sufficiently satisfied with. any

meaning ascribed to it to attempt an English equivalent."²

For the commonly proffered etymological associations, one

The Westminster Press, 1965), p. 201, n. 5.

394

relay consult the standard lexica. The Koehler-Baumgartner Lexicon or-

(1) That the word is cognate with Akkadian sadu, "mountain,"

and thus would mean "mountain deity."

(2) That the word is related to the Hebrew word dwa, "breast "

and would have meant (in the early period?) "maternal mother

goddess of many breasts."

(3) That the word is related to the Hebrew word VT , "to de-

vastate, to despoil, to deal violently, " and would mean "the

violent."

(4) That the word may be taken in the meaning given by the Rabbis:

-w plus yDa, and meaning "self-sufficient."

(5) That the word may be taken a s in the LXX, "pantokrator," and

compared with Arabic XXXXX.

Finally, the conclusion is given in the lexicon that "no explanation

is satisfactory.”²

Albright has strongly advocated the association of Shaddai

with the Akkadian word for "mountain. " An early statement to this effect

is as follows:

The older name, Shaddai, has recently been identified with a

North-Accadian word for "mountaineer," in the sense of "the One

of the Mountains" The name may have been brought with them to

Palestine by the ancestors of the Israelites, many centuries be-

fore. Since YHWH is always closely associated with the mountains,

especially in poetic theophanies, this interpretation (which is phon-

395

Recently, George E. Mendenhall has advanced the theory that

the word Shaddai is in fact a topographical designation, and hence the full

expression El-Shaddai would mean "the El of Shaddai," much as El-Bethel

means "the El of Bethel."²

If a decision were to be made on the basis of present evidence,

the association with "mountain" seems to be the most compelling. This

has been adopted by Jacob and Albright, as noted above, and by Beegle.³

Eichrodt seems to be of the same opinion, though he is more cautious.⁴

Cassuto does not advance an etymology for the word, but relates it to the

concept of fruitfulness in passages such as Genesis 17:1, 2, and Exodus 6:3.^5
1 Albright, "Recent Discoveries," p. 35. See also by the same

writer, The Biblical Period from Abraham to Ezra: An Historical Survey;

Harper Torchbooks, The Cloister Library.(New York: Harper & Row, Pub-

lishers, 1963), p. 13; Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan (Garden City, N.Y.

Doubleday & Company, 1968), pp. 188-89.

² George E. Mendenhall, "The Abrahamic Narratives," (unpub-

lished paper presented in seminar session at the International Congress of

Learned Societies in the Field of Religion, Century Plaza Hotel, Los An-

geles, California, September 4, 1972. John Van Setters of the University of

Toronto, one of the respondents to the paper, took Mendenhall to task for ad-

vancing this theory without presenting his evidence more fully. Fohrer sug-

gests the meaning, "El of the plain," History of Israelite Religion, p. 64.

³ Beegle, Moses, The Servant of Yahweh, pp. 24, 67.

⁴ Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, I, 81.

⁵ Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Exodus, pp. 78-79.

396

himself.¹

In the light of the considerable disquiet concerning the mean-

ing of this designation for deity, it may be prudent simply to transliterate

the term, than attempt to translate it. Motyer summarizes the use of

Shaddai in Genesis in a very helpful manner:

Fourteen years at least had elapsed Gen. 16:16-17:1 be-

tween the original promise of descendants to Abram and the time

when next God spoke to him about the matter. The passing of the

years, and the manifest failure of man-made alternatives to God's

declared plan [Gen. 16:5, 12; 17:18], had the effect of under-

lining human powerlessness. It is in this context that El Shaddai

reveals Himself, and this same characteristic--ability to transform

situations of human helplessness- -is found in other passages also.

Thus, when Jacob sends his sons back to Egypt, committing them

to the capricious power of the ruler of the land before whom they

are helpless, he commends them to El Shaddai [Gen. 43:14]. In

the same spirit, later, Jacob identifies El Bethel with El Shaddai

IGen. 48:3 ] , for what could be more hopeless than the situation of

Jacob as a homeless wanderer and outcast. And again, in the

blessing, the dying patriarch invokes blessing of Joseph [Gen. 49:25]

in the name of Shaddai, for of all the brothers he had gone lowest

into human despair and weakness, and was the outstanding illustra-

tion of El Shaddai's transforming power. El Shaddai, then, is, first

of all, the God who takes over human incapacity and transforms it.

But also there is a consistency of suggestion as to the method of

His working. The three patriarchs are either named or renamed by

El Shaddai [Gen. 17:5, 15, 19; 35:10, 11]. El Shaddai, therefore,

performs His wonders on the basis of a miracle worked on the in-

dividuals primarily concerned; the transformed human situation is

pecting the association of the word with Akkadian sadu, he says: "Accor-

ding to the last hypothesis sadday would mean the lofty God, the Most High,

or the Lord, or perhaps the "God mountain" that is to say, the secure

refuge, just as He also is the rock [Dt 32:4; Ps 18:32].

397

tent feature of the revelation of El Shaddai is that He covenants to

the patriarchs boundless posterity and inheritance of the land of

promise [Gen. 17:5-8, 19, 21; 28:3, 4, 13 (cf. 48:3); 35:9-13;

47:15-19] . This is in accord with the previous two points: it was

the claim of El Shaddai to be powerful where man was weakest, and

lie exerts this claim supremely by promising to an obscure and

numerically tiny family that they should one day possess and pop-

ulate a land which, in their day, was inhabited and owned by people

immeasurably their superiors in number and power.¹

It would appear that the observations of Motyer have relevance

to the use of Shaddai in. our oracles. This is particularly true in terms of

)ds first observation, that Shaddai is the God who takes over human in-

capacity and transforms it. Certainly the use of Shaddai by Balaam is

sitting when the pagan diviner says he is one who now "sees the vision of

Shaddai"--when Balaarn, the spiritual degenerate, is given visions and

vistas of the working of Yahweh for His own. In our passages the word is

used twice in a similar fashion. Shaddai it, used as part of the intro-

duction of both the third and fourth oracles (Num. 24:4, 16). The first of

these has Shaddai used, in parallel construction with El, and the second

has it parallel with both El and Elyon.

It will be remembered that the word Shaddai is the term con-

trasted to Yahweh. in the passage in which the latter word was given its

new significance to Moses (Exod. 6:3). Shaddai is there stated to be a

term particularly fitting for the kind of knowledge the Patriarchs had of
¹ Motyer, The Revelation of the Divine Name, pp. 29-30.

398

afield. If the proper reference is to tadu, the term Shaddai may have

meant "strong like a mountain," or "high like a mountain."¹

Elyon [NOyl;f,]

Elyon is used by Balaam one time, in the introduction to the

fourth oracle (Num. 24:16). In this passage it is parallel with E1 and

Shaddai. There is a suggestion that Philo of Byblos knew the term Elyon.

This is made on the basis of a citation in Eusebius in which Philo is said

to have known the term Elioun kaloumenos upsistos,² a term of wide dif-

fusion, but perhaps not always used of the same god. Jacob suggests that

we are not to equate this god mentioned by Eusebius with the El Elyon of

the biblical passages. Some have argued for the use of Elyon as an appel-

lation of Baal,³ but the word Elyon does not seem to.be listed in the stan-

dard Ugaritic lexica. One might wish to equate the Hebrew word Elyon

with the Ugaritic term Alyon, but the two words come from entirley

Job, and forty-eight times in the entire Old Testament. Cf. Lisowsky,

Gray, The Legacy of Canaan: The Ras Shamra Texts and Their Relevance

pp. 157-58.

399

different roots.¹

"upper." It is also used some thirty-one times as a designation

(or deity, meaning "Most High." The majority of the latter (twenty-one)

are to be found in the Psalms. The term is used with the meaning "Most

High" four times in Genesis 14, when Abraham and Melchizedek meet. The

usage in Numbers 24:16 is unique to the book, but the word is used also in

the Song of Moses (Deut. 32:8), which is contemporary to the Balaam or-

acles.² In addition to these usages in the Hebrew Old Testament, we may

cite the use of the word four times in the Aramaic section of Daniel (Dan.

7:18, 22, 25, 27).

Following a suggestion made by Bruce K. Waltke, we may ob-

serve that the term NOyl;f, is used frequently in connection with Yahweh's

sovereignty over all the nations, and is hence preeminently fitting when

used in the introduction to the last oracle in which Israel's relationship to

the nations is detailed.³ Some examples of the usage of this term may be

cited for a demonstration of this factor.

by some writers. Allis, The Old Testament: Its Claims and Its Critics,

pp. 258, 304-305. The Ugaritic word Alyon comes from the root 1'y, "to

prevail;" the Hebrew root hlf "to go up" is the root for the term NOyl;f,

For the latter, cf. BDB, p. 751.

² This statement is made on biblical, not comparative, grounds.

³ Personal correspondence with the author, January 12, 1973.

400

Then the sovereignty, the dominion, and the greatness of all the

kingdoms under the whole heaven will be given to the people of

the saints of the Highest One [i' 31 '1Y ] His kingdom will be an.

everlasting kingdom, and all the dominions will serve and obey

Him. [N. A. S. B]

Psalm 47:2-5 [Eng. vv. 1-4];

O clap your hands, all peoples;

Shout to God with the voice of joy.

For Yahweh Most High [NOyl;f,] is to be feared,

A great King over all the earth.

He subdues peoples under us,

And nations under our feet.

He chooses our inheritance for us,

The glory of Jacob whom He loves. [N.A. S. B.]

Psalm 83:3, 14-19 [ Eng. vv. 2, 13-18]:

For, behold, Thine enemies make an uproar;

And those who hate Thee have exalted themselves.

O my God, make them like the whirling dust;

Like chaff before the wind.

Like fire that burns the forest,

And like a flame that sets the mountains on fire,

So pursue them with Thy tempest,

And terrify them with Thy storm.

Fill their faces with dishonor,

That they may seek Thy name, 0 Yahweh.

Let them be ashamed and dismayed forever;

And let them be humiliated and perish,

That they may know that Thou alone, whose name is Yahweh,

Art the Most High [NOyl;f,] over all the earth.

[ N. A. S. B.]

The word NOyl;f, bespeaks the sovereignty of Yahweh over the

nations. He is the NOyl;f, of Israel; indeed He is the NOyl;f, of all the

earth. This was the one who revealed His word through the pagan diviner

Balaam.

The use of the phrase "the shout of a king"[ j`lm,m, tfaUrt;U]

in Numbers 23:21 is a "first" in Pentateuchal theology. For this is the

first clear occurrence of the descriptive title "King" to Yahweh. That it

is to be regarded as applying to God in our passage is evident from the

parallel: "Yahweh his God is with him."

Feinberg writes:

The term king jlm is not a personal name for God, but is

rather a general title applied to God. Its attribution to God as a

name is common to all Semitic languages, as is the idea of His

[sic] authority over man. It is first ascribed to God during the

Mosaic period (Ex. 15:18; Num. 23:21; 24:7, 8; Deut. 33:5.). . .

Exodus 15:18 speaks of God "reigning, " although Numbers 23:21

(cf. Deuti 33:5) is the first time this title is attributed to God.¹

Now how very striking this is! Here is the first application

of the term King to Yahweh, and it comes from the mouth of a pagan out-

sider, one who was not in the "kingdom" but was still under the power of

the King, the King of Glory. The concept of the king relates us at once to

the covenant, which Meredith G. Kline aptly has titled, "The Treaty of

the Great King."² It relates us as well to the coming Kingdom which will

be the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies of God's reign on the
¹ Feinberg, "The Doctrine of God," p. 102.

2 See above, p. 333, n. 2.

402

earth. The first clear expression of Yahweh as King comes from Balaam.

33.5: "And He was king in Jeshurun."

Summary

This extensive survey of Balaam's employment of the appell-

the subject by past and recent authorities. It has been demonstrated that

the employment of the terms Yahweh and Elohim may not be used as a

criterion for source analysis in the present passage. The ever-enigmatic

Balaam has used the name of God, Yahweh, and several appellatives of

God in a very purposeful manner to display clearly grand concepts con-

cerning the greatness of the person of the God of Israel.

We may now turn to the concept of Heilsgeschichte in general,

and then to the specific Heilsgeschichte of the Balaam oracles.

The Role of Heilsgeschichte

Arnold M. Goldberg, in his recent commentary on the Book of

Numbers, writes, "Fur den christlichen Leser enthalt dieses Buch erst

einmal eine Epoche der Heilsgeschichte, eine Epoch der Geschichte, die

von Adam, dem gefallen Menschen, auf Jesus hinfuhrt" I emphasis added.¹

(Dusseldorf: Patmos-Verlag GmbH. , 1970), p. 136.

403

And of course, he is correct. The Christian reader must read a book such

of a remote people of antiquity. The Book of Numbers is another element

in the Heilsgeschichte of the Old Testament, and the Balaam materials are

best understood in that perspective.¹

Yet the mere mention of the word Heilsgeschichte raises innum-

gable problems to the orthodox theist, the biblicist. The spectre of the

distinction between Historie and Geschichte raises its serpentine head.

Questions of epistemology, history, and faith--are all involved.

The German word Heilsgeschichte means "holy history, " or

"salvation history." A presentation of its use, particularly in its more

negative aspects, is given by Ramm in his Handbook.

(1) Heilsgeschichte is first of all a reaction against the old

Protestant orthodoxy that made Scripture the ultimate datum of the

Christian religion. According to this view, the ultimate datum is

holy history, and the significance of Scripture is that it is the rec-

ord of that more ultimate datum. Scripture is the witness to the

datum, not the reality itself.

(2) To those who hold the idea of Heilsgeschichte, a measure

of critical treatment of the Scripture is allowable. The antithesis

between criticism and theology is false. The Scriptures may be sub-

jected to a measure of criticism but never to the destruction of the

essential fabric of holy history.

in Numbers is not in listing the events, but in giving their spiritual mean-

ing. Here we see not merely a group of people struggling toward independ-

ence, but God working with them to bring them to the point where He wants

them to be." The Book of Numbers: A Study Manuel, "Shield Bible Study Series" (Grand Rapids. Taker Book House, 1972), p. 11.

404

tally the document of holy history. This means that there is a :limit

to scientific historiography. God acts in history and therefore holy

history will have elements that are indigestable to the scientific his-

torian. But this is the character of holy history--to be historical