The Case of the Non-Jewish Prophet

This week’s Torah reading of Balak (Numbers 22:2-25:9) is named after the king of Moab, who sets its plot in motion. Its true protagonist, however, is the prophetic hit man Balaam, who fatally accepts Balak’s commission and proceeds to listen to his royal client rather than to the source of his genuine prophecies—who is of course the Lord.

I confess I’ve always had a soft spot for Balaam and could not see why the ancient rabbis were so unkind to him. In talmudic literature he is always “Balaam the wicked,” described as a one-eyed man with a limp and a crooked soul. But if you compare him with, say, the American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, who likewise put a bit of himself into any commercial work he did but also had a fatal weakness for the lure of fame and fortune, Balaam seems completely our contemporary.

Upon closer examination, however, the rabbinic tradition is itself ambivalent, torn between recognizing Balaam as a genuine prophet and denigrating him not just because he isn’t a Jew but because he exploits his gift to attack Israel.