Balaam and Phinehas

Q. Give a brief review of the respective ministries of Balaam and Phinehas (Numbers 22–26). How can we connect the dots from their experience that would have meaning in our day ?

To speak about Balaam first, he is one of those fascinating characters in the Old Testament who are outside the covenant community but who somehow seem to know the true God. However, for us today, Balaam unfortunately provides a negative example of disobedience rather than a positive example of obedience.

Balaam’s story basically illustrates the truth of what Paul wrote to Timothy: “Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.” In Balaam’s case, many others were pierced with grief as well.

The details are clear in the story of Balaam. The Moabite king Balak feels threatened by the Israelites, who are passing through his territory, so he sends messengers to Balaam to hire him to curse the Israelites. Balaam consults God and refuses. But Balak then sends distinguished officials back to Balaam to tell him, “Do not let anything keep you from coming to me, because I will reward you handsomely,” Balaam, having already been told “no” by God, asks God again if he can go. God works through the situation, allowing Balaam to go but inspiring him to bless the Israelites rather than curse them. Balak, furious, tells Balaam, “Now leave at once and go home! I said I would reward you handsomely, but the Lord has kept you from being rewarded.” And the Bible says, “Then Balaam got up and returned home, and Balak went his own way.”

That seems like the end of the story. But we find out later in the Bible that it is not. The very next thing that the book of Numbers says is, “While Israel was staying in Shittim, the men began to indulge in sexual immorality with Moabite women,  who invited them to the sacrifices to their gods. The people ate the sacrificial meal and bowed down before these gods. So Israel yoked themselves to the Baal of Peor. And the Lord’s anger burned against them.” (The context shows that this last sentence means that God sent a plague to kill the Israelites.) It turns out that this was Balaam’s idea. Wanting the money that Balak had promised him, Balaam advised him to ruin Israel by having the Moabite women entice the Israelite men into immorality and idolatry. Balaam knew that this would make God furious and turn God against the Israelites—whom God had just inspired him to bless!

It is hard to overstate the degree of moral culpability here. Knowing that God wants to bless people but instead leading them into grave disobedience so that God will punish them is something that an avowed enemy of God and God’s people would do. But Balaam’s motivation was not so dramatically diabolical. It was insipidly banal: He wanted money. If we want to connect the dots from his experience and see what meaning it has for us today, we can see it as an illustration of the mandate from another New Testament admonition, at the end of Hebrews: “Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, for God has said, ‘Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.'”

By the way, the ongoing biblical narrative records what happened to Balaam after the end of his story in Numbers. As the book of Joshua records how the various tribes took possession of their shares of the land, it describes how the tribe of Reuben took its share and mentions in passing, “The Israelites also killed Balaam the son of Beor.”

Phinehas is a foil for Balaam in the story, that is, a character who does the opposite thing. In this case, that means he does the right thing. However, the way in which he does it is shocking for contemporary readers, and so we struggle to understand how it really is the right thing.

God tells Moses that the Israelites who led the others into immorality and idolatry with the Moabite women should be executed. This occasioned grief and repentance. But “while Moses and the whole assembly of Israel were weeping at the entrance to the tent of meeting, an Israelite man brought a Midianite woman into the camp right before their eyes. When Phinehas son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron, the priest, saw this, he left the assembly, took a spear in his hand, and followed the Israelite into the tent. He drove the spear into both of them, right through the Israelite man and into the woman’s stomach. Then the plague against the Israelites was stopped.”

We can certainly appreciate the zeal that Phinehas felt for the purity of the Israelites’ devotion to God, but we must also wonder about the violence that he used. The question of violence in the Old Testament is a deep and difficult one for thoughtful readers of the Bible; I discuss aspects of it in several posts on this blog, and I would refer you to those posts for a fuller discussion. For our present purposes, let us say about Phinehas that he illustrates a burning zeal for purity of devotion to God, and in that specific regard he provides a positive example for us today. We would certainly not advise anyone today to kill another person because that person was being unfaithful to God. But we would advise people to recognize that devotion to God takes precedence over kinship and friendship relations, and certainly over money.

Maybe the best take-home message for us today is to contrast the tawdry banality of Balaam’s motivation with the single-minded zeal of Phinehas’s motivation, even as we do the challenging work of cultural translation to bring that message from the ancient inspired text into our own world.