Biblion Bible Commentary
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A Star Will Come Out of Jacob
Numbers 24:1-25
1 When Balaam saw that it pleased Yahweh to bless Israel, he didn’t go, as at the other times, to use divination, but he set his face toward the wilderness. · WEB
Balaam stops trying for a different answer and sees a star rising out of Jacob a long way off.
Something changes at the start of the fourth attempt. When Balaam saw that it pleased Yahweh to bless Israel, he didn't go, as at the other times, to use divination Numbers 24:1.
He gives up the technique. There is no more manipulation of the vantage point and no more procedure, and what happens instead is that the Spirit of God came on him Numbers 24:2.
What he sees first is a camp: Israel dwelling according to their tribes. The square arrangement of chapters 1 and 2, seen from a hillside by a hostile professional, and his reaction is the most famous line he speaks.
How goodly are your tents, Jacob, and your dwellings, Israel! As valleys they are spread out, as gardens by the riverside Numbers 24:5–6.
He is looking at a tent city in a desert and describing irrigated gardens and cedars by water. A man hired to curse them cannot find anything wrong with the view.
The fourth oracle then goes further out in time than anything before it. Balaam introduces himself as the man whose eyes are open Numbers 24:15, which is worth remembering from a man who could not see an angel on a road.
And the vision is dated by two negatives: I see him, but not now. I see him, but not near Numbers 24:17.
Then: a star will come out of Jacob. A scepter will rise out of Israel.
Two images, and both are of rule. A star rising and a scepter — the ordinary furniture of kingship in that world, applied to a nation that at this moment has no king, no land and no capital.
The immediate horizon is a victory over Moab and Edom Numbers 24:17–18, and the last line widens it: out of Jacob shall one have dominion Numbers 24:19.
How far the sight reaches the text does not say, and the two negatives are the only dating given. What it does say is that the promise of a ruler out of Jacob was spoken by a foreign diviner, in the hearing of the king who had paid to prevent it, and could not be recalled.
Balaam then goes home Numbers 24:25 — and reappears twice more in the book, neither time to his credit.
held with reason What this mark means