The Pulpit Commentary — Numbers — Section 334

NOTE ON THE PROPHEOIEB OF BALAAM. That the prophecies of Balaam have a Messianic charac ler, and are only to be fully understood in a Christian sense, seems to lie upon the face of them. The Targums of Onkelos and Palestine make mention of King Meshiha here, and the great mass of Christian interpretation has uniformly followed in the track of Jewish tradition. It is of course possible to get rid of the prophetic element altogether by assuming that the utterances of Balaam were either composed or largely interpolated after the events to which they seem to refer. It would be necessary in this case to bring their real date down to the period of the Macedonian conquests, and much later still if the Greek empire also was to" perish for ever." The difficulty and arbitrary character of such an assumption becomes the more evident the more it is considered ; nor does it seem consistent with the form into which the predictions are cast. A patriotic Je,v looking back from the days of Alexander or his successors would not call the great Eastern power by the name of Asshur, because two subsequent empires had arisen in the place of Assyria proper. But that Balaam, Iookingforward down the dim rata of the future, should see Asshur, and only Asshur, is in perfect keeping with what we know of prophetic perspective,-the further off the events descried by inward vision, the more extreme the foreshortening,-according to which law it is well known that the first and second advents of Christ are inextricably blended in almost every case. If we accept the prophecies as genuine, it is, again, only possible to reject the Messianic element by assuming that no Jewish prophecy overleaps the narrow limits of Jewish history, The mysterious Being whom Balaam descries in the undated future, who ia the King of Israel, and whom he identifies with the Shiloh of Ja.cob's dying prophecy, and who is to bring to nought all nations of the world, cannot be David, although David may anticipate him in many ways; still Iese, as the reference to Agag, Amalek, and the Kenitee might for a moment incline us to believe, can it be Saul. At the same time, while the Messianic element in the prophecy cannot reasonably be ignored, it is obvious that it does not by any means exist by itself; it is so mixed up with what is purely local and temporal in the relations between Israel and the petty tribes which surrounded and envied him, that it is impossible to isolate it or to exhibit it in any clear and definite form. The Messiah indeed appears, as it were, upon the stage in a mysterious and remote grandeur; but he appears with a slaughter weapon in hie hand, crushing such enemies of Israel as were then and there formidable, and exter- minating the very fugitives from the overthrow. Even where the vision loses for once its local colouring in one way, so that the King of Israel deals with all the sons of men, yet it retains it in another, for he deals with them in wrath nnd destruction, not in love and blessing. There is here so little akin to the true ideal, that we are readily tempted to say that Christ is not here at all, but only Saul or David, or the Jewish monarchy personified in the ruthleeeneee of its consolidated power. But if we know anything of the genius of prophecy, it is exactly this, that the future and the grand and the heavenly is seen through a medium of the present and the paltry and the e11rthly. The Messianic element almost always occurs in connection with soma crisis in the outward history of the chosen people ; it is inextricably mixed up with what is purely local in interest, and often with what is distinctly imperfect in morality. To the Jew-and to Balaam also, however unwillingly, as the eerv11nt of Jehovah- the cause of lame! was the cause of God ; he could not discern between them. " Our country, right or wrong," w11s an impossible sentiment to him, because he could not conceive of hie country being wrong ; he knew nothi,r,g of mor-1 victories, or the 320 THE BOOK OF NUMBERS. (OB. llll, 41-lllv.