Balaam

[Beet]

At one point late in Numbers, the Israelites are encroaching on a tribe of a King Balak, who is afraid of them. He sends his emissaries to a seer named Balaam, to get him to curse the Israelites. Balaam communicates with God who forbids him to do so. God allows Balaam permission to travel to meet Balak, but Balaam only blesses the Israelites three times, because this is what God has given him permission to say. However later, during a raid on a tribe called the Midianites, it says the Israelites put Balaam to the sword. Then, there is one sentence which implies that Balaam encouraged the Midianite women to entice the Israelite men to heresey.

I find this story interesting because Balaam is one of the few non-Israelites up to this point in the narrative who can communicate with God. Not only that, but he appears to worship God as the Lord, even though he is not an Israelite himself. He also gets a rather extensive narrative for his own personal story. So, I was disappointed when Balaam was killed, since up until that point he was an example of a non-descendant of Abraham who could still know God and seemed to be righteous. Overall, Balaam's story seems to be a caution against legalism. God told Balaam he could travel to meet Balak, so he did. But God put obstacles in Balaam's way in the form of an angel, showing that even though God allowed it, he did not really want it. God never explicitly forbid Balaam from telling the Midianite women to entice the Israelis, but Balaam should have known that it would be going against God because he knew that the Israelis were a blessed people.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

The extra-Biblical sources of which the Deir Alla inscription is most relevant indicate that for the Moabites, Balaam was seen as a polytheist.  Indeed, the whole tale of Balaam in the Bible reads a lot more logically if instead of Balaam being told three separate times by God what to do.  He consulted three separate gods and built altars to three separate gods, all of whom chose to bless Israel.  Of course, later on when the Israelis cleansed their religion of polytheism, they had to redact the story to have only one God in their scripture.

There are enough parallels between Abram and Balaam that is not inconceivable that they were originally the same mythic figure, remembered differently by the Israelis and the Moabites. However, that is a very, very, speculative idea, and it almost certainly would never be provable.