This Torah portion tells the story of Balaam, who is not Jewish. Listen here and here.
* As the West becomes steadily more tribal, the more relevant these texts become. In the world as described by the Torah, it doesn’t matter that not all Amorites or Edomites or Canaanites or Midianites are bad people, they are members of an enemy tribe and if they get in your way, they must be destroyed. That’s the sane way of thinking. For a sane tribal man, if his people are merely inconvenienced, let alone menaced by another tribe, all of that tribe becomes the enemy until it is subdued.
* If Western liberalism is dead, and conservatism is but a subset of liberalism, then what replaces it? The primary opponent of liberalism over the past 100 years has been fascism. Fascism is a reaction to liberalism. What are the other viable alternatives to liberalism?
* “Balak saw all that Israel had done to the Amorite.” Power matters. Offensive capability matters. You can never be sure of a competitor’s motivations, so if the competitor is more powerful than you, you have good reason to fear. One country may think it is building up its military for purely defensive purposes but because motivations are not easy to read, people are not easy to read, surrounding countries will find this build-up a threat. The morality of a country plays no role in power politics and assessment of a threat.
* Link:
Question: “Who were the Amorites?”
Answer: The Amorites were an ancient nation mentioned frequently in the Old Testament. They were descended from one of the sons of Canaan (Genesis 14:7). In early inscriptions, the Amorites were also known as Amurra or Amurri. The “land of the Amorites” included Syria and Israel. Some of the southern mountains of Judea were also called the hill country of the Amorites (Deuteronomy 1:7, 19-20).
Two kings of the Amorites named Sihon and Og were defeated by the Israelites under Moses’ leadership (Deuteronomy 31:4). In Joshua 10:10, five Amorite kings were defeated by the people of Israel, and the victory was decisively won in Joshua 11:8. In the time of Samuel, peace existed between Israel and the Amorites (1 Samuel 7:14).
Less than a century later, King Solomon forced the remaining Amorites into slavery: “All the people who were left of the Amorites . . . who were not of the people of Israel—their descendants who were left after them in the land, whom the people of Israel were unable to devote to destruction—these Solomon drafted to be slaves” (1 Kings 9:20-21). The Amorites are last mentioned in Amos 2:10. It is assumed they either died out or were absorbed into the culture of Israel.
The Amorites were known as fierce warriors during their prime. Moses referred to Og, the king of the Amorites, as a very tall man whose bed was approximately 13.5 feet long (Deuteronomy 3:11). Despite their strong numbers and military might, the Amorites were destroyed due to their worship of false gods. Israel’s conquest of their land was part of God’s judgment on the pagan Amorite culture.
* On a literary note, the Balaam story is completely distinct from the material surrounding it.
* Most problems in life can be solved with money, including the hiring of a reluctant prophet.
* Maimonides understands the scene with the ass to be a dream. The purpose of this story is to make Balaam look bad.
* Do blessings and curses have power? I’m agnostic.
* Jacob Milgrom: “Three times in the Bible God appears to non-Israelites to warn them not to carry out their intentions; the other occasions are Genesis 31:24 (Laban) and Genesis 20:3 (Abimelech).” Do you ever have wise people in your life to warn you not to carry out your intentions?
* Milgrom: “Later [Jewish] tradition acknowledges almost nothing of Balaam the obedient servant of the Lord, who could not be bribed by all the wealth of Moab. He is, instead, the archetype enemy of Israel, a Pharoah or Haman, whose power would threaten to annihilate Israel were it not for the intervention of Israel’s God.”
Similar with Esau. In the Biblical text, Esau is a sympathetic and tragic figure who’s screwed over by his brother Jacob. In the Jewish tradition, however, Esau is the epitome of the goy, of the enemy, of Rome and Western civilization.
