BALAAM went on to reveal how God had helped the Israelites in the wilderness, and assured Balak of their continued military success. The king reminded him that this was not what he had paid for, but Balaam could recall giving no guarantees. “Then” said Balak with asperity “neither curse nor bless;” but Balaam replied that he must obey the god. Hurriedly, Balak took the whole company up Mount Peor, sacred to the god Baal, hoping the Hebrews’ god would be more biddable there;* but the blessings kept pouring out. Meanwhile, Balak gloomily surveyed the tents of the Israelites below, sprawling across the plain at Shittim.*
Yet even as the God of Moses was lord upon Baal’s mountain, down among those tents Baal-worship was spreading; for Baal was a fertility god, his rites excused unbridled sensuality and the local women simply begged the Hebrews to join in. One man even carried a Midianite woman right past Moses and into the Tent of Meeting.* Whatever sacrilegious purpose they had in mind ended when Aaron’s son Phinehas ran them both through with a javelin; but twenty-four thousand Israelites died before the plague was stayed,* and Israel remembered that her God is a jealous God.
* The peoples of the ancient Near East held that gods were associated with specific places, and in any given place the powers of other gods were diminished. Mount Peor was associated with the Moabite god Baal-peor, and Balak seems to have been hoping that the local god would dominate the wandering god who had followed the Hebrews out of Egypt. All he succeeded in doing was to prove the words of King Solomon true: “Lord God of Israel, there is no God like thee, in heaven above, or on earth beneath”. See 1 Kings 8:22-24.
* Shittim (‘acacias’) is a plain on the eastern (left) bank of the River Jordan, where it empties into the Dead Sea. It would be clearly visible from the peak of Mount Peor a few miles further south.
* The Tabernacle or Tent of Meeting was the place where God had spoken with Moses during Israel’s years in the wilderness.
* St Paul speaks of a similar downward spiral in Romans 1:18-32. According to Numbers 25:5, Moses’s cure was of the radical surgery kind: ‘And Moses said unto the judges of Israel, Slay ye every one of his men that were joined unto Baal-peor.’