The Torah's Pagan Oracle

There are certain basic facts about Judaism that we expect everybody to know. One of them is the number of books in the Torah. Though you will probably immediately think of five, it is actually not so obvious. For one, the Talmud suggests that the Book of Bemidbar contains a complete and autonomous narrative that really doesn't belong, one that could even be considered a book within a book; that "extra book" is the story of the gentile prophet Bil'am.[1]

 

Chronologically, of course, the story of Bil'am takes place during the time period covered by Bemidbar and that is why it's there. But in terms of almost every other factor that goes into this book's organization, it seems to be divorced from the rest of the book. Besides the distinct content of what the Talmud calls the Parsha of Bil'am, its separation from what comes before and after it is quite evident. The story is neatly self-contained, starting with its own proper introduction — giving us the information needed to understand the rest of the story — and concluding with a classic ending in which the protagonists all return home. Also, for the first and only time in the Torah, the entire scene changes away from the camp of the Israelites or their ancestors.  We see instead the inner workings of an enemy encampment and their rather unusual strategy to confound the approaching march of the Jews — we have no similar descriptions of Pharaoh's palace or the events going on in the Amalekite or Edomite encampment. To lend further credence to the rabbis' view that this story stands apart, the whole protracted story appears as one paragraph according to the masoretic text.[2]

 

There is one more thing that separates our story from the rest of the Torah — Bil'am's oracles. While the Torah does occasionally go into a lyrical mode, it does so most sparingly. And of the few lyrical sections that we do find, none have quite the same tone and content as the ones we find in what we could now entitle the Book of Bil'am. In fact, his oracles rather remind us of someone speaking in a semi-magical inspired trance, something that we see more commonly in pagan documents of the time. It is true that these types of visions are not so different than some of the later prophecies that we see in the Bible, but the particular flavor of Bil'am's oracles as well as their placement specifically in the Torah – as opposed to the later books – set them apart.

 

In fact, there are other pagan-like elements here as well; one of them is talking animals. While Bil'am's donkey's speech is a unique event in the Bible, talking animals are not at all uncommon in the world of pagan mythology. Accordingly, Bil'am's otherwise unexplainable comfort with his donkey's speech becomes more understandable when we remember that his roots were in that world of magic and sorcery.[3] Regardless, talking animals is just one more element that further contributes to an indelible picture of a story that doesn't belong in the Torah.

 

In short, what we see here is a pagan mini-document in the middle of one of the most anti-pagan documents known to man. True, the main protagonist appears to be some type of monotheistic prophet, but his values, customs and behavior are right out of the pagan world. But he is only a proto-monotheist, a half-baked version of Avraham or Moshe. That being the case, the Torah purposely uses classical pagan forms to describe Bil'am's life and personality.  It does so since it is imperative that we see the rival religiosity for what it is — an immature form of monotheism; easily bribed and often perverted. While a step in the right direction, it is far less than what God wants from the Jews.

 

Since Bemidbar is a book of preparation for living in an actual country surrounded — and sometimes even permeated — by pagans, it must gear up the Jews for what they can expect in this respect. In the Land of Israel, they would meet compromisers — both Jewish and gentile — who would try to moderate the monotheistic revolution by incorporating "inoffensive" pagan elements into it. Of course, identity is almost never pristine. Foreign elements inevitably seep in from a given culture's contact with others. One must only compare synagogue architecture in various times and places with that used for churches and mosques to see that this is the case. This is not a condemnation, as not all gentile religious forms need to be avoided.[4] However, in the case of pagan culture, religion had become so debased as to require very radical surgery, if anything could be salvaged at all. In such a context, the Jews would need to be highly vigilant about the integration of any elements of pagan culture that might come their way.

 

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If we think further about the place of Bil'am's book in the Torah, we can see that it closely resembles an inoculation. As with a vaccine, a small dose of the illness is given into the midst of a healthy body in order that the body can recognize it and know how to defend itself, should it ever come across it again. In terms of the Biblical Jewish nation encountering compromises toward paganism, this was far from a theoretical danger. The Jews would repeatedly come across it via the many false prophets that would condone the worship of God through intermediaries and idols, and through priests and kings that would seek salvation in foreign religious practices.

 

Of course, our metaphor is not exact. "Inoculated" though they may have been, the Jews would not always succeed in fending off these threats. As opposed to a physical inoculation, an educational inoculation does not always work. Since there is much more of a human element at play, the Torah can only bring us to water but it can't make us drink. At the end of the day, however, the Torah did its job and gave the Jews the teachings to contend with the Bil'am-style threats that they would encounter later on. Whether they would use them or not would be their own choice.

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[4] See Ramah on Shulchan Arukh, Yoreh Deah 178:1 who presents the commonly accepted limitations on borrowing gentile practices. Also see Iggerot Moshe, Yoreh Deah 4, 12:2 specifically on the question of building synagogues that resemble churches.