Q&A: The Portion of Balak
The Portion of Balak
Question
I wanted to ask the Rabbi why Balaam’s advice is mentioned only in the portion of Mattot — “Behold, these were the very ones who, at Balaam’s word, caused the children of Israel…” — and not in our portion?
Thanks in advance
Answer
This is the kind of question for which I can think of various interpretive suggestions, but all of them would just reflect my own way of seeing things. Usually there is no way to confirm or refute them from the verses themselves. Explanations like these are usually just nice homiletic ideas, so I generally don’t deal with them.
I’ll suggest something, with all of the above caveats. It may be that the Torah wants to say that what Balaam did was wrong and worthy of opposition regardless of his motives. The act in itself was wrong, and when judging an act and behavior we should not get into motives. Judging motives is relevant when one comes to judge the person for his actions, and that is what the Torah does in the portion of Mattot. There you go — you’ve got a nice thought for the next Sheva Berakhot or Sabbath meal 🙂
Discussion on Answer
The Holy One, blessed be He, said the Torah. Moses only wrote it down. So I don’t see any difficulty. The Sages say that Esther was said with divine inspiration because things were written in the Scroll that had been in people’s hearts.
And as for Ibn Ezra’s assumptions — you’d have to ask him what their source is. If Moses could know how the world was created and what God said to Abraham, why wouldn’t he be able to know what Og’s bedstead was made of?! Those are astonishing words.
There is a big difference between the stories of the Patriarchs and the story of Balaam.
The events that happened before Moses’ generation were apparently preserved in tradition among the people of that generation, or at least among the educated class (the elders of Israel); that is the reasonable assumption, and that is also what appears in the words of the Sages. Therefore, even if Moses was the one who formulated them and committed them to writing, he still was not telling of things that nobody knew.
As for most of the things that happened in his own time, he was also not introducing anything new, because everyone took part in those events.
The passage of Balaam is different, as stated, because it took place at a geographic and cultural distance.
If one accepts the matter of writing with divine inspiration, then of course there is no difficulty at all. The question is only why Ibn Ezra did not accept the matter of divine inspiration regarding “Behold, his bedstead was an iron bedstead,” while here he ignored it.
The Hatam Sofer already noted this (Yoreh De’ah 356), and these are his words:
“And I wish to raise one point. Behold, nowhere in the entire Torah do we have anything of which we ourselves were eyewitnesses except for the passage of Balaam; for all the wonders of Egypt and the wilderness, our own eyes saw them, and they were done before six hundred thousand, etc. The whole Torah we saw with our own eyes except for the passage of Balaam. Who told us what took place between the king of Moab and a certain diviner, Balaam, who came to him in his land, and why he came, and who brought him, and who knew that he built altars and wanted to curse, and it was turned into a blessing? Who entered their private counsel? Israel was dwelling in the wilderness, and even if they stood in the land of Moab on the top of the cliff and saw the wilderness below from afar, how would the inhabitants of the wilderness know that people were looking at them from the top of that mountain and divining about them? Even Moses our teacher did not know; rather, only from the mouth of the Holy One, blessed be He, were these matters written, and the prophet cries out: ‘Remember now what Balak advised…'”
And see here:
https://forum.otzar.org/viewtopic.php?t=27998
I already wrote to you that regarding Ibn Ezra I have nothing to answer. His words are astonishing.
And if you accept that there was a tradition about what happened with Abraham, I don’t know why Moses couldn’t know about Og’s bedstead. It is certainly reasonable that this was well known in the world and everyone knew about it.
One more question about the portion of Balak:
How did Moses know about everything that took place between Balak and Balaam in such detail, so that he could describe it and transmit it to the children of Israel?
After all, even regarding “Behold, his bedstead was an iron bedstead,” Ibn Ezra wrote that it was a later addition, apparently because Moses was not supposed to have known Og’s bedstead in Rabbah of the Ammonites.