Author Archives: Ilana Stein

About Ilana Stein

Ilana Stein has a BA in English, a degree in Nature Conservation, and is a registered Field Guide. She works as a writer for the ecotourism company and conservation organization Wilderness Safaris and lectures in Tanach at the Emunah Women's Beit Midrash in Johannesburg, South Africa.

The Nature of Balaam’s Prophecy


In the portion of Balak, the prophet Balaam, hired by King Balak of Moab, sets out to curse the children of Israel, only to find himself proclaiming four blessings instead. Each blessing builds on the one before it, becoming more sophisticated and exalted.

Balaam begins with introducing his theme and mission in the first, replies to Balak’s anger at not cursing the people as he promised in the second, and by the third launches into a praise song of Israel that is considered “neither vindication nor denunciation but pure prophecy (Nehama Leibowitz, Studies in Bamidbar).” Here the language itself becomes declamatory and filled with more symbolism; specifically more imagery taken from the natural world. In the first prophecy, only hills and rocks are mentioned, in the second, an ox and a lion, but in the third, both plants and animals are used to great effect. Let us examine one of the verses here.

The third blessing begins with Balaam’s most famous statement (Numbers 24:5), “How goodly are your tents O Jacob, and your tabernacles, O Israel.” The verse following this is less well known: “Like the winding brooks, like gardens by the river’s side, like aloes which the Lord has planted, and cedar trees beside the waters.”

Conventions of Biblical Poetry

At first glance, this is a further description of the physical camp of Israel, and we can see it in our mind’s eye, stretching into the distance in long rows like streams or tents standing on the flat ground, like tall cedars jutting into the sky.

However, if we look closer at the imagery in the verse, it does not seem to follow any of the patterns used in biblical poetry–for example A-B-A-C (staircase parallelism) or A-B-B-A (chiastic structure)–or even the style of the previous verse, where the first part of the verse is parallel in theme to the second. In our verse we have one body of water (winding brooks) followed by a list of three types of flora (gardens, aloes, cedars), one a desert plant (aloes) and two of which ‘happen’ to be next to water (gardens by the river’s side, cedar trees beside the water). None of the usual structure patterns as mentioned above seem to fit.