Catholic Commentary
Balak's Final Attempt: Relocation to Peor and Third Ritual Preparation
25Balak said to Balaam, “Neither curse them at all, nor bless them at all.”26But Balaam answered Balak, “Didn’t I tell you, saying, ‘All that Yahweh speaks, that I must do’?”27Balak said to Balaam, “Come now, I will take you to another place; perhaps it will please God that you may curse them for me from there.”28Balak took Balaam to the top of Peor, that looks down on the desert.29Balaam said to Balak, “Build seven altars for me here, and prepare seven bulls and seven rams for me here.”30Balak did as Balaam had said, and offered up a bull and a ram on every altar.
Numbers 23:25–30 describes Balak's final failed attempt to have Balaam curse Israel, as Balaam insists he can only speak what God commands and prepares a third sacrificial offering on Mount Peor. Despite changing locations and Balak's explicit demand for silence, Balaam remains bound by divine constraint, refusing to compromise God's established word regardless of external pressure or ritual repetition.
God's word does not negotiate: Balak's three-fold attempt to curse Israel fails because the divine decree is immovable, regardless of where he stands to listen.
Commentary
Numbers 23:25 — "Neither curse them at all, nor bless them at all." Balak's exasperated command reveals the full collapse of his strategy. Having heard two unsolicited blessings over Israel (22:41–23:10; 23:18–24), he no longer asks for a curse; he now demands total silence. The double absolute ("at all… at all") is emphatic in the Hebrew (gam-qōb lō' tiqqubennu, gam-bārēk lō' tebārekennū), conveying a man who, having lost control of the situation, attempts at minimum damage control. His logic is desperate: if the prophet will not curse, let him at least say nothing beneficial. This verse marks a psychological turning point — Balak has implicitly conceded that Balaam's words carry genuine power.
Numbers 23:26 — "Didn't I tell you… All that Yahweh speaks, that I must do?" Balaam's response is a near-verbatim echo of his earlier declaration to Balak's messengers (22:18, 38; 23:12). The repetition is theologically deliberate: the narrator insists that Balaam's constraint is not personal loyalty to Israel nor fear of Balak, but strict obedience to the divine word already received. The Hebrew verb 'eśeh ("I must do") carries covenantal weight — the same language used of Israel's obligation to the Torah. Balaam here functions as a kind of involuntary instrument of prophetic fidelity, a mouthpiece whose will is overridden by the divine will. Patristic readers noted the irony: a gentile diviner models the very submission to God's word that Israel was called to practice.
Numbers 23:27 — "Perhaps it will please God that you may curse them from there." Balak's third attempt is theologically revealing. He has not changed his objective; he has only changed his geography, operating on the ancient Near Eastern assumption that a deity's power was territorially conditioned — that a new site might offer a new divine disposition. The word translated "please" (yîšar) literally means "be straight" or "be right in the eyes of," suggesting Balak hopes to find an angle from which God might agree with him. This is a profound misunderstanding of Israel's God, whose decrees are not subject to spatial renegotiation. The Catholic interpreter sees here a type of all attempts to manipulate God through the manipulation of externals — changing the setting but not the heart.
Numbers 23:28 — "Balak took Balaam to the top of Peor, that looks down on the desert." Mount Peor (Hebrew Baal Peor, as it becomes in chapter 25) is loaded with ominous irony. This very location will soon become the site of Israel's catastrophic apostasy with the Moabite women and the worship of Baal of Peor (Num 25:1–9). The narrator's choice to name the mountain here, before the oracle, plants a dark seed: the place where God sovereignly blesses Israel is the same place where Israel will voluntarily compromise that blessing. "That looks down on the desert" (hannišqāp̄ 'al-penê hayyešîmōn) recalls the earlier vantage point at Pisgah (23:14), but yešîmōn — the wasteland or desolation — carries a note of vulnerability. Israel is seen from above, exposed in the wilderness, yet covered by divine protection.
Verses 29–30 — The Third Sevenfold Ritual Preparation The repetition of the altar-building ceremony — seven altars, seven bulls, seven rams — for the third time (cf. 23:1–2, 14–15) is striking in its mechanical redundancy. Balak executes the ritual flawlessly; Balaam directs it faithfully. Yet the reader understands that no multiplication of sacred numbers, no surplus of sacrificial victims, can coerce a divine oracle. The seven-altar pattern, drawn from ancient Near Eastern divination rites, here becomes an unwitting parody of itself: abundant external religion in service of a corrupt intention. The Catholic tradition sees in this a perennial warning — the form of worship without the conversion of will is spiritually inert.
Typological and Spiritual Senses: In the allegorical sense, Balaam's threefold insistence on obedience to God's word prefigures the Church's teaching that Sacred Scripture cannot be made to say what the interpreter desires; the Word stands over the interpreter, never the reverse. In the moral sense, Balak's persistence is a mirror for the human tendency to keep returning to forbidden strategies, merely changing their externals. In the anagogical sense, Mount Peor's double identity — site of blessing and later site of apostasy — anticipates the mystery of human freedom operating within sovereign grace: God's word cannot be revoked, but the recipients of blessing can still choose to reject it.
Catholic Commentary
Catholic tradition illuminates this passage through several interlocking lenses.
The Inviolability of Divine Speech. The Catechism teaches that God's word is marked by absolute fidelity: "God's truth is his wisdom, which commands the whole created order and governs the world" (CCC 216). Balaam's repeated refrain — "All that Yahweh speaks, that I must do" — embodies what the Church calls the norma normans principle: God's word norms all other speech and action. St. Augustine, in Contra Faustum (XVI.23), drew attention to Balaam as evidence that prophetic utterance is not the property of the speaker but of God — a point that grounds the Catholic doctrine of biblical inspiration as articulated in Dei Verbum §11: the sacred authors wrote "under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit… God is the author of Sacred Scripture."
Balaam as Type and Anti-Type. The Church Fathers were fascinated by Balaam's paradoxical status. Origen (Homilies on Numbers, XIII–XV) reads Balaam as a figure for those who possess spiritual gifts and genuine knowledge of God yet remain fundamentally disordered in their desires. This exegesis informed the later tradition's understanding of grace as genuinely operative even outside the visible boundaries of Israel — a theme the Second Vatican Council developed in Lumen Gentium §16. Yet Origen also warns that Balaam's subsequent counsel to corrupt Israel (Num 31:16) shows that prophetic charism and personal holiness are not equivalent — an important caution for Catholic pneumatology.
The Futility of Ritual Without Conversion. The threefold repetition of identical sacrificial rites underscores what the Council of Trent (Session XXII) and the Catechism (CCC 2100) articulate: external sacrifice derives its value from interior disposition. "The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit" (Ps 51:17). Balak's altars, technically irreproachable in their construction, are spiritually vacuous because they are ordered toward subverting God's declared will.
Peor as Eschatological Warning. The identification of this site with the future apostasy of Baal Peor (Num 25) is a reminder that the donum perseverantiae — the gift of final perseverance — is not to be presumed. As the Catechism notes (CCC 2016), "the grace of final perseverance" is a gift to be sought in humble prayer, not assumed on the basis of past blessing.
For Today
Contemporary Catholics encounter "Balak's strategy" constantly — not in the form of literal divination, but in the subtler habit of seeking a vantage point from which God's clear moral teaching might look different. We relocate to a new spiritual landscape (a different confessor, a more accommodating interpretation, a community that confirms what we already want to hear) hoping that the divine word will soften from a new angle. This passage is a direct challenge to that impulse. God does not change his pronouncement based on where we stand to listen.
More positively, Balaam's constrained obedience — "All that Yahweh speaks, that I must do" — offers Catholics a model of submission to the Magisterium even when its teaching is personally costly. The priest who must preach an unpopular homily, the layperson who must explain Humanae Vitae, the convert who surrenders a previously held theological opinion — all participate in Balaam's posture of binding themselves to a Word that exceeds their own preferences.
Practically: examine any area of your life where you keep "changing the altar site" — revisiting a settled moral question, hoping the answer will be different this time. Balak's strategy never worked. It will not work for us either.
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