Numbers 24:20–24

Numbers 24:20 — Amalek: "First among nations, yet his end is destruction." Balaam's gaze turns first to Amalek. The phrase "first among nations" (rē'šît gôyim) is deliberately ironic: Amalek was renowned as a fierce, ancient desert warrior-people (cf. Exod 17:8–16), yet the very title that seems to honor them becomes their epitaph. To be "first" in worldly power is no guarantee of permanence. The Hebrew word for "end" (aḥărîṯô) carries overtones of final destruction—an eschatological resonance that the Fathers would later amplify. Amalek had attacked Israel at Rephidim while the people were vulnerable, striking the weak and the stragglers (Deut 25:17–18), and YHWH had declared perpetual war against them (Exod 17:16). Balaam's oracle confirms that this enmity resolves not in Amalek's favor. The Septuagint renders "his end is to perish" with notable finality, a rendering that caught patristic attention.

Numbers 24:21 — The Kenites: Security that is not security. The Kenites (Qayin in Hebrew, cognate to "Cain") were a semi-nomadic people associated with smithcraft and, interestingly, with Israel's allies—Moses' father-in-law Jethro/Hobab was a Kenite (Judg 1:16). Balaam observes their dwelling: "your nest is set in the rock" (sîm bəsela' qinnekā), evoking the image of an eagle's eyrie, seemingly impregnable. The wordplay between Qayin (Kenite/Cain) and qēn (nest) is unmistakable in Hebrew. Despite this apparent security, verse 22 qualifies even this favorable picture with a word of coming exile: "until Asshur carries you away captive." The oracle thus distinguishes between the Kenites' enviable present position and their still-vulnerable future under the sweeping power of Assyria. There is, for Israel's readers, a cautionary message: human fortifications, however cleverly placed, are not ultimate refuge.

Numbers 24:22 — "Nevertheless Kain shall be wasted..." The word 'êpô (translated "nevertheless" or "how long") introduces a lament-tinged question: how long can even a well-situated people hold out? The Kenite/Cain link opens a deeper typological vein: as the original Cain was marked and wandered without final rest (Gen 4:12–15), so his nominal descendants remain ultimately unsettled despite their rocky strongholds. The mention of Asshur (Assyria) grounds the oracle in history—the Assyrian deportations of the 8th century BC would sweep across the entire region—while simultaneously pointing beyond it. The oracle functions as a memento mori for all who trust in geography, ancestry, or craft rather than in the living God.

Verses 23–24 — Kittim and the cryptic convergence of empires. Verse 23 opens with Balaam's awestruck exclamation: "Alas, who shall live when God does this?" (mî yiḥyeh miśśûmô 'ēl)—a rhetorical cry that acknowledges the overwhelming, world-altering character of what he is seeing. "Kittim" (Kittîm) originally referred to Cyprus (cf. Gen 10:4; Isa 23:1,12) but became in later Jewish usage a cipher for powerful western sea-peoples generally—eventually applied in the Dead Sea Scrolls (the Kittim of the War Scroll and pesharim on Habakkuk) to Rome. "Ships from the coast of Kittim" shall afflict Asshur and afflict Eber (the Hebrews or the trans-Euphratean peoples). The oracle thus sketches a succession of empires: present nations will be swept away by Assyria; Assyria itself will be checked by western naval powers; and even these shall "come to destruction." The final Hebrew word, 'aḇad—perish—falls like a hammer on every successive empire named. Balaam, who could not curse Israel, can only watch the nations consume one another while Israel endures.

Catholic tradition reads these closing oracles within a broader theology of history as the arena of divine providence. The Catechism teaches that "God's plan of 'gracious condescension'...unfolds across time" (CCC §122), and Balaam's final oracles dramatically enact this: no nation stands outside God's sovereign ordering of history.

Origen of Alexandria (Homilies on Numbers, Hom. XIII) treats the Balaam cycle typologically, reading the nations that fall before the seer's gaze as figures of the spiritual powers arrayed against the Church—"Amalek" as the flesh that wars against the spirit, "Kittim" as the seemingly invincible worldly order. He draws on Paul's language in Galatians 5:17 to spiritualize the conflict.

St. Jerome, annotating the passage in his Hebrew Questions on Genesis, noted the Kittim-Rome identification circulating in his day and saw in the oracle a foreshadowing of how even the Roman Empire—however vast—would not be the final word of history. This reading aligns with Augustine's City of God: earthly cities, no matter how powerful, are passing; only the City of God endures.

The phrase "who shall live when God does this?" (v. 23) was read by several Fathers as a proto-eschatological cry pointing toward the Last Things—a moment when the purely human calculus of power and survival collapses before God's ultimate action in history. The Council of Trent's decree on Scripture affirmed the fourfold sense of Scripture (Dei Verbum §12 reaffirms the spiritual senses), validating precisely this kind of typological extension from Kittim-as-Cyprus to Kittim-as-all-worldly-empire.

The theology of nations here is consistent with Gaudium et Spes §22: all human history is oriented toward Christ, who is its Judge and Fulfillment. The crumbling empires of Balaam's vision point forward to the One Kingdom that cannot be shaken (Heb 12:28).

These cryptic verses speak with uncomfortable clarity into our media-saturated present, which is equally obsessed with the rise and fall of great powers. Catholics today live amid constant anxiety about civilizational decline, political upheaval, and the fragility of institutions once thought permanent. Balaam's oracles are a bracing corrective: the nations have always been rising and falling; God has always been sovereign over the process.

Concretely, this passage challenges the Catholic to resist two temptations. The first is placing ultimate hope in any political order, party, or civilization—even a nominally Christian one. The "ships of Kittim" come for every Asshur. The second is despair when the institutions we depend on weaken or fail. Balaam's anguished question, "Who shall live when God does this?" is not answered by retreat or panic, but by the deeper biblical conviction that Israel—the People of God—endures through every imperial collapse. For the Catholic, this means anchoring one's identity and security not in any earthly "nest in the rock," however cleverly situated, but in the Rock who is Christ (1 Cor 10:4). Regular examination of where we actually place our security—nation, wealth, reputation, health—is the practical spiritual fruit of sitting with these strange, haunting verses.