The whimsied story of Balak’s hired prophetic gun firing blanks still entertains. It also ventures a sly tale about magical religion.
In his trouble over the Israelite masses who are passing through is land, the Moabite king Balak contracts Baalam, a highly regarded speaker of curses, to put the whammy on these well-herded Israelites before they consume his grain like locusts or make it safely out the other end of his pasture. Ancient shepherd-kings, it seems, could be cranky about such intrusions onto the metaphorical pasture. The upkeep of that turf, after all, is what in part underwrote a regal authority that often had little else to stand on.
Baalam famously misfires, pronouncing blessing after blessing upon Moses’ people when he should have been foreshadowing their skewering with fiery words that would turn in good time into swords, dripping with real blood in answer to the prophet’s crimson words.
This was not to be.
Underlying the narrative, the seamy story of Balak’s repeated relocations of Balaam tells the story of magical religion, an ancient and modern endeavor that purposes the same accomplishments that YHWH religion promises, but without the human concession of authority that the latter demands.
This, too, was not to be.
Magical religion is mechanical where the YHWH faith of liberated slaves is persistently and sometimes lethally personal. Magical religion depends upon the right calibration of words, postures, rites, and angles. YHWH religion has all these things (witness Leviticus), but at its core it posits a deity who speaks sovereignly out of inscrutably good intentions.
Balak is in one sense a literary laughing stock. He imagines that monarchy and the resources to hire mercenaries have placed control of what by now the reader senses must be YHWH’s incontrovertible decision to prosper Abraham’s heirs. He supposes that mechanical considerations bear some potency in the face of such resolve.
This, too, was not to be. In the biblical plot, magical religion is not powerless. It simply always disappoints.
Canter Bridge 
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