Stephen Beam - Balaam, the Gray Prophet

Balaam stumbled to the door, opened it while yawning widely, and found Balak himself standing outside the doorway to greet him. This time it was only Balak, no entourage surrounded him. Balak said, “What word did your god give you? Something positive, I hope. Something for our mutual benefit.”

“The Lord let me sleep without dreaming, blessing me with a peaceful night’s rest. Perhaps He’s grown weary of repeating Himself to me.”

“Or perhaps his silence IS the message. Maybe he’s telling you to show some initiative, giving you permission to live in luxury with everything you’ve ever dreamed of having.”

“I want to believe you, Balak, but I know what you say isn’t true. YHWH doesn’t change. He would never give me the okay to curse the Sons of Israel. He’s chosen them for His own mysterious purpose, while binding me tightly to Himself. I know I can say only that which He allows me to say.”

Balak smiled and said, “Today we’ll find out if that’s true or not. I ask you, why would your god let those Israelite thugs destroy Moab? He wouldn’t! If your mojo is working, and you give the word, your word will come to pass. I believe in you. Your reputation is known throughout the land. And with my help, you’ll stop the Sons of Israel dead in their tracks.”

“I want to accept your generous offer more than you can imagine. All I can guarantee is that I’ll try. I pray God will grant both of us our heart’s desire. My hope rests in the fact that He has allowed me to stand here before you.” Balaam walked over to the nightstand where he’d left the bottle of scotch. He poured a glass for Balak and himself. Each held their drink high and clinked glasses. Balaam said, “Cheers.” They downed their drinks in a single swallow, slammed their empty glasses against the bar, and quickly left the hotel, eager to get started.

Balak left the Kirjath Huzoth Hotel with much greater confidence than Balaam. Balaam’s hopes were fueled by alcohol and the absence of a dream message from YHWH. These things weren’t much inspiration to the prophet.

“Where are you taking me?” Balaam asked, as they walked down the sanitized white brick streets past towering metal and glass buildings.

“To the high places of Baal,” Balak said.

The rocky hill rose abruptly from a field at the end of the cul de sac. The self maintaining white brick road contrasted sharply with the weed and rock strewn field where their borders met. Balaam followed Balak across the field and up the hill. When they reached the top, Balak gestured with a sweep of his hand towards the surrounding lowlands. “Our god, Chemosh, is one of the Baals. We stand atop one of his high places. From here, you’ll work your mojo. You’ve got a great panoramic view of my land and my people.

Balaam was nervous. He timidly said, “YHWH hates the hills where Baal is honored, but I’ll try as hard as I can to do as you wish. There’s only a slim chance of success based on the Lord’s absence last night, leaving me without a vision or a word. That’s not much to go on.” Balaam fidgeted with his hood, trying to find the perfect spot where the wool met his head.

Balak’s high ranking elites were already waiting for them, standing near a circular clearing surrounded by huge boulders. When Balaam saw this clearing, he knew this was the spot to perform the ceremonial sacrifices to YHWH.

Balaam said to Balak: “Build seven altars here. Prepare seven bulls and seven rams. Use your oxeep to generate the altars and the sacrificial beasts. Make the animals small and lethargic so that you can hold them in your hand for convenience. Make each alter a five foot tall cylinder topped with a vaporizing incinerator.” When Balaam shifted into prophet mode, he felt comfortable, falling into character quickly and naturally.

Balak nodded his head in enthusiastic agreement. He took the oxeep from an inner pocket of the silken white robe he wore especially for today’s sacrificial ceremony. He held the small device to his forehead and closed his eyes, locking into its ESP interface. An oxeep could readily transform imaginative thought into ingeniously designed working objects, both animate and inanimate. Balak and his entourage watched as the nanobot symphony of creation began.

Near the center of the hilltop clearing, seven equally spaced flat golden plates emerged, forming a circle. The plates grew, extruding upwards to a height of five feet. The upper half of each cylinder was wrapped in a swirl of small tubes surrounding a flat sacrificial staging area. Each tube tip pointed towards the cylinder’s staging area. This was the vaporizing incinerator platform, where the synthetic animals were atomized.

The miniature bulls and rams started out as a dense vapor on the ground, centered in the circle of seven cylinders. The vapor rapidly formed into hand sized beasts which laid on their sides, too lazy to move. Balaam and Balak entered the circle, grabbed a bull in one hand and a ram in the other, and placed the pairs of synthetic beasts atop the cylindrical altars until all seven cylinders were loaded. After finishing this task, a blinding ball of blue light flashed atop each alter, evaporating the animals. Not a single ash was left behind.

Balaam said to Balak, “Wait here by the sacrificial altars while I look for some privacy beyond those boulders. Perhaps God will agree to meet with me. And if He does, whatever He reveals to me, that I will do.”

Balaam walked through a man sized gap between the boulders. He stood on a small mound hidden from Balak and his entourage. He gazed at the Moabite dominion below, spread out like a checkerboard across the land. He closed his eyes to this panoramic vista, and prayed: “I have prepared the seven altars and offered on each a bull and a ram. But then, you know that already, my Lord. You see and know everything. You know my struggles. You know my weaknesses.”

With arms raised skyward, standing in a patch of weeds, he did his best to calm down and open himself up to whatever the Lord willed. There were handicaps to overcome. Number one: it was daylight. Number two: he was wide awake. This wasn’t a dream in the middle of the night, which was God’s normal time to invade his mind. Asleep, he was at his most vulnerable, but the Lord could open a spiritual channel to him whenever or wherever He saw fit.

Balaam felt a wave of heat rise up from his feet to his head. His eyes opened so wide they nearly fell from his face. He saw before him nothing but glittering blue flame, a pillar reaching skyward, past the clouds, breaking the bonds of earth.

The Lord opened a channel of control to Balaam’s mouth; the prophet felt his lips move, his tongue wiggle, his vocal chords vibrate, all beyond his control. He was no more than a fleshy marionette, his strings manipulated by God’s invisible hand. “Return to Balak, and you shall speak the words I give you to speak,” Balaam said, but in a voice not his own.

He began to walk slowly back to the sacrificial altars without willing himself to do so. With only a tiny portion of his mind still under his personal control, he walked past the high boulders to the sacrificial altars and stood before Balak. His loss of physical control should have frightened him, but his emotional responses were muted to the point of nonexistence. He was God’s zombie.

Balak gazed into the vacant eyes of Balaam that gazed coldly back at him. Was the prophet’s strange stare a hopeful sign? Or did this mean he should dump this endeavor and start preparing an army to fight the Sons of Israel, a battle lost before it’s even begun. Maybe it was best to grab his family and go hide in the hills. If Balaam couldn’t deliver on cursing the Israelites, then it was either fight or flight… and fighting was barely an option.