,Hummingbird hassles eagle.

 Oakland in the 1990s, I am sweating out my dissertation on a computer that unravels each day's work.  Some secret worm has burrowed in my hard drive. It's a dreadful curse,  like writing on quicksand. I type for eight hours, and the next day either nothing is saved, or some, or sometimes it sticks. But how do I know? Like Penelope secretly unraveling her day's weaving each night.  Will this misery ever end?  

I walk down to the Oakland Catholic cemetery, a mile from our house.  Victoria and I go regularly.  It's a blistery blue California day. Grave stones stand upright on the bright grass. The divine wanders among the dead; humans leave you to yourself.  I'm hiccuping with tears. It's nearly seven years. Am I going to get through this? Please, give me a sign.  

And YHWH, in a good mood, offers a Gideon moment: Test me.  Now, I like the Gideon story in Judges 6.  Gideon is no respecter of persons. The angel catches him threshing wheat secretly in a wine press so that the Midianites would not see him. The angel's there to recruit him for a manly job: take down the Midianites. Gideon declines.  "Pardon me, but we didn't make this problem."  But then he relent (it is God, after all). After a series of God-tests for Gideon, God gives Gideon the chance to test God. So Gideon asks for  wet wool on dry ground (done) and wet ground and dry wool (easy).  Gideon has to complete his impossible task, which YHWH says is a breeze, like a little league playing the Kansas City Royals (world series tonight).  Gideon wins. 

But I'm not thinking of all that when I say, "If things will be OK,  I want to see an eagle and a hummingbird together."  After that big declaration, I look around sheepishly and think: this is the fairytale of three wishes. You always f*ck up.  Which, in a nicer way, is what my mother says when she hears this story later: Don't test God. And she shoots me a strong look that I interpret as, How did I raise this one?

The good news is that my Gideon moment stops my tearful petition.  It's dusk. As the light turns rosen,  a conference of birds rise up in the tangled bushes that border the cemetery.  They twitter in gorgeous chaotic harmony. It's enough, I think, this bird anthem;  it's  answer enough. And up from the memory, I hear, first one line, then another, of a song I composed in my evangelical Minnesota days. A Malcolm Solbakken hymn Kari would love. I sing it to myself, surprised, but glad to remember it.
"Woke up drowsy this morning.
The sun was playing on my sheets,
she was elated with her light.
I breathed a psalm to the morning.
And as I closed the book,
the birds outside my window harmonized.

We've got a long way to climb
We can't avoid the winter storms
and intimately comes the night
but deeper still the greening
the earth gives birth before our eyes.

Woke up bright from my dreaming.
Somebody called me to my feet
and I was standing in the light.
A stranger stood before me and
as he smiled I noticed something familiar in his eyes.

He said, sister, do you see me,
he said Kathryn, do you know me
he asked Kerry, do you love me?
and I cried: Lord!

He said, we've got a long way to climb
but I will walk with you
Together we will make the narrow wide
and as I love you love each other
I've conquered death so enter life..
--------------------
I sing it to myself as I walk home for supper with Victoria, and to bed.  Waking the next morning,  I remember the last stanza:
Around the world people are waking
some on their mats, some on the streets
and some are waking in their cells
Lord I pray this dawn now breaking
will break into the hearts and minds of those
who keep this darkness.

We've got a long way to climb...

Then I looked out our window and am astonished. A wild band of hummingbirds are whizzing through the garden.  Never have we seen this.  All morning, they buzz the air.  As I sit down to my computer, one flies up and peers at me through the window.  I get it!  I see it! 

Years later, at the Wisconsin lake, the bald eagle sits in the high branch of a white pine facing our island,  I kayak out to get closer and disturb a hummingbird nest set in the dark of the lower trunk.  They buzz out to shoo me away. 
For years, I called this a miracle.  Now, I wonder about the Gideon-God pact. What was my part of the bargain?  Jesse says: beware that you honor what you've been given, and not become the fox. 

Been interested in Balaam, mostly because of the donkey and angel. See below for a post of my sermon on this.

As I prepared, I learned more about Balaam.

Who is Balaam? A mesopotamian soothsayer who “sees” into the future, usually through dreams. But is he a sorcerer or a diviner? Sorcery, or  keshafim, was banned and punished by death in Israel (Deut 18:10).  In Mesopotamian law, it is also a capital crime.  Divination, nahash, involved reading omens, casting lots, interpreting oil or water, was practiced by the Levite priests who threw the urim and thurim.  Balaam is considered nahash (23:23, 24:1) and kesem (22:7, 23:23). This form of divination could be tolerated in Israel since it wasn’t incompatible with monotheism.  
Hackett writes that "Balaam is a diviner, a form of intermediary apparently acceptable in court circles in preexilic Judah.... a typical Yahweh-prophet, one who can only speak the word that Yahweh puts in his mouth, a phrase reflecting the paradigmatic description of a prophet in Deut 18:18.” ( Hackett, 1992, p 569). 

But Balaam is more than a mouthpiece for the Israelite god. The Book of Balaam is a set of plaster inscriptions of Aramaic/ Canaanite dated 800 BCE. It was discovered at Tell Deir ˁAllā, on the Ammonite site of the Jabbok River in the late 1960s.  He is a “seer of the gods” (ḥzh ˀlhn).   Here is an excerpt of Balaam's visions (or Bileam).

The gods came to him at night.
And he beheld a vision in accordance with El's utterance.
They said to Balaam, son of Beor:
"So will it be done, with naught surviving.
No one has seen [the likes of] what you have heard!"
Balaam Reports his Vision to His Intimates.
Balaam arose on the morrow;
He summoned the heads of the assembly to him,
And for two days he fasted, and wept bitterly.
Then his intimates entered into his presence,
and they said to Balaam, son of Beor,
"Why do you fast, and why do you weep?"
Then he said to them: "Be seated, and I will relate to you what the Shaddai gods have planned,
And go, see the acts of the god!"
Balaam Describes the Celestial Vision and Its Aftermath in the Land
"The gods have banded together;
The Shaddai gods have established a council,
And they have said to [the goddess] Shagar:
'Sew up, close up the heavens with dense cloud,
That darkness exist there, not brilliance;
Obscurity and not clarity;
So that you instill dread in dense darkness.
And - never utter a sound again!'
It shall be that the swift and crane will shriek insult to the eagle,
And a nest of vultures shall cry out in response.
The stork, the young of the falcon and the owl,
The chicks of the heron, sparrow and cluster of eagles;
Pigeons and birds, [and fowl in the s]ky.
And a rod [shall flay the cat]tle;
Where there are ewes, a staff shall be brought.
Hares - eat together!
Free[ly feed], oh beasts [of the field]!
And [freely] drink, asses and hyenas!"

Nonetheless, let us return to the Hebrew Balaam. He arrives at a critical point at the end of Numbers, which can be organized like this:
(1) Israel in the Desert of Sinai (1:1 – 10:10)
(2) From Sinai to Kadesh (10:11 – 12:16)
(3) In the Kadesh area (13:1 – 20:21)
(4) Detour to avoid Edom (20:22 – 21:35)
(5) Israel in the plains of Moab (22:1 – 36:13). 
  
Oracles of Balaam  (Numbers 22-24)
Balak, King of Moab is worried about the immigrant force of Israelies plowing through neighboring territories.  Following protocol, he hires the seer Balaam to curse them. Balaam tells him he will consult El about this, so he dreams and El or YHWH tells him he can't curse the Israelites because they are blessed.  Balaam says he can only do what El prescribes, so he can't curse the Israelites.  Balak, increasingly agitated, thinks Balaam is bargaining for a higher divination fee. So he sends messengers a second time with more gifts. Balaam goes back to dreaming. He receives the same answer (no), but then El permits him to meet Balak if he repeats what El tells him to say.

The little story I love  - his trip on the donkey and encounter with the angel is Chpts 22-24.  Like the jewel in the egg, we have the story I will tell next.

References
Hackett, J.A., Balaam, Anchor Bible Dictionary,  New York: Doubleday, 1992, 569-572.
Levine,  B.A. "The Deir 'Alla Plaster Inscriptions", in: W.W. Hallo (ed.), Context of Scripture, vol.2 (2003), 140-145.
Oppenheim, A. L. The Interpretation of Dreams in the Ancient Near East, Philadelphia, 1956
 Unger, M.F. Unger’s Bible Dictionary, 3rd ed.; Chicago: Moody Press, 1966,  799.
See this collection of dreams in the bible