4 - Elisha and Balaam: the enabling and disabling of discernment

Summary

We must now go back a bit and explain what the whole scene had looked like from Uncle Andrew's point of view. It had not made at all the same impression on him as on the Cabby and the children. For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.

– The narrator in c. s.lewis' The Magician's Nephew (lewis 1963:116)

Introduction

In the two preceding chapters I have considered criteria for the discernment of prophetic authenticity in contexts where the prophetic message was contested. The prime emphasis has been on the related issues of the character of the prophet (integrity and lack of self-seeking) and the nature of the message (its challenge to complacency and self-will) as constituting the ‘accessible’ factors by which the apparently ‘inaccessible’ realm of God is rendered evident and potent within the human sphere. What is necessary for the activity of discerning has also been touched upon in relation to Ahab and Zedekiah, but with less emphasis, and so it is that issue on which I wish to focus in this chapter.

My texts will be two further prophetic narratives, both imaginatively rich and resonant, which portray the ability of Elisha and Balaam to discern God (2 Kgs. 2:1–18, Num. 22:1–35).