Numbers 23

Speaker 00:00

[upbeat music] Come and study the Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast, The Whole Counsel of God. Father Stephen holds a PhD in Biblical Studies and is an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Stephen De Young· Host0:19

Chapter 23, verse one. "Now Balaam said to Balak, 'Build seven altars for me here, and prepare for me here seven young bulls and seven rams.'" So Balaam has a process, [laughs] right? And this is not, this is not uncommon. Right? So we think about, uh, priests and other religious functionaries now based on Christianity, and so [laughs] we think about it in a very communal sense, right? Where, where a priest is somebody who, like, lives with the community and shares their life, and weddings and funerals and births and... right? And all these sort of things. That's not how priests worked, pagan priests worked in the ancient world at all. The primary job of pra- pagan priests in the ancient world was they were sort of spiritual technologists in the sense that they knew how to do certain things to produce certain results. A- and this, there's a variety of things within that, right? And