The Literary and Thematic Unity of Balaam`s Prophecies in Ramban`s Biblical Commentary

Modern biblical commentators have long debated the literary unity and compositional cohesiveness of the Balaam Narrative (Numbers 22—24). Ramban’s commentary on Balaam’s prophecies offers a significant contribution to this scholarly discussion. Ramban analyzes each prophecy as a coherent literary unit, and he also integrates all the prophecies into a unified schema, while considering the relationship between the prophecies and their narrative context. On a micro-level, Ramban organizes the verses of each prophecy around a symmetrical design that verifies its inner integrity and exposes its thematic consistency. Ramban reveals each prophecy’s literary arrangement by exploring its poetic features, such as types of parallelisms, wordplay, imagery, and allusion. On a macro-level, Ramban organizes the prophecies into a cone-shaped structure, in which each prophecy builds on the previous one to establish thematic continuity. By exploring the literary pattern of Balaam’s prophecies, Ramban clarifies their theological and polemical message concerning Israel’s historical destiny. Ramban’s commentary on Balaam’s prophecies illustrates how they are artfully constructed as an integrated unity, individually and from a broad perspective. His penetrating analysis reveals how he integrates his literary readings within the wider context of the theological discourse of the biblical text.