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165 sional seer in a Bible that prohibited soothsaying, conjuring, and so on adds to the feeling that the whole tale was, origi- nally, a non-Israelite tale, and yet the Bible incorporated it, devoting to it substantial space, so the incident and its mes- sage must have been considered a significant prelude to the Israelite possession of the Promised Land. The text suggests that Balaam was an Aramaean, residing somewhere up the Euphrates River; his prophetic oracles expanded from the fate of the Children of Jacob to the place of Israel among the nations to oracles regarding the future of such other nations—even of distant and yet-to-come impe- rial Assyria. The oracles were thus an expression of wider non-Israelite expectations at the time. By including the tale, the Bible combined the Israelite destiny with Mankind’s universal expectations. Those expectations, the Balaam tale indicates, were chan- The Cross on the Horizon FIGURE 71