1:24]].
Verse 19
“God is not a man, that He should lie; nor a son of man, that He should repent: hath He said, and should He not do it? and spoken, and should not carry it out?”
Verse 20
“Behold, I have received to bless: and He hath blessed; and I cannot turn it.” Balaam meets Balak's expectation that he will take back the blessing that he has uttered, with the declaration, that God does not alter His purposes like changeable and fickle men, but keeps His word unalterably, and carries it into execution. The unchangeableness of the divine purposes is a necessary consequence of the unchangeableness of the divine nature. With regard to His own counsels, God repents of nothing; but this does not prevent the repentance of God, understood as an anthropopathic expression, denoting the pain experienced by the love of God, on account of the destruction of its creatures (see at Gen 6:6, and Exo 32:14). The ה before הוּא Num 23:19) is the interrogative ה (see Ges. §100, 4). The two clauses of Num 23:19, “Hath He spoken,” etc., taken by themselves, are no doubt of universal application; but taken in connection with the context, they relate specially to what God had spoken through Balaam, in his first utterance with reference to Israel, as we may see from the more precise explanation in Num 23:20, “Behold, I have received to bless' (לקח, taken, accepted), etc. השׁיב, to lead back, to make a thing retrograde (Isa 43:13). Samuel afterwards refused Saul's request in these words of Balaam (Num 23:19), when he entreated him to revoke his rejection on the part of God (1Sa 15:29).
Verse 21
After this decided reversal of Balak's expectations, Balaam carried out still more fully the blessing which had been only briefly indicated in his first utterance. “He beholds not wickedness in Jacob, and sees not suffering in Israel: Jehovah his God is with him, and the shout (jubilation) of a king in the midst of him.” The subject in the first sentence is God (see Hab 1:3, Hab 1:13). God sees not און, worthlessness, wickedness, and עמל, tribulation, misery, as the consequence of sin, and therefore discovers no reason for cursing the nation. That this applied to the people solely by virtue of their calling as the holy nation of Jehovah, and consequently that there is no denial of the sin of individuals, is evident from the second hemistich, which expresses the thought of the first in a positive form: so that the words, “Jehovah his God is with him,” correspond to the words, “He beholds not wickedness;” and “the shout of a king in the midst of it,” to His not seeing suffering. Israel therefore rejoiced in the blessing of God only so long as it remained faithful to the idea of its divine calling, and continued in
