Bilaam stood on a mountaintop overlooking the plains of Moav stunned. Divine lightning had struck his anti-Jewish heart and for one blazing instant it had shown him the meaning of Am Yisrael. He gazed down on the Jewish People in the valley below and he saw a panoramic vision of all the generations to come in the future history of this nation. He saw the scene unfolding and he got the message.
Suddenly his strength left him. The curses he had prepared for the Jewish Nation were squelched within and in their stead arose a compulsion to bless them. He couldn’t help but sing their praises in the language of metaphor: “How can I curse whom Hashem has not cursed… For from their beginning I see them as mountain peaks and I behold them as hills; it is a nation that will dwell alone and will not be reckoned among the nations.” (Bamidbar 23:8-9)
Here is how some of the classical mefarshim shed light on Bilaam’s words:
“I [Bilaam] look upon the nation and see that it will dwell alone and no other nation will incorporate them in the way that many nations band together to form one entity. But these people all have one Torah and one Law and they are one nation that will dwell alone by the name of Yaakov and Yisrael… For as I see it now dwelling alone so will it forever dwell securely alone… and no nation will overcome it or absorb it into itself.” (Ramban)
