Come and study the Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the

podcast, The Whole Council of God. Father Stephen holds a Ph.D. in biblical studies, and it's

an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Chapter 23, verse 1.

Now, Bailam said to Balak, build seven altars for me here, and prepare for me here seven young

bulls and seven Rams.

So, Bailam has a process, right?

And this is not, this is not uncommon.

Right.

So we think about priests and other religious functionaries now based on Christianity.

And so we think about in a very communal sense, right, where a priest,

somebody who 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 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.

And there's a variety of things within that, right? And different priests of different

gods and different cultures would have sort of different specializations. So, for example,

there are a lot of different forms of divination in the ancient world, which are basically ways

to predict the future.

And so some of those were augurs who would read signs, right?

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