Beautiful Tents, Jacob

Beautiful Tents, Jacob
NUMBERS 23: 25 24: 25
 

As a boy I sang in a cathedral choir. One of my favorite anthems was “How Goodly Are Thy Tents, O Jacob,” composed by a Victorian composer called Sir Frederick Arthur Gore Ouseley, a professor of music at Oxford, a prolific composer of church music, and a cathedral canon. He inherited his knighthood from his father, a diplomat in Persia and India who published the first translation of the New Testament into Persian. Those were the days. The anthem was a musical setting of words from Balaam’s blessing in the King James Version. I don’t know what I thought they were about, and I don’t know whether Ouseley knew that Balaam’s words also come at the beginning of a Jewish prayer used on entering synagogue. They have often been set to music by Jewish composers (the line is also used to commend Jewish summer camps)...