1And the Israelites journeyed onward, and they camped in the steppes of Moab across the Jordan from Jericho. 2And Balak son of Zippor saw all that Israel had done to the Amorite. 3And Moab was very terrified of the people, for they were many, and Moab loathed the Israelites. 4And Moab said to the elders of Midian, “Now, this assembly will nibble away everything around us as the ox nibbles the grass of the field.” And Balak son of Zippor was king over Moab at that time. 5And he sent messengers to Balaam son of Beor at Pethor, which is on the Euphrates in his people’s land, to call him, saying, “Look, a people has come out of Egypt. Look, it has covered the eye of the land and it is sitting over against me. 6And so, pray, go curse this people for me, for it is mightier than I. Perhaps I shall be able to strike against it and drive it out of the land. For I know that whom you bless is blessed and whom you curse is cursed.” 7And the elders of Moab and the elders of Midian went, with spells in their hand, and they came to Balaam and spoke Balak’s words to him. 8And he said to them, “Lodge here tonight, and I shall give you back an answer as the LORD will speak to me.” And the chieftains of Moab stayed with Balaam. 9And God came to Balaam and said, “Who are these men with you?” 10And Balaam said to God: “Balak son of Zippor has sent to me: 11‘Look, the people that has come out of Egypt has covered the eye of the land. So, go hex it for me. Perhaps I shall be able to do battle against it and drive it out.’” 12And God said to Balaam, “You shall not go with them. You shall not curse the people, for it is blessed.” 13And Balaam rose in the morning and said to Balak’s chieftains, “Go to your land, for the LORD has refused to let me go with you.” 14And the chieftains of Moab rose and came to Balak, and they said, “Balaam refused to go with us.” 15And Balak once more sent chieftains, more numerous and more honored than the others. 16And they came to Balaam and said to him, “Thus said Balak son of Zippor: ‘Do not, pray, hold back from going to me. 17For I will surely honor you greatly, and whatever you say to me, I will do. And, pray, go hex this people for me.’” 18And Balaam answered and said to Balak’s servants, “Should Balak give me his houseful of silver and gold, I could not cross the word of the LORD my God to do either a small thing or a great one. 19And now, stay here, you, too, tonight, that I may know what the LORD may speak further with me.” 20And God came to Balaam in the night and said to him, “If these men have come to call you, rise, go with them. 21But only the word that I speak to you shall you do.” And Balaam rose in the morning and saddled his ass, and he went with the chieftains of Moab. 22And God’s wrath flared because he was going with them, and the LORD’s messenger stationed himself in the road as an adversary to him, and he was riding his ass, and his two lads were with him. 23And the ass saw the LORD’s messenger stationed in the road, his sword unsheathed in his hand, and the ass swerved from the road and went into the field, and Balaam struck the ass to steer her back to the road. 24And the LORD’s messenger stood in the footpath through the vineyards, a fence on one side and a fence on the other. 25And the ass saw the LORD’s messenger and was pressed against the wall and pressed Balaam’s leg against the wall, and once more he struck her. 26And the LORD’s messenger crossed over and stood in a narrow place in which there was no way to swerve right or left. 27And the ass saw the LORD’s messenger and crouched down under Balaam and Balaam’s wrath flared and he struck the ass with the stick. 28And the LORD opened the ass’s mouth, and she said to Balaam, “What have I done to you, that you should have struck me these three times?” 29And Balaam said to the ass, “Because you have toyed with me. Had I a sword in my hand, by now I would have killed you.” 30And the ass said to Balaam, “Am I not your ass upon whom you have ridden your whole life till this day? Have I ever been wont to do thus to you?” And he said, “No.” 31And the LORD unveiled Balaam’s eyes, and he saw the LORD’s messenger stationed in the road, his sword unsheathed in his hand, and he prostrated himself and bowed down on his face. 32And the LORD’s messenger said to him, “For what did you strike your ass three times now? Look, I myself have come out as adversary, for the road plunged before me. 33And the ass saw me and swerved away from me these three times. Had she not swerved away from me, by now it is you I would have killed, while her I would have let live.” 34And Balaam said to the LORD’s messenger, “I have offended, for I did not know that you were stationed to meet me in the road. And now, if it is wrong in your eyes, let me turn back.” 35And the LORD’s messenger said to Balaam, “Go with the men. But the word that I speak to you, it alone shall you do.” And Balaam went with Balak’s chieftains. 36And Balak heard that he had come, and he went out to meet him to the town of Moab, which is at the edge of the territory. 37And Balak said to Balaam, “Did I not assuredly send to call you? Why did you not go to me? Is it true that I cannot honor you?” 38And Balaam said to Balak, “Look, I have come to you now. Can I possibly speak anything? The word that God puts in my mouth, only that will I speak.” 39And Balaam went with Balak, and they came to Kiriath-Huzoth. 40And Balak slaughtered cattle and sheep and sent to Balaam and to the chieftains who were with him. 41And it happened in the morning that Balak took Balaam and brought him up to Bamoth-Baal, and he saw from there the edge of the people.
CHAPTER 22 NOTES
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2. Balak . . . saw. The thematic key word of this entire episode is “to see,” raʾoh (and in the poems that follow, its poetic synonym, “to gaze,” shur). The Moabite king sees the vast expanse of the Israelite multitudes, which at the climax of the story Balaam, the hexer he has hired, will see as well; the ass sees the LORD’s messenger in the road while her master, the professional seer, remains blind to the divine emissary until his eyes are “unveiled.”
3. Moab was very terrified of the people, for they were many, and Moab loathed the Israelites. This report alludes pointedly to the response of the Egyptians to the Israelites in Exodus. There, too, the sheer magnitude of the Hebrews is stressed, with two terms, rabim and ʿatsumim, “many” and “mighty,” that recur here, and the Egyptians, too, are said to “loathe” (verbal stem quts) the Israelites.
4. nibble away everything. The verb here for “chewing up” or “nibbling away” is generally reserved for animals, as the ox simile makes clear. The covering of the eye of the land in the next verse is an image borrowed from the plague of locusts in Exodus, which neatly catches the Moabites’ fearful revulsion at the sight of the Hebrew multitudes. (In the Egyptian loathing in Exodus, the Hebrews are assimilated to the realm of crawling and creeping things by the verb “swarm.”) In practical terms, though the Israelites have not actually invaded Moab, Balak fears that this vast horde will eat up everything in sight along the borders of his territory (“everything around us”).
5. the Euphrates. The Hebrew says “the River,” which usually is the designation for the Euphrates. In what follows, there is some ambiguity as to whether Balaam’s homeland is Aram in Mesopotamia or Ammon, to the southwest of Aram, in trans-Jordan. In the latter case, “the River” might be the Jabbok. The very next phrase here, “in his people’s land” ʾerets beney ʿamo, sounds a little odd in Hebrew, and a reading reflected in the Vulgate and the Peshitta, ʾerets beney ʿamon, “land of the Ammonites,” is a more idiomatic usage and would place Balaam in trans-Jordan. That reading, however, may be merely an ancient solution to the very textual difficulty delineated here.
6. whom you bless is blessed and whom you curse is cursed. Balak’s concluding words are the crux of this monotheistic fable. He assumes that he can employ Balaam as a technician of the realm of spirits to put a hex on his enemies. The emphatic point of the story is that God alone controls human destiny, and man has no independent power to impose curses or blessings.
7. the elders of Midian. The addition of Midianites, not afterward mentioned, to the delegation is perhaps puzzling. A couple of the medieval commentators propose that the frightened king of Moab is rounding up allies from his neighbors.
with spells in their hand. The meaning of this phrase has long been disputed. Since the Middle Ages, many interpreters claim that this is an idiom that actually means “payment for spells to be cast,” although one may wonder whether the emissaries would really have brought Balaam his reward—to entice him?—before he performed any service. The alternative view is that they brought along spells to demonstrate their own expertise in magic as credentials for their engaging him in informed fashion as a past master of the craft.
9. And God came to Balaam. This idiom, as Moshe Weinfeld notes, is reserved for God’s appearance to non-Israelites. It is equally noteworthy that God typically comes to non-Israelites in night-visions. (Compare the Gerarite king Abimelech in Genesis 20:3.) Otherwise, the entire story, with the fable of the talking ass that this commentary regards as integral to it, is altogether distinct from the surrounding narrative. Even the use of YHWH and ʾelohim as designations of the deity does not follow the pattern of discrete literary strands detectable elsewhere in the Torah. Baruch Levine conjectures that both story and poem are the special product of Israelite literary activity in Gilead, the central northern trans-Jordanian region. It is striking that an inscription on plaster, probably composed in the eighth century B.C.E., discovered in 1967 at Deir ʿAlla, in this same region, about fifteen kilometers east of the Jordan River, speaks of a powerful soothsayer and seer named Balaam son of [the Aramaic bar is used rather than the Hebrew ben] Beor. The language of the inscription, which some scholars have called “Gileadite,” is very close to Hebrew, perhaps merely a dialect of it with certain Aramaizing elements. Some terms in the inscription are quite similar to terms used in Balaam’s poems in our text. The Deir ʿAlla inscription, though fragmentary, clearly reflects a polytheistic outlook, which would by no means exclude an Israelite author. The well-known figure, then, of the pagan seer Balaam, whether legendary or historical, has been co-opted by the author of the Balaam story in Numbers to make a monotheistic point with considerable satirical brilliance. Balaam’s first words reveal him as someone who assumes all answers and instructions come from “the LORD,” YHWH (verse 8).
Who are these men with you? As elsewhere in dialogue between God and man (e.g., “Where is Abel your brother?”), God asks a question not in order to get information He needs but to elicit a response from his human interlocutor that will register some appropriate recognition of the situation at issue.
10. has sent to me. The verb here indicates: has sent me the following message. Balaam then goes on to quote the text of the message.
11. Look, the people that has come out. Although Balaam’s report repeats Balak’s words, he abbreviates the message, and, as Yitzhak Avishur neatly observes, he edits out elements that would unduly stress Balak’s personal perspective. Thus, “and it is sitting over against me” and “it is mightier than I” are both deleted.
17. I will surely honor you. “Honor” throughout suggests the generous bestowal of material rewards. The “more honored” emissaries of the second delegation may well be imagined as more splendid in raiment and personal ornament, explicitly chosen on these grounds in order to provide Balaam an intimation of the munificence from which he will benefit after rendering his services. One should note that Balak’s second dispatch to Balaam is much briefer than the first, not repeating anything about the vastness of the Israelite hordes but instead stressing the promise of payment, not mentioned in the first dispatch.
20. If these men have come to call you. God of course realizes that the men have come to “call,” or invite, Balaam. He has now determined to turn this invitation of a professional hexer into a trap to humiliate the polytheists, as the second sentence here (“But only the word that I speak . . .”) makes clear.
22. God’s wrath flared because he was going with them. This is a famous source of puzzlement because God has just told Balaam to go with them. Some biblical critics solve the problem by cutting the textual knot and assigning the tale of Balaam’s ass that begins here to an entirely independent source. But could the God of this story be capable of capricious second thoughts? Or, to suggest more moral grounds for the seeming contradiction of God’s act, when later He repeats what He had said in the night-vision, “Go with the men. But the word that I speak to you, it alone shall you do” (verse 35), the implication of the second sentence may be that Balaam was inwardly harboring other intentions. That is, he may have accepted the instructions of the dream-revelation in good faith, but now on the way to Moab, contemplating the profusion of wealth Balak has dangled before him, he could have begun to wonder whether he might not go ahead with a good professional execration. This shift of intention would then trigger God’s wrath and the sword-wielding divine messenger.
24. the footpath. The Hebrew mishʿol, which occurs only here, is transparently derived from shaʿal, “span,” and so implies a narrow pedestrian way. The story assumes the folktale structure of a crescendo of three repetitions (like “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”) with a climactic reversal or revelation in the third occurrence. What is noteworthy here is the progressive constriction: from road to footpath to a way so narrow that there is no room to move to either side. The spatial arrangement of the story becomes a dramatization of how man and beast are inexorably caught in God’s design for them, from which there is no escape.
a fence. The fences are, as one would expect in this region, low stone walls, and should not be imagined as picket fences or hedges. Their construction becomes clear in the next verse.
25. and pressed Balaam’s leg against the wall. In the progression of three occurrences, first Balaam is caused to make an involuntary detour, now he is caused physical discomfort, and finally he will be totally stymied in his forward movement as the ass crouches down under him.
27. with the stick. No stick was previously mentioned. Abraham ibn Ezra, ever alert to minute textual details, infers that in the two previous instances Balaam struck the ass with a switch or branch and only now administers a more serious beating with a stick.
28. And the LORD opened the ass’s mouth. This is the only talking animal, if one excludes the mythological serpent in the Garden story, in the entire Bible. The early rabbis, sensitive to the anomaly, put the mouth of Balaam’s ass on their list of ten prodigies especially preordained from the time of creation. But the talking ass is perfectly in accord with the theological assumptions of the story: if God absolutely controls blessings and curses and vision, He can do the same for speech. And the ensuing dialogue between master and ass opens up splendid comic possibilities.
29. Because you have toyed with me. The wonderful absurdity of this response is that Balaam doesn’t miss a beat. Confronted with the articulated speech of his ass’s eminently justified complaint, he answers irascibly as though he were thoroughly accustomed to conducting debates with his beast.
Had I a sword in my hand. Even as he harangues his ass, Balaam remains perfectly blind to something the ass has had no difficulty seeing all along: he wishes he had a sword at the very moment the LORD’s messenger stands in front of him wielding an unsheathed sword.
30. your whole life. The Hebrew, a single word, means literally “as long as you have been.”
Have I ever been wont to do thus to you? The ass sounds altogether like an aggrieved worker. Her service to her master has always been dependable, as Balaam concedes in his one-word response, so these three deviations must have special cause.
31. the LORD unveiled Balaam’s eyes. The unveiling or uncovering (verbal stem g-l-h) of the eyes is of course crucial to the central theme of vision, and both unveiling and eyes will recur in the prologue of Balaam’s oracles.
he prostrated himself and bowed down on his face. This gesture of reverence continues the comedy of man and beast, for Balaam unwittingly imitates what his ass has already done in crouching down.
32. the road plunged before me. The reader should be warned that no one really knows what this phrase means. The verb yarat occurs only one other time in the Bible, in Job 16:11, and it is not even certain that the same root is manifested there. The context in Job suggests violent descent or some other catastrophic action. Many interpreters, medieval and modern, seek to smooth out the meaning by understanding derekh, “road” or “way,” as “mission” or “behavior,” referring to Balaam. In that case, however, one would expect “your way” instead of “the way.” It seems best for the translation to reproduce the enigma of the Hebrew.
33. by now it is you I would have killed. The divine messenger, sword in hand, addressing the swordless Balaam, bounces back to him the very words he used against the ass (verse 29).
while her I would have let live. The messenger’s words are a virtual citation of the words Abram says about himself and Sarai, “they will kill me while you they will let live” (Genesis 12:12). This transposition of the predicament of patriarch and matriarch to pagan prophet and his ass is still another bold gesture of comic incongruity in the shaping of the story.
36. And Balak heard that he had come. Against the initial “seeing” (verse 2), he has now only this mediated report of Balaam’s arrival at his border, and he has not the slightest idea of all that Balaam with his unveiled eyes has seen, so he blithely imagines that his design against Israel is moving forward.
37. Why did you not go to me? Although the ordinary logic of English usage would call for “come,” this translation maintains “go” (verbal stem h-l-k) throughout because it is manifestly a thematic key word in Balaam’s story, the story of a man who goes on a questionable way.
38. The word that God puts in my mouth. Balaam, after his confrontation by the sword-wielding messenger of the LORD, is speaking in perfect good faith. Balak on his part no doubt assumes that this is the sort of pious twaddle that a top-notch execrator would invoke for the benefit of a client before proceeding to put a hex on someone.
40. and sent to Balaam and to the chieftains who were with him. Balak sends the dressed meat to Balaam and the chieftains as an act of hospitality and a prelude to the great ceremony of execration. It is unclear whether any of this slaughtering is sacrificial or whether it is purely a culinary measure, the same Hebrew verb serving both purposes.
41. brought him up to Bamoth-Baal. The place-name means “high places [that is, sacrificial sites] of Baal,” and so becomes the stage for the elaborate procedure of sacrifices that immediately follows. The bringing up is equally important because each of Balaam’s oracles is delivered from a promontory where he can look out over the multitudes of the Israelite camp.
and he saw from there the edge of the people. The narrative unit from the initial exposition of the story to the moment before the first oracle begins with Balak’s seeing Israel and concludes with Balaam’s seeing Israel. But the professional visionary can see only the “edge” of the people, both because he is at a considerable distance from them, on the heights, and because they constitute such a vast expanse that his eye can take in no more than the edge of their encampment. The legendary notion that the total population of the Wilderness generation comes to well over two million is here both dramatized and thematized.