Balaam and the Talking Donkey

A donkey stops dead on a narrow path between two vineyard walls. Her rider is furious. He raises his stick. And then the donkey turns her head and speaks.

Israel is camped on the plains of Moab, just across the Jordan from Jericho. They have already defeated two kings who attacked them, and the Moabites are terrified. Their king, Balak, looks down at the tents spread across the valley and says, “This crowd will lick up everything around us, the way an ox licks up the grass of the field.” He can’t beat them in battle. So he tries something else. Far away, near the great river, lives Balaam son of Beor, a seer famous across the region. People say that whoever Balaam blesses is blessed, and whoever he curses is cursed. Balak sends messengers with money in their hands. “Come and curse this people for me.”

That night God speaks to Balaam. “Do not go with them. You must not curse this people, for they are blessed.” So Balaam sends the messengers home. Balak tries again, with more important princes and a bigger offer. Name your price. Balaam answers grandly, “Even if Balak gave me his house full of silver and gold, I could not go beyond the word of the Lord my God.” But he asks them to stay the night, in case God says something different. And God tells him, “If these men have come to call you, go with them. But you will do only what I tell you.”

In the morning Balaam saddles his donkey and sets off. And here the Bible says something surprising: God is angry that he went. Interpreters have long wondered why, and many suggest that Balaam’s heart was still set on Balak’s gold. Whatever the reason, the angel of the Lord stands in the road with a drawn sword. Balaam doesn’t see him. His donkey does. She swerves off the road into a field. Balaam beats her back onto the path. Further on, the road narrows between two vineyard walls. The angel stands there too. The donkey presses against the wall and crushes Balaam’s foot. He beats her again. Then comes a place so narrow there is no room to turn at all. The angel stands there. And the donkey simply lies down under him. Balaam loses his temper and strikes her with his staff.

Then the Lord opens the donkey’s mouth. “What have I done to you, that you have beaten me these three times?” And Balaam, too angry to be amazed, argues with her! “Because you’ve made a fool of me! If I had a sword in my hand, I’d kill you right now.” The donkey says, “Am I not your own donkey, that you have ridden all your life to this day? Have I ever done this to you before?” “No,” he admits. Then the Lord opens Balaam’s eyes. He sees the angel, sword in hand, and he falls flat on his face. “Your donkey saw me and turned away three times,” the angel says. “If she hadn’t, I would have killed you and spared her.” The great seer, who claimed to see what others could not, had been out-seen by his own donkey. “I have sinned,” says Balaam. “Go on,” says the angel. “But speak only what I tell you.”

Balak takes Balaam up onto high places where he can look down on Israel’s camp. Seven altars. Seven bulls. Seven rams. Balaam opens his mouth to curse, and out comes blessing. “How shall I curse whom God has not cursed?” Balak is horrified and tries another mountain. Again blessing. “God is not a man, that he should lie. Has he said, and shall he not do it?” A third time, from a third peak, Balaam looks at the tents of Israel spread out below like gardens beside a river, and sings, “How lovely are your tents, O Jacob, your dwellings, O Israel!” Balak claps his hands together in rage. “I called you to curse my enemies, and you have blessed them three times!” But a word from God cannot be bought, and it cannot be turned around.

Balaam was not just a name in an old story. In 1967, archaeologists digging at Tell Deir Alla, in the Jordan Valley in modern Jordan, uncovered fragments of writing painted in ink on a plastered wall. The text, dated to roughly the eighth century before Christ, tells of a vision received by Balaam son of Beor, a seer of the gods. It is a different story from the one in Numbers. But it shows that Balaam was remembered as a famous seer in that very region, centuries after Moses.

Balaam’s story is in Numbers, chapters twenty-two to twenty-four. A king paid for a curse, a seer tried to deliver one, and a donkey saw more clearly than both of them. And God turned every curse into a blessing. So here is something to think about. Is anything pulling you toward what you know God has said no to, and who might God be using to stop you?