Balaam & The Talking donkey

  The Old Testament is chock full of magical creatures such as the Nephilim (giants), Leviathan (sea serpent), Behemoth (a hippopotamus monster) and your quintessential angelic host. But it’s hard to beat the down-home appeal of Balaam’s talking donkey in the Book of Numbers (which also features a bad ass armed angel). Without this bit of obscure scripture, there may never have been a Mr. Ed. 

With Israelite hordes camped on the border of Moab1, King Balak panics and calls upon the soothsayer Balaam to curse the chosen people before they invade his small nation. Although he is a Syrian, this sorcerer is renowned for being on great terms with YHWH, the god of the Israelites.  King Balak sends emissaries to Balaam, but the Lord warns the shaman-for-hire not to curse the Israelites.  Undeterred, Balak sends higher level officials with a better offer. This time God tells Balaam he can make the trip, but only if he follows strict instructions. 

With the permission of YHWH and mounted on his faithful donkey, Balaam accompanies the Moabite courtiers. For unexplained reasons, God seems to have changed his mind and now he is so angry he sends an angel to block the witch doctor’s way. The donkey can see the angel but Balaam can’t. The beast of burden avoids the angel’s sword by leaving the path, but incurs the wrath of Balaam. The sorcerer punishes the ass several times with his staff, until the donkey has had enough and starts talking back to his master.

The donkey admonishes his master, at which point, Balaam sees and hears the angel. The winged warrior explains that the magician is lucky the donkey saved his ass, because otherwise the angel would have killed him while allowing the donkey to live.

Ultimately, the talking donkey incident comes to nothing as Balaam continues on to the Moabite court. In three separate elaborate sacrificial rites, Balaam wastes the king’s time and torches his livestock.  Instead of thrice cursing the chosen people he blesses them instead. When Balak complains, Balaam explains they he can only speak the words YHWH put in his mouth.

The story continues with murder, fornication and genocide, resulting in destruction of the Moabites, Edomites, Amalekites, Midianites and other undesirables. Sadly, Balaam’s reputation trends inexplicitly downward in brief references throughout the rest of the Bible, finally reaching bottom in Book of Revelation 2.

 EXTENDED STORY: THE DONKEY THAT WON'T STOP GIVING
Balaam is an unlikely Biblical protagonist, an Syrian or Iraqi from Mesopotamia who enjoys a reputation among the heathen as a shaman/soothsayer with a special relationship with YHWH.2 

The troubles begin in Num. 22, as the Israelite masses head into the territory of Moab, camping on the plains east of the Jordan after forty years of wandering. This causes sleepless nights for King Balak, and with good reason.3

 “This horde is going to lick up everything around us, as an ox licks up the grass of the field.” -  Num 22:4 [KJV]

Among the standard services of a sorcerer is the throwing of curses, exactly the sort of magic Balak desperately needs to prevent an Israelite invasion. Intending to offer Balaam a hefty curse commission, the king sends his officials on a five hundred mile journey to summon Balaam. The magician invites the emissaries to stay overnight while he confers with YHWH. When he explains things to God, the Israelite deity instructs him to hold off on the curse. He points out that Balaam can’t curse the people because they are already blessed.

The officials return to Balak and inform the king that Balaam won’t do the curse. Balak sends higher level officials to sweeten the offer, even dangling a position in the Moabite court. Balaam turns him down again emphatically, but oddly, while the king’s men are resting for the night, the Lord advises Balaam he can go with the men after all. Enigmatically, God tells the shaman that he has to follow YHWH’s instructions to the letter.

 “..Go with them; but only the word which I speak unto thee, that shalt thou do.”  - Num. 22:20 [ASV]

Even though YHWH has clearly granted permission to travel, confusion arises: when Balaam rides out on his donkey, God become agitated. He stations one of this sword wielding angels on the road, blocking the way. If deployment of a heavily armed angel is any indication, he has not been this pissed since the Garden of Eden.

The donkey sees the angel and moves off the path. Balaam does not see the angel, so he smites the donkey. After some maneuvering, the angel positions itself in the middle of a very narrow path, causing the donkey to smash his master’s foot against the wall. Balaam strikes the donkey again with his staff, causing the animal to simply lie down. This leads to more beatings.

At this point, the donkey verbally admonishes Balaam, asking what she had ever done to deserve this angry abuse. Expressing no surprise to be speaking with a talking animal, Balaam muses that he wishes he had a sword so he could kill the donkey for mocking him.

At this point God allows Balaam to see the angel, who admonishes the sorcerer for striking the donkey. The angel points out that if it weren’t for the donkey turning aside, he would have killed Balaam already. Balaam is pretty sorry about all this and suggests that he turn right around and go back. 

But God, using the same ambiguous language as previously, instructs Balaam to go with the king’s men after all. As before, he is only following God’s orders. Donkey beating notwithstanding, it is hard not to have a little sympathy for the very confused Balaam: Except for allowing an innocent donkey to be wacked about, God has accomplished nothing but creating a nice bit of Sunday School fodder with this fable.

At this point Balaam is still traveling with Balak’s representatives, whose reaction to the talking donkey and angel confrontation is not recorded. On arrival, the King of Moab comes out to meet Balaam and throws him a feast. In the morning they all go up to the heights dedicated to the Moabite god Baal. From this vantage they can see the vast encampment of the Israelites below. Following Balaam’s instructions, Balak builds seven altars, He sacrifices one bull and one ram on each one.

But instead of cursing the Israelites, Balaam blesses them with a rambling poem. King Balak expresses his feelings of surprise and profound disappointment, to which Balaam replies, “Did you want me to go against the wishes of YHWH?”

Nonplussed but undeterred, Balak insists on trying the hex again. He takes Balaam to a field, and attempts to persuade him to curse the Israelites from a different angle. His argument seems to be that Balaam will only be cursing a portion of the refugees. After setting up seven more altars and barbequing fourteen more animals, God gives Balaam another inscrutable parable, which again is a blessing and not a curse. In the parable, Barak exalts the accomplishments of the Hebrew monarchy, which will not exist for two hundred more years.4

Balak is so mad that he claps his hands together and threatens Balaam. Nevertheless, he falls for the sorcerer’s “build me seven altars” bit yet a third time 5 and this sequence of events takes place a third and final time. At the summit of Mt. Peor, King Balak again builds seven altars and kills more animals, but ultimately Balaam won’t curse the Israelites. From the king's point of view, Balaam’s final prophesy is even more alarming, beginning with the imminent conquest of Moab. The only thing the king has to show for his trouble is a lot of blackened livestock and some bad news about the future.

Balaam then goes out into the wilderness and issues an extended blessing consisting of three prophecies that don’t make much sense unless they are understood to have been written and edited about a thousand years later, reflecting the political status of that era.

One could wish and hope this was the end of this tale, but it is not. Balaam goes into a trance and makes a series of troubling predictions, all of which involve wiping out various ethnic groups. This begins with Edom, the state over which Balaam’s brother reigns and also includes the Moabites, Amalekites and the Kenites. We are not talking about standard warfare here, but rather explicit genocide.

The rest of Balaam’s career is laid out piecemeal in a series of later scriptural entries that take us right up to the End of Days..
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ANOTHER UNFORCED ERROR FOR THE ISRAELITES
After receiving YHWH’s blessing from Balaam, the Israelites manage once again to screw things up by sinning. Beginning in Num. 25 the refugees begin playing the harlot with the locals. Then the devious Moabite women use sex to entice the otherwise decent Israelite men into worshiping Baal. 6
 

After all the mixed messaging with the talking donkey, stealth blessings and a Pandora’s basket of prophecies, now YHWH is really pissed. He instructs Moses to set things aright morally by committing more atrocities. These include hanging tribal officials high up in the desert sun and death by sword for those worshiping Baal-Peor. God backs those measures up with one of his generic plagues, which kills 24,000 of the chosen.

The next few verses are lurid, but also troubling for other reasons. A Levite priest named Phineas follows a mixed Moabite/Hebrew couple into a tent, where he discovers them disporting. As they are making the beast with two backs, he runs them both through with a single thrust of his spear, increasing the body count by two. While many key players in the Hebrew Bible are never named, these two fornicator are identified for all eternity: Zimri and Cozb. This quick thinking bloodshed calms God down. Nevertheless, he does instruct Moses to kill all the Midianites which he does eventually in Num. 31.7

The continuation of the story jumps to the end of Numbers, in which the wicked group behavior is blamed on Balaam’s advice to the Israelite women. This is a flashback to an event that has not yet been revealed in real scriptural time. In Num. 31:8 the murder of Balaam is noted, and in 31:16 the reason.

 “Look, these women caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to trespass against the LORD in the incident of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregation of the LORD.” - Num. 31:16.  

This is the first we are hearing of Balaam’s “bad counsel.” Up to now he has been nothing worse than a donkey beater. 

 NO BASTARDS, SEVERED PENISES OR MOABITES ALLOWED
A little more of the complete sequence of events is revealed in a Deut. 23 passage, which explains why God is mad at the Moabites. The chapter begins somewhat randomly with a reminder that a man with crushed balls or severed penis can’t be part of the worship, nor can a bastard. 

“No man whose testicles are crushed or who has a severed penis is to come within the assembly of the Lord.” - Deut. 23 [EHV]
 

These challenges out of the way, we move onto the Moabite problem.

 “…and they hired Balaam son of Beor from Pethor in Aram Naharaim to pronounce a curse on you. Nevertheless Jehovah thy God would not hearken unto Balaam; but Jehovah thy God turned the curse into a blessing unto thee, because Jehovah thy God loved thee.”

This is a reiteration of the Balaam curse complaint, but it isn’t consistent with the original story. Although he never importunes YHWH to allow the curse, the passage is another undeserved rip in the fabric of Balaam’s reputation.

Moving along the biblical timeline, Joshua 13:22 reports Balaam being slain in the course of listing all the peoples the Israelites have wiped out. 8 It is pointed out that he was killed separately from the actual battle. His status is someone re-habilitated in Micah 6:5 where he is extolled for not cursing the Israelite multitudes, thus contradicting previous statements. The Micah citation is historically about five hundred years in the future.

This is the outcome also reported in 2 Peter 2: 15-16. 

“They have left the straight way and wandered off to follow the way of Balaam son of Beor, who loved the wages of wickedness. But he was rebuked for his wrongdoing by a donkey—an animal without speech—who spoke with a human voice and restrained the prophet’s madness.”

To be honest, it almost seems as if these people can’t let go of a good children’s story, even when 1,300 years have passed and the deity involved has been rebranded. Again, this is entirely out of context, and we ask once again why this minor player keeps popping up. 

Ultimately, Balaam makes it all the way to the End Times in the Book of Revelation.

 “But I have a few things against thee, because thou hast there some that hold the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to cast a stumblingblock before the children of Israel, to eat things sacrificed to idols, and to commit fornication.” - Rev. 2:14 [ASV]

Balaam has morphed from a man who beat his donkey but did not curse the Israelites, into the very personification of evil. In the original telling, he simply heads back to Syria after failing the King of Moab’s assignment.

There are also endless glosses on this story in the Talmud and Zohar, which demo the results of religious scholars without useful jobs sitting around make up even more nonsense.

One of the generally unexamined features of the Old Testament story is the assumption that the Israelites have the divine right to massacre the inhabitants of the land they are invading. The fact that neither history, nor archeology nor the Biblical account itself supports this as an actuality has not stopped this abject tribalism from time traveling thousands of years, generating more violence and dangerous rhetoric in the 21st century.
 

__________________________ NOTES_________________________

1. Present day Jordan, east of the Dead Sea.

2. We are not told why or how he is on good terms with the peripatetic Israelite battle god, who has been traveling with the Israelite multitude for about forty years. Even Moses had only been introduced to YHWH four decades ago. It is also notable that Balaam lives about five hundred miles from Moab, so he must have been a top notch prophet to be summoned from so far away.

3. According to Exodus, they number in the millions. (And if they had just gone northeast from Goshen they could have been building sub divisions in Jerusalem by now).

4. One way to assure accuracy in prophecies is to create them after the fact.

5. The third time around, the blame really must gall on the king.
6. Surely the escaped slaves learned what a bad idea this was forty years ago on Mt. Sinai? Nope.
7. The authors forgot some previous stuff: Moses himself (still out there on the Moabite plain) sought sanctuary and spent 40 years in Midian after killing an Egyptian. His first wife Zipporah and priest father-in-law are Midianites and his two children are half Midianite.  Geographically, the Israelites would have already had to pass through Midian to get to Moab. Note also that the inscrutable Book of Ruth features a Moabite heroine.

8. Historically, this didn’t happen. The settlement of the hill country was gradual and mostly by assimilation.