Balaam's Moment of Confusion

The question of Balaam’s status as a positive or a negative character in the book of Numbers is spotlighted by his encounter with the divine.

By James L. Kugel

This article is drawn from a book chapter that deals with biblical characters who initially mistake an encounter with God for something more ordinary. Balaam in this regard is in the company of positive characters; for example, Abraham initially fails to recognize his three visitors as divine emissaries, and Joshua mistakes an angel for an enemy soldier. Balaam’s "moment of confusion" involves his famous encounter with a talking donkey.This article is excerpted from The God of Old, and is reprinted by permission of The Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Good Guy or Bad Guy?

Balaam is an ambiguous figure in the book of Numbers. Something of a seer or visionary, he is offered a large sum of money to curse Israel (since cursing was felt to be an effective means of harming someone in the biblical world). Balaam willingly takes the job. This certainly did not speak well of him--not only did he use his visionary gifts for personal gain, but he tried to turn them against an entirely innocent people.

But then, instead of cursing Israel, Balaam ends up reversing himself, blessing Israel not once but several times. These blessings seemed to argue in favor of Balaam. After all, no matter what he intended at first, he did end up helping Israel with his words. What is more, the Bible stresses that God "put His word in Balaam's mouth." He thus seems to have been nothing less than a true prophet.

It is against this background that a peculiar incident with Balaam's donkey should be read, since it is clearly designed to portray this prophet for hire in an unambiguously negative light.

Numbers 12:22-31:  A Discerning Donkey

He was riding on his donkey, with his two servant-boys alongside, when the donkey saw an angel of the LORD standing in the middle of the road with his sword drawn in his hand. The donkey went running off the road and into a field. Balaam hit the donkey to get it to go back on the road, but by then the angel of the LORD was standing in a pathway of the vineyards, with a fence on either side. When the donkey saw the angel of the LORD, it squeezed up against the wall, pressing Balaam's leg against it. He kept on hitting it.

The angel of the LORD then moved around until he stood in a place so narrow that there was no room to turn to the right or left. When the donkey now saw the angel of the LORD, it just lay down underneath Balaam. This made Balaam furious, and he hit the donkey even harder with his stick. Then the LORD opened the donkey's mouth and it said to Balaam, "What have I done to you to make you hit me three times?" Balaam said to the donkey, "You've put me to shame! Why, if I had a sword in my hand, I would have killed you by now." Then the donkey said to Balaam, "Am I not your own donkey! Haven't you been riding on me from long ago to this very day? Have I ever acted this way in the past?"

And he said: "No."  Then the LORD opened Balaam's eyes and he saw the angel of the LORD standing on the road with his sword in his hand, so Balaam prostrated himself and bowed to the ground. 

The Moment of Confusion

"Some prophet!" the narrative seems to be saying. "At a crucial moment, even his donkey was more discerning than Balaam was."

This point aside, however, here we are once again confronted with a moment of confusion. The donkey suddenly shies from the middle of the road (as donkeys sometimes do; this hardly needed to be said in the ancient world), and Balaam does not understand why. In other words, here again is a narrative that presents an "angel of the LORD" appearing to someone (and again, as with Joshua, "with his sword drawn in his hand"), but the someone in question does not realize what is happening. Indeed, Balaam's lack of discernment is exceptional. It is not that he mistakes the angel for a human; rather he sees nothing at all.

The donkey, who does see, does not merely remain immobile but actually tries to flee from the angel time and time again. Yet Balaam simply beats the donkey harder; this man must indeed be in some kind of fog. So thick is that fog that when the donkey actually starts speaking to him--but donkeys don't speak!--Balaam answers as if it were the most normal thing in the world. It is only when God opens Balaam's eyes that he at last discerns what was so obvious to the donkey and us readers--and then Balaam reacts just as every other human being does when his or her eyes are opened: he falls down to the ground in reverence.

The point of this narrative seems to be to put Balaam to shame. But this is accomplished by evoking elements that must have been familiar in the biblical world--the fog, the moment of confusion, the moment of recognition. In other words, this narrative too is telling a bit more than it seems to intend: it seeks to diminish Balaam's standing as a holy man, but it does so by tying into the conventions of a theme that we have seen before with Joshua, Manoah and his wife, Abraham and Sarah, and Gideon (none of them negative characters at all).

The world in which such supernatural encounters occur seems like ordinary reality, or at least starts off that way. Then everything changes--putting not just people like Balaam to shame, but Manoah and his wife, Joshua, even Abraham. The most distinguished men and women of the spirit can be in a fog and fail to see the obvious.

James L. Kugel is Starr Professor of Hebrew Literature at Harvard University and Visiting Professor of Bible Studies at Bar-Ilan University in Israel.  He is the author of a number of books of biblical scholarship, including The Great Poems of the Bible and The Bible As It Was. This excerpt is from The God of Old by James L. Kugel.  © 2003 by James Kugel.  Reprinted by permission of The Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.