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.