Ha-Satan Danced Balaam Down the Road to His Grave

Balaam rose while it was still dark, saddled the donkey with his own hands, and pointed her toward Moab. He was riding out to curse a whole nation into the dust, and he could already feel the weight of the fee in his palm.

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The night before, God had come to him. "If the men have come to call you, rise and go with them," the voice said, "but only the word I speak to you, that you shall do." Balaam heard permission. He did not hear the rest.

God Came by Night and Hid the End of the Road

There is a thing God does for a man walking toward his own ruin. He opens the man's ear in a dream, in a vision of the night, and He can turn him back from the deed before it swallows him. Sometimes He hides it instead. He hides from the man that this road, the one he is so hungry to travel, ends in the pit of corruption.

So it was here. God did not spread the ending out before Balaam. He let the sorcerer keep his pride and his appetite, let him keep every ounce of his certainty, and let him ride. Balaam thought he was going to work. He was going to his grave, and he could not see it.

The Dancer Went Before Him

This is what happens when a man sets out to sin. Ha-Satan dances ahead of him. He goes before the sinner the whole length of the road, light on his feet and glad, and he does not stop dancing until the man has finished the thing he came to do. Only then does the Accuser wheel around and tell him what he has done. By then the arrow is already through the liver, the way a bird rushes into a snare and never knows the trap until it shuts.

Balaam rode, and the dancer went before him, and Balaam felt only the good clean road under the donkey's feet.

The Donkey Saw What the Seer Could Not

Then the angel of the Lord planted himself across the road as an adversary, his sword already drawn. The famous seer, the man kings paid a fortune to see, saw nothing at all. The donkey saw everything. She swerved into a field, and he beat her. She crushed his foot against a wall, and he beat her. She folded her legs and lay down under him in the path, and he beat her a third time. Then her mouth came open.

"What have I done to you, that you have struck me these three times?" she said. Balaam did not stop to marvel that his animal was speaking. "You have made a fool of me," he spat. "If I had a sword in my hand, I would kill you right now."

The words hung in the air like a physician who came to cure a snakebite with nothing but his tongue, with a whispered charm over the dying man. On the road he spotted a lizard and went scrambling for a stick to kill it. You cannot lift a hand against that small lizard without a club in your fist, they asked him, and yet you meant to draw snake venom out of a man with a single word?

That was Balaam, exposed by his own donkey. "You cannot kill me unless there is a sword in your hand," she was telling him, "and you mean to tear up a whole nation with your mouth?" He had no answer. He sat there silent on the back of a talking animal while the princes of Moab stared, and not one of them had ever witnessed a wonder like it anywhere in the world.

Some say he tried to save face. "She is not even mine," he muttered toward the princes. The donkey turned her head. "Am I not your own donkey, that you have ridden your whole life until this very day?" From her mouth they learned that Balaam was not even an old man. The donkey was older than her master.

He Rode Back for His Wages

He could not curse. Every time he opened his mouth over the camp of Israel, blessing fell out instead. On one of those heights he heard his own future crack open and cried, "Let my soul die the death of the upright." He wanted the ending of a righteous man. He did not want to live like one.

So he found another way to earn his fee. He handed Midian a plan sharper than any curse. Send the women down to the camp with wine and with the idol of Peor, and let Israel destroy itself from the inside. Twenty-four thousand fell in the plague that followed. Then Balaam went home.

But he came back. When Israel marched on Midian, they carried the vessels of the sanctuary out to war with them, the Ark itself and the holy garments with the Urim and Thummim burning inside the breastplate. And there, among the five slain kings of Midian, on a field he had no reason to be standing on, they found Balaam.

What was he doing there? He had come back to collect. Twenty-four thousand of Israel had died through the trap he designed, and Balaam had returned to Midian to be paid for the bodies. They killed him with the sword. The man who had begged the heavens for a sword to kill his donkey, who never once saw the angel's sword standing in his own road, died face down on a Midianite field under the sword, his wages unpaid, his soul the one thing he had already sold.