How Balaam Seized a Throne With Snakes and Sorcery

There is a period in Moses's life that the Torah skips entirely. Between his flight from Egypt and his encounter with the burning bush, the text offers nothing. Decades of silence. The rabbinic tradition refuses this silence and fills it with forty years of extraordinary history, including a chapter that begins with a betrayal and ends with a capital city defended by swarms of snakes.

King Kikanos of Ethiopia was a man who trusted the wrong person at the wrong moment. When he left to fight a distant war against a rebellious vassal state, he entrusted his capital city to the most capable administrator he knew: Balaam son of Beor, who came with a reputation for both intelligence and supernatural ability, and whose two sons Jannes and Jambres served as his deputies. Kikanos left in good faith. He expected to return to a city he still owned.

Balaam's first move was political and it was swift. He went among the people of the city while the king was away and made his case. Kikanos was not coming back. The war had turned against him. If they wanted stability, if they wanted safety, they needed a king who was present and capable and already trusted by the people who mattered. They needed Balaam. The people of the city, cut off from news and frightened by the absence of their army, were persuaded. They acclaimed Balaam as king.

Then Balaam did what every ruler does who knows his legitimacy is borrowed and his position is precarious. He built walls.

The Legends of the Jews, which preserves this account drawn from earlier Hellenistic-era Jewish pseudepigrapha and amplified through medieval rabbinic traditions including the Chronicles of Moses, describes the fortification in specific detail because the specific detail is the point. On two sides of the city, Balaam raised the existing walls until they were too high and too thick for any siege equipment Kikanos possessed. On the third side, he diverted waterways into a canal network, an artificial moat that would drown any army attempting to ford it, eliminating the most direct approach entirely.

On the fourth side, he used what the tradition calls his magic arts. He gathered the snakes and scorpions of the region and drove them into the approaches to the city's fourth wall, and kept them there through means the text does not explain because the text considers them self-evident. This was Balaam. Snakes did what he told them.

When Kikanos returned from the war, he found his own capital sealed against him from every direction. He tried the walls and failed. He brought rams against them and the rams broke before the walls did. He tried to ford the water on the third side and lost soldiers. He sent men toward the fourth approach and watched them retreat from things that moved in the ground and did not fear armed men. He camped outside the city he had built and waited, and the waiting went on for months, and then years, and King Kikanos died outside his own gates without ever going home again.

The Yalkut Shimoni records that Kikanos's army, leaderless and demoralized after nine years outside the walls, was searching for anyone who could solve what none of them had been able to solve. This is where Moses enters the story. He was already a fugitive from Egypt, a man in his thirties with nowhere certain to go, when he came across this army in the open field. The tradition records that the soldiers recognized something in him. Leadership. Competence. The particular quality of someone who had grown up in palaces and knew how power worked from the inside.

They made him their commander. Moses studied Balaam's defenses. The walls, he could not breach directly with what he had. The water on the third side he could route around. The fourth side he understood immediately. The Ginzberg tradition records his solution with the precision of a military historian. He ordered his soldiers to bring ibises, the long-beaked birds of the Nile valley that hunt and eat snakes as a matter of instinct. He released them on the fourth side in numbers. The magic that had defended the city for nearly a decade was cleared by birds in an afternoon. The soldiers moved through. The city fell to the men who had been camped outside it for nine years.

Balaam and his sons fled before the gates were fully open. They had enough advance warning to disappear. The Legends of the Jews follows them to Egypt, where they returned to Pharaoh's court and continued their careers as royal advisors, which is how they come to be present at the council that debates what to do about the Hebrew slaves. Balaam carried his techniques from one court to the next. The snakes were just the most visible application of a method that worked just as well with dreams and suspicions and the fears of kings.

Moses was made king of Ethiopia not by birth or by conquest in the traditional sense but by acclamation. Soldiers who had watched him solve in days what had defeated them for years placed him on a throne and gave him their loyalty. He ruled for forty years, by most accounts of the tradition, and he ruled justly. The tradition notes that he did not oppress, did not exploit his position, remembered what it meant to be a man without a country. The man who would one day lead a nation of slaves out of the greatest empire in the world spent his middle decades governing a kingdom he had recovered from a sorcerer, learning everything a man needs to know about holding a people together when everything around them is trying to come apart.

When he finally left Ethiopia and walked toward Midian, he was walking away from the second throne he had held and lost. He sat down by a well, the way men sit when they have run out of destinations. A priest's daughters came to draw water. Strangers drove them away. Moses stood up without thinking, because forty years of kingship had not changed the reflex, and helped them anyway.