Moab and Midian Buried Their Hatred to Stop Israel

Moab and Midian hated each other. This was not a diplomatic chill or a trade dispute. It was ancient, documented hatred. The book of Genesis records that an Edomite king named Hadad “smote Midian in the plain of Moab” (Genesis 36:35). The two nations had been fighting in each other’s territory for generations. And now, in (Numbers 22:4), the Torah says, “So Moab said unto the elders of Midian.” They were consulting. They were coordinating. They were, against all prior history, acting together.

Midrash Tanchuma, Balak 3, compiled in the fifth century CE, asks the obvious question: how does that happen? It answers with a parable. Two dogs despised each other. Then a wolf came after one of them. Immediately the other dog decided: if I do not help my enemy against the wolf today, the wolf will kill him, and tomorrow it will come for me. Better to have a living enemy than a dead ally and a wolf at the door.

That is the logic behind Moab’s alliance with Midian. Israel had been conquering in a way that was not customary for conquerors. They had destroyed Sihon and Og, nations of considerable power, in what looked to the surrounding peoples like something beyond normal military strategy. Moab needed to understand this enemy. And they reasoned: Moses was raised in Midian. The Midianites knew him. They had watched him grow up in their territory. They would know the shape of his power.

The Midianite elders told them plainly: Moses’s power is only in his mouth. He speaks and things happen. He prays and armies fall. He calls on God and the mathematics of battle stop applying. Moab took this information and drew the logical conclusion: find someone who also has power in his mouth. Match word against word, tongue against tongue.

The Tanchuma then unpacks the comparison between Moses and Balaam using the image of the ox from the same verse: “As the ox licks up the grass of the field” (Numbers 22:4). An ox has its power in its mouth. What the ox devours leaves no trace of blessing. What Balaam would speak, they hoped, would leave nothing of Israel behind. And just as an ox gores with its horns, so Israel gores the nations with prayer, “and his horns are the horns of a wild ox, and with them he gores the nations” (Deuteronomy 33:17). The nations had watched this happen and were trying to replicate it in reverse.

What the Tanchuma is describing is a kind of theological arms race. Israel has a weapon: the speech of Moses, the prayers of the community, the connection to divine power through the mouth. Moab and Midian, traditional enemies who had to choke down their mutual contempt to hold a joint strategy session, are looking for someone who can use the same weapon against Israel that Israel uses against its enemies.

The alliance born of mutual fear is one of the oldest political forms in human history. The Tanchuma does not moralize about it. It simply shows us Moab and Midian sitting down together, setting aside centuries of enmity, because what was coming over the horizon frightened both of them more than they frightened each other. Their fear of Israel was reasonable. Their solution, locating a prophet of comparable verbal power to deploy against Israel, was logical.

The Midianites knew Moses. They had lived with him. They understood what a mouth empowered by God could accomplish. They just assumed it was a transferable technology.

It was not.