Phinehas Flew Into the Sky to Kill Balaam

Most accounts of Balaam's death are brief. Numbers 31:8 lists him among five Midianite kings killed in battle, his name sixth in a list. He went to war, he died. The end. The Targum Jonathan, composing its Aramaic expansion of the Torah sometime in the first millennium CE, has a completely different version. When Phinehas came for Balaam, Balaam used his magical arts and flew into the air of the heavens. The pursuit that followed is one of the most spectacular scenes in all of ancient Jewish literature.

Phinehas flew after him. He used the plate of the golden crown of the high priest, on which the divine name was engraved, and he rose into the air to chase the sorcerer down. When he caught him, he spoke the divine name, and Balaam fell. The Targum adds that Balaam used his magic to make himself as light as an eagle in flight, and Phinehas used the name of God to bring him down from that lightness like a stone.

Phinehas as Walking Oracle

The Targum's description of Phinehas before the battle begins establishes him as more than a warrior. He went out carrying "the Urim and Thummim consecrated to inquire for them, and the Jubilee trumpets in his hand." He was a walking oracle and signal corps in one person. The Urim and Thummim were the priestly divination instruments, stones housed in the breastplate of the High Priest, used to get yes or no answers from God in times of military and legal uncertainty. Having Phinehas carry them into battle meant the army had real-time access to divine counsel at the front.

This is the same Phinehas who had stopped a plague with a censer and earned a covenant of eternal priesthood. By the time of the Midianite war, he had become something the tradition treats as a category unto himself: a priest who could operate on the battlefield, in the courtroom, and apparently in the air. Later traditions about Phinehas identify him with Elijah the prophet, a claim that makes sense once you accept the Targum's portrait of him as someone who could move between human and supernatural registers without apparent difficulty.

Balak Among the Midianite Kings

The Targum includes another identification that most readers miss. One of the five Midianite kings killed in the war is named Zur, and the Targum states: "Zur, who is Balak." The king of Moab who had hired Balaam to curse Israel was hiding among Midian's royalty. He had not gone home after Balaam's blessings. He had joined the Midianite alliance that would eventually fall to Israel's army.

This detail connects the Balaam story to the Phinehas story to the Midianite war in a single narrative arc. Balak hired Balaam. Balaam failed to curse Israel. Balak remained as an enemy. Israel eventually went to war and killed both of them. The Targum is constructing a story of enemies who cannot stop, who keep escalating, who meet the same end despite changing tactics. Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews, compiled in the early twentieth century from tannaitic and amoraic sources, identifies Balaam as a figure whose opposition to Israel was not personal but cosmic, a recurring force of hostility that manifested in different guises across different generations.

What Magic Could and Could Not Do

Balaam's flying is not the Targum's first attribution of flight to him. Earlier in the Balaam narrative, the Targum describes him as a sorcerer of exceptional power, able to know the moment of divine anger, to time curses to fall in that window. He is not a fraud. His powers are real. What the Targum insists on is that real magical power is still finite, still bounded by the divine name, still subject to being overridden by someone carrying the right instrument.

The golden crown plate with the divine name was not a weapon in any conventional sense. It was an instrument of identification: this priest belongs to God, carries God's name, operates under divine authorization. When Phinehas spoke the name from that plate, he was not performing a counterspell. He was asserting a hierarchy. Balaam's magic was real but unauthorized. Phinehas's power was authorized at the highest level. The unauthorized power fell.

The aerial battle is the Targum's way of making this theological claim visible. It takes the abstract principle, that God's authority supersedes magical power, and renders it as a chase through the sky. Balaam climbs, Phinehas climbs after him, the name is spoken, and the sorcerer falls. The Midrash Aggadah tradition, with its hundreds of texts exploring the nature of divine power against human and supernatural opposition, treats this story as a demonstration of that principle in the most literal possible form. You can fly on magic. You cannot fly away from the name of God.