The Angel Demanded Justice for the Donkey

When God finally uncovered Balaam’s eyes and showed him the angel standing in the road with a drawn sword, the first thing Balaam did was bow down and prostrate himself. The second thing the angel did was demand an accounting on behalf of the donkey.

This detail, so strange it almost reads as comic, is where Midrash Tanchuma, Balak 10, compiled in the fifth century CE, finds its deepest theological point. The angel said: “Why did you strike your she-ass these three times?” And then, before Balaam could answer, the angel made the argument explicit: “For the she-ass, which has neither its own merit nor merit from ancestors, I have been commanded to seek satisfaction from your hand. How much the more so for an entire people that you have come to uproot.”

If God sends an angel to intervene on behalf of a donkey, what will He do for Israel?

The Tanchuma had already noted, a few verses earlier, why the angel blocked Balaam’s path three times rather than simply stopping him at the first encounter. Each position on the road corresponded to one of the three patriarchs. The first blockade, with open space on both sides of the road, represented the children of Abraham: if Balaam sought to curse them, he would find the children of Ishmael and Keturah flanking them on both sides. The second position, pressed against a wall, represented the children of Isaac: with Esau’s descendants on one side, there was still a narrow opening. The third position, the narrowest of all, represented the children of Jacob: no residue, no opening, no gap in any direction. The verse about the third blockade reads “in a narrow place,” and the Tanchuma notes that the word for “narrow” echoes the word for Jacob’s distress at the ford of the Jabbok: “Jacob was very frightened and it distressed him” (Genesis 32:8). Jacob’s children were as tightly enclosed against harm as Jacob himself had once been in his fear.

Balaam, confronted by all of this, said: “I have sinned because I did not know” (Numbers 22:34). The Tanchuma reads this with cold precision. He knew that nothing withstands divine punishment except repentance. He knew that whenever anyone says “I have sinned,” the angel has no authority to touch them. He was using the formula strategically. And then his own mouth gave him away. He had claimed elsewhere to have “knowledge of the Most High” (Numbers 24:16). Now he said “I did not know.” The same mouth that advertised his prophetic credentials admitted his ignorance within a few verses of each other. His mouth bore witness against him.

The angel told him to continue with the princes of Moab. “For your lot is with them, and your end is to be obliterated with them from the world.” Balaam went. The Tanchuma notes again that he went gladly, that “just as they were happy to curse Israel, so was he happy.” The permission given was not a pardon. It was the completion of a process that Balaam himself had set in motion by his eagerness, his defiance, his early morning saddling of the donkey.

When Balak heard that Balaam had arrived, he came out personally to the metropolis to meet him. He showed Balaam the borders that had been fixed since the days of Noah, the territory Israel had crossed coming through Sihon’s land, and complained: these people are breaking ancient boundaries. Balaam, stripped of all pretense, answered him honestly: “I have come unto you now, but am I really able to say anything at all?” He had no authority. The man who had once hidden the truth from messengers could not hide it from himself any longer.

The angel had demanded justice for a donkey. God, the Tanchuma concludes from the laws about animals in (Leviticus 20:16), is “concerned about the honor of creatures and knows their needs.” He closed the mouths of animals so that human beings could survive. He opened the mouth of one animal so that Balaam could hear what he was actually doing. The donkey got her justice. Israel remained standing. And Balaam arrived at the palace of Balak knowing exactly what his mouth could and could not do, and knowing who controlled the difference.