Numbers Straight from The Donkey’s Mouth

Parashat Balak Numbers 22:2-25:9

Parashat Balak includes the only talking animal in the Torah after the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Because I write fiction, and because I like to fold an occasional uncanny element or moment or surreality into my stories–towels at a summer camp that refuse to dry, for instance, or a sibling who plays games that may or may not be supernatural–the recurrence of this fantastical detail draws my attention. The Torah has established an expectation that when an animal talks, the stakes are high; a serpent speaks, and humanity is banished forever from Eden, a land of absolutes, out into a world of complexity.

So what happens when an animal speaks in Parashat Balak? In summary: The animal is a donkey who belongs to Balaam, a non-Israelite prophet hired by his relative King Balak of the Moabites to curse the Israelites, who are camped outside of Moab. Balak’s advisors beseech Balaam to visit their king and take up his cause.

God intervenes by placing a messenger in Balaam’s path during his journey to Balak. Balaam cannot initially see the messenger, but his donkey can, and refuses to maneuver around him, despite enduring three beatings from the prophet. Eventually, the donkey speaks, chiding Balaam for this abusive treatment and reminding Balaam of the support she has given him. “I am the ass you have been riding all along until this day. Have I been in the habit of doing this to you?” (Numbers 22:30). Humbled, Balaam answers, “No,” and God opens his eyes to the messenger blocking their path.

Balak’s plan, and Balaam’s journey, culminates in the prophet’s absolute failure to deliver a curse upon the Israelite encampment. Each time he goes to speak, he can only deliver the words God places in his mouth, blessing and extolling the Israelites as God’s chosen people.

This summary glosses over a thicket of warnings, reversals, and mixed intentions: God appears to Balaam in a dream and tells him not to travel to see Balak, but also that he should go if he will heed God’s words when he arrives. Balaam tells the advisors he cannot help Balak, but agrees to travel. Despite the earlier conversation, God is still displeased that Balaam is traveling to Moab, and dispatches the messenger to communicate with him. But the messenger is only visible to the donkey until “God uncovered Balaam’s eyes” (Numbers 22:31), which raises the question of why God chose not to make them open in the first place. Balaam’s final attempt to curse the Israelites is so unsuccessful that the poetry of his blessing finds its way into Jewish liturgy, “Mah Tovu,” an Ashkenazi prayer for entering a place of worship. What can we make of all this contradiction?

Fiction writers bear a certain allegiance to a text as it presents itself without filters of interpretation and exegesis. In other words, before consulting Rashi, or clicking through the “related texts” on the right hand column of Sefaria.org, I feel compelled to perceive something meaningful that flows only from the text itself. Writing doesn’t happen by accident; if the author wanted more than what was on the page, it would already be on the page.

Working with this commitment, how might we make meaning out of these contradictions? We return to Balaam’s talking donkey, the first and only talking animal we encounter after the serpent. Why does the donkey speak?

The story of Balaam and his donkey is a story of changeable intentions and misapprehended agency. God, God’s messenger, Balak’s advisors, Balaam, his donkey–all of these parties and more shift their intentions, over- or underestimate their agency, and/or misinterpret the intentions of others, leading to unintended and unanticipated consequences. The only person whose intention does not shift is Balak himself, and he is doomed to fail.

As concepts, agency and intention are simple to define and understand: agency is the ability to take action, and intention is the desire to achieve a certain effect. In reality, agency and intention are messy, changeable, and difficult to parse. A person can have a strong intention that is useless if they lack agency, while another might have full autonomy but lack the intention to apply it. A person might hold conflicting intentions. A person might have agency in one environment and feel powerless in another. And this is only at the individual level; what happens when our intentions and agencies begin to overlap and commingle? One person’s intention can impact another person’s agency, or vice versa, and endless permutations thereof. And it’s not only people: institutions have agency and intention, as do communities, corporations, and other groups. Depending on your conception, so might God. And so, in their way, do animals.

The breakdown of agency and intentionality in Numbers 22 reflects the complexity and uncertainty of the world outside of Eden. In this world, there is no direct correlation between the strength of our intentions, or the extent of our agency, and our ability to control outcomes. In this world, we cannot predict or decide how one intention will interact with another. We cannot anticipate how power reshapes and redistributes itself in its exercising. The serpent exiles us from a garden of simple absolutes, Balaam’s donkey greets us in a thicket of untameable complexity, where the stubbornness of a single donkey can overwhelm the intentions of a king.

Adam Zemel is the senior storyteller for the marketing department of Hebrew College. He holds an MFA in Fiction from UCRiverside, and his nonfiction has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Daily Beast, Hey Alma, and elsewhere. He is a contributing writer to the American Scripture Project.

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