Today, I am reading and commenting on  Numbers 22-24.

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When I read this passage, I do not understand why God was angry with Balaam.  That doesn’t mean that I can’t think of reasons why God might have been angry with Balaam, but nothing in the passage makes it clear as to why He was angry that Balaam went.  I suspect that the Hebrew words used in this passage contain connotations (or, at least, did for those who spoke Hebrew when this passage was first recorded) which do not carry over into English.  So, I am going to skip over that and move on to Balaam’s interaction with his donkey.  Three times Balaam’s donkey took action to preserve Balaam’s life from a danger which Balaam did not perceive, and every time Balaam struck the donkey.  Balaam got angrier and angrier at his donkey, until he wanted to kill her.  At that point, God gave the donkey the power of speech.  The donkey points out to Balaam that she had been Balaam’s donkey for a long time and had never behaved in this manner previously.  At that moment, God allowed Balaam to see the danger he had been in, the danger which his donkey kept him safe from.  Balaam was upset because his donkey made him look foolish in front of strangers (the representatives of Balak, whom he was accompanying).  We need to learn not to do the same thing.  We need to learn not to turn on those we have known and trusted for years because they embarrass us before others.  The tendency of humans to abandon those they have known and trusted for a long time to avoid being embarrassed in front of strangers is used by those who seek to draw us away from good behavior and away from God.  Teachers will use this to draw children away from the things which their parents taught them.  Those seeking followers will do the same thing to separate people from their friends and family.

And now I am going to come back to perhaps why God was angry with Balaam.  After Balaam sees the angel of the Lord, he says, “if it is evil in your sight, I will turn back.”  The angel of the Lord (I am not going to expand on this today, but take note of the fact that the passage does not just say “the angel”, as many other passages say, but rather it says “the angel of the Lord”) tells Balaam to go with the men, but repeats that Balaam is to “speak only the word that I tell you.”    This suggests to me that Balaam might have been thinking of how he could distort the word God gave him about the Israelites in order to avoid the embarrassment of blessing those he was hired to curse, perhaps he was not even doing so consciously.  So, we also need to be careful to speak only the word which God tells us.

I was going to write about what we can learn from the rest of the passage, but this took too long to flesh out.  Perhaps I will do a blog entry on this passage again another day.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.