Balak: Balaam's Donkey Vision

Balaam and His Donkey:

Biblical Soul-Making through Hillman’s Lens

Introduction

Among casual readers of Hebrew Bible, the prophet Balaam is best known for being upstaged by his talking donkey (Numbers 22:2-24:5). Despite the story’s obvious magical realism, many religious scholars and writers have read Balaam’s story solemnly, suggesting that the truth of their religious claims rests on understanding Balaam’s true personality and prophetic intent. The Christian author of the gospel according to Matthew (2:9) read Balaam’s poetic reference to a rising star as a prediction of the birth of Jesus Christ (Levine and Brettler, 2011). In response, some contemporaneous Jewish authors argued polemically that Balaam was a flawed prophet (Kravitz and Olitzky, 1993). Based on a recently discovered inscription at De’ir Allah, Jordan, modern archeologists have postulated that Balaam was known to multiple religious communities in the ancient Near East (Milgrom, 1990), hinting at ancient interfaith teachings. While none of these writers goes so far as to claim Balaam’s historical existence, each uses the story to argue for what James Hillman might call a literalized perspective (Hillman, 1971).

Because Hebrew Bible is a foundational work of literature for our world civilization, it is not surprising that groups and individuals appeal to its authority, using a variety of hermeneutics. The text itself, however, speaks against literalism, in its very first chapter. On Day One, God creates light (Genesis 1:3-5). But the now-familiar tangible sources of light – sun, moon, and stars – are not created until the fourth day (Genesis 1:14-19). This oddity causes attentive readers to re-examine the images they held of Day One’s light. It was not anything we now literally call “light,” yet the author found “light” a suitable metaphor for it; what could it be? This subversion of literal reading occurs again and again in the Hebrew Bible, across its twenty-four books. Jewish hermeneutic tradition has proposed many theories about what lies beyond literalism, including midrashic predictions of the historical future; Kabbalistic portraits of God’s subtle body; and Hassidic guides to soul-making (Fishbane, 1992).

Hillman, in his own work, has developed a vocabulary for understanding and exploring soul-making (Hillman, 1975), and for speaking about the development of imagination (Hillman, 2000). Both vocabularies can be helpful in looking beyond biblical literalism. Key Biblical characters, says Hillman, often receive “a lesson about literalism,” showing them literalism’s limits, and initiating them into a life of imagination (Hillman, 1971, p. 116). Balaam’s story, read through the lens of Hillman’s description of soul-making, shows Balaam to be such a character.

Balaam’s Story: A Summary

King Balak of Moab feared the military might of the Israelites. He sent messengers to Balaam, hoping to hire Balaam to curse the Israelites. “Whoever you bless is blessed, and whoever you curse is cursed,” they said. While the messengers spent the night, Balaam dreamed of God, who said, “You cannot curse these people; they are blessed. Do not go with the messengers.” So, Balaam refused the job. King Balak sent a higher-ranking group of dignitaries, offering Balaam a generous financial reward. “Money is irrelevant,” said Balaam, “when God says not to take the job.” While these dignitaries stayed the night, Balaam dreamed of God, who said, “Go with them, but speak only the words I speak to you.”

The next morning, Balaam saddled his donkey, and left with the Moabite dignitaries. God was angry that he went. Balaam rode his donkey on a narrow path, between fenced-in vineyards. An angel of the Lord stood in Balaam’s way to oppose him. The donkey saw the angel standing on the path holding a drawn sword, so she swerved into a field. Balaam hit her to turn her back to the path. The angel moved, creating only a narrow pathway near a wall. Avoiding the angel, the donkey pressed Balaam’s leg against the wall. Balaam hit her again. The angel moved so that there was nowhere to go. The donkey lay down and Balaam hit her with his stick.

God opened the donkey’s mouth, and she said, “What have I done to you that you have hit me three times?” Balaam said, “You are mocking me! If I had a sword, I would kill you right now.” The donkey said, “I am your donkey, whom you have been riding for so long! Have I been in the habit of doing this to you?” Balaam said, “No.” God opened Balaam’s eyes, and Balaam saw the angel. The angel scolded him for beating the donkey and repeated God’s message. “Go with the men, but speak only the words I say to you.”

King Balak came to meet Balaam to witness the curse. They viewed the Israelites from multiple vantage points, built many altars, and made many offerings. At each place, Balaam took up his prophetic stance, and offered the Israelites poetic words of praise and blessing, rich in metaphorical expression. “I can only say the words God says to me,” Balaam explained to the very angry King Balak. Each man journeyed back to his home (Numbers 22:2-24:5).

Balaam’s Soul-Making Journey

Read literally, Balaam’s story contains a number of oddities. For example, since Balaam was following God’s instructions, why was God angry with him? Why could Balaam, a gifted seer, not discern the angelic presence? Why did he become so enraged with his usually reliable donkey? Why did he need his donkey’s wisdom to reconnect with his mission? These oddities seem less odd if we read the passage as a story about Balaam’s journey into what Hillman calls “soul-making,” or deepening our experience of psyche. The events that puzzle a rational reader are the ones that called Balaam to grow his soul. Balaam’s soul grew through four activities identified by Hillman: personifying, i.e., recognizing the world’s living soul; de-humanizing, i.e., de-centering the ego; pathologizing, i.e., accepting disturbed states as normal parts of psychic life; and seeing through to the frames of our consciousness (Hillman, 1975).

Balaam began his seer’s journey to Moab equipped with a narrow psychological framework: whatever God told him in a dream was to be interpreted literally, as the true path to follow. He did not consider metaphorical possibilities or interpretations, as other Biblical dreamers such as Joseph and Daniel did. His dreams did not speak to him of his own psyche and its challenges; they posed no riddles for him to pursue. As Hillman wrote, “A psyche with few psychological ideas…asks the wrong questions and forgets itself as a soul” (Hillman, 1975, p. 118). Thus, Balaam, for all his pious intention, was unable to “see through” to the ideas that constrained his perception of reality. For him, God appeared as a commander with an agenda. Balaam’s job, as he understood it, was to follow the agenda regardless of his own thoughts and feelings. He did not experience God as a living force in psyche and nature, or imagine that his own thoughts and feelings could express or influence God. On both these counts, he differed from earlier Biblical figures such as Abraham and Moses.

Of course, it is an “axiom of depth psychology” that “what is not admitted into awareness irrupts in ungainly, obsessive, literalistic ways” and that “personifying not allowed as a metaphorical vision returns in concrete form” (Hillman, 1974, p. 46). Balaam’s unexpressed reluctance towards the mission, desire to make independent decisions, and recognition that God was more than a dream-commander appeared to him as if coming from outside him. His donkey expressed reluctance on his behalf, making her own decisions about where and how to move. Balaam responded with explosive anger, beating the donkey repeatedly. He did not get his anger under control until she spoke to him about it. Only after their conversation, did he see the angel.

In this densely packed scene, four aspects of soul-making were active: pathologizing, de-humanizing, and personifying made it possible for Balaam to see-through the narrow frame of his consciousness. At first, Balaam did not notice the pathologizing function of his psyche. He was not aware that something was “deeply wrong,” i.e., that there was “something ‘deeper’ going on that needs immediate attention” (Hillman, 1975, p. 81), until his donkey refused to travel forward with him. In this troubled situation, his anger towards the donkey arose as a kind of “gift” announcing “a movement in the soul” outside of his ego’s narrow area of control (p. 177). By the end of his dialogue with the donkey, Balaam recognized that his disturbed state had carried important information. De-humanizing, he allowed his rigid conceptions of self and God to loosen their hold on his perception. Personifying, he heard his donkey speak, thus recognizing psyche outside himself, particularly outside his old rigid structure of literalism and un-self-aware obedience.

This soul-making analysis suggests possible answers to questions provoked by the story’s oddities. Since Balaam was following God’s instructions, why was God angry with him? Given Hillman’s understanding of gods as psychic forces moving within us, one could say that powerful psychic forces within Balaam were triggered. Balaam went on the mission obediently, without examining his own feelings and motives. Yet within him, powerful feelings of anger arose. Why could Balaam, a gifted seer, not discern the angelic presence? Balaam, when first approached for the mission, was a literalist. The angel was not a literal presence, but a metaphorical expression of psyche’s presence throughout the world, a presence Balaam was not yet equipped to see. Why did Balaam become so enraged with his usually reliable donkey? His psyche was bursting the boundaries of its former rigid constraints. Emotions he barely recognized took over. Why did Balaam need his donkey’s wisdom to reconnect with his mission? The donkey was Psyche herself, showing both playfully and seriously that psyche lives in everything. While the text says that the donkey saw the angel, the donkey itself could also be called an angel, in two senses of the word: (a) the original Biblical sense of a messenger, bringing Balaam a wake-up call; and (b) Henry Corbin’s sense of animals as fellow beings who see things we cannot see, and thus make us aware of the multifarious range of psyche (Avens, 1984/2003).

Balaam’s Donkey

Balaam’s donkey showed Balaam how much “more” there is to him, to his image of God, and to the world around him. Her character deserves its own interpretation, one that does not reduce her to a symbol. Such a reduction would happen if we abstracted the idea of “donkey” from this story, researched what “donkey” means in other stories, and then re-read those general meanings into the specifics of this story (Hillman, 1977). By staying close to the events in the story, the reduction can be avoided. The challenge is to simultaneously make use of mythological amplification. In the case of animal images, says Hillman, mythological amplification can help modern urban readers who are unfamiliar with the animals (Hillman, 2008). Amplification drawn from images of donkeys in Hebrew Bible can provide the help, while remaining close to the original context.

Balaam’s donkey was a faithful companion who journeyed with him everywhere. As she herself said, “You have ridden on me me’odcha ad hayom hazeh” (Numbers 22:30, in Stein, 2001). These four words combine to make an absolutely unique idiom, not found elsewhere in Biblical or modern Hebrew. In its most straightforward translation, the phrase means “again and again for you until today,” suggesting that today something had changed in Balaam’s attitude towards the donkey. If the grammar is slightly misread, the word me’odcha (again and again for you) can be understood as a cognate of the word mo’ed, a sacred meeting. On this more playful reading, Balaam’s donkey said, “You have ridden me to all your sacred meetings, until today,” suggesting that today, Balaam’s understanding of meeting the divine had changed. Both readings suggest that the donkey was more aware of the shift in Balaam’s psyche than he was.

As a longtime co-worker and companion, Balaam’s donkey existed both outside him and inside him. She was outside him in that she was a separate creature, with a distinct body. She was inside him not in any unusual or mystical way, but in the way any one internalizes any close friend or family member. When you plan for yourself, you envision a role for them; you account for their needs; to some extent, you see life from their perspective. Balaam and his donkey shared a “form of life” (Wittgenstein, 1953/1973), communicating through shared action, likely making mutual decisions in a kind of silent dance. Today, i.e., the day of the story, that dance broke down. Balaam set them on a path, but along that path the donkey’s options got narrower and narrower, until there was nowhere for her to go. Physical gestures, her usual means of communication, were ignored, even beaten down. Finally, as a last resort, she spoke. To Balaam, this was so out of the ordinary, so beyond his previous experience as a seer, that he said, “You are mocking me!” But no, she indicated; she was not. She reminded him of their partnership, that she was and always had been alive in his psyche, as a reliable guide, perhaps even as a daimon, to borrow Socrates’ word for his guiding spirit (Plato, 2001).

At that moment, when Balaam heard his donkey’s message, his eyes opened to new possibilities. With access to more inner resources, he became able to see messenger angels around him, embodied, for example, in his own donkey. No longer did he recognize messages only literally, as he had previously understood the words heard in his dreams. Instead, he opened to the richness of metaphor, as he demonstrated in his words of blessing to the Israelites. His new sensitivity towards metaphor enabled him to see things in their “true essence” (Avens, 1984/2003, p. 63) as Heidegger might say, with all their multiple meanings “stepping out from concealment” (p. 70). Balaam’s donkey, it seems, opened Balaam to imaginative knowing, teaching him a powerful “lesson about literalism” and its limits (Hillman, 1971, p. 116).

Amplifying the image by drawing on other appearances of the donkey in Hebrew Bible reinforces this view of Balaam’s donkey as an expression of his daimon. Biblical stories have consistently portrayed donkeys as reliable, intuitive guides to their human partners, leading them towards insight, skill, and healing. For example, Abraham saddled up his donkey as he set out to offer his beloved son on the altar, finally learning to his great relief that God did not expect child sacrifice (Genesis 22:3). When Abigail’s hotheaded husband insulted the violent outlaw David, she rode a donkey as she headed out to successfully negotiate with David (I Samuel 25: 20-35). When the son of the Shunammite woman fell ill, she saddled up her donkey and went in search of the prophet Elisha, who returned with her and healed her son (II Kings 4:24).

Conversely, missing donkeys have appeared in stories of unsuccessful lives. Saul, a failed king, made his first appearance as a young man searching for his father’s lost donkeys (I Samuel 9:3). Samson served his people with physical strength born of undirected anger. After his wife left him, he lost what little inner compass he had, attacking people with the bone of a dead donkey, finally throwing even that away (Judges 15-17). In a famous oracle, the prophet Zechariah encapsulated the guiding power of the donkey. Envisioning an anointed king who would usher in an age of peace and stability, Zechariah described him as “victorious, triumphant, and humble, riding on a donkey” (Zechariah 9:9).

Perhaps this mythological trope has its origin in the literary imagination, as a fictional expansion of donkeys’ outstanding abilities to hear and judge situations around them. Or perhaps the ancient Israelites did actually revere the donkey, though not as part of religious ritual. Biblical legal codes granted these working animals a number of rights. They were entitled to one day off work per week (Exodus 23:12; Deuteronomy 5:14). They were not expected to keep up with an ox (Deuteronomy 22:10). If a donkey fell down under a heavy load, all passers-by were required to assist (Exodus 23:5; Deuteronomy 22:4). For readers of Balaam’s story, however, establishing a historical basis for the donkey’s role would beside the point, a side journey into the very literalism the story overturns. Balaam’s donkey, after all, opened Balaam to imaginative ways of seeing.

Educating the Imagination

The story of Balaam and his donkey, recognized by many scholars as an originally independent novella included in Hebrew Bible (Milgrom, 1990), could be classified as an example of magical realism. In this literary genre, magical events happen as a “natural part in an otherwise mundane, realistic environment” (“Magic Realism,” 2014, para. 1). Magical realism is not simply a whimsical genre; many authors use it deliberately as an antidote to the rigid scientific world-view dear to many powerful institutions, a world-view that suppresses parts of reality. Magical realism recognizes that we live simultaneously in multiple worlds of consciousness, gives voice to marginalized groups and realities, and showcases magical elements of our everyday world. It surprises readers, awakening them to pay attention differently to the story and to the world around them (“Magic Realism,” 2004). Like “images and dreams,” magical realism works by “confusing our usual sense-language,” thus, “retraining our senses themselves” (Hillman, 2000).

Balaam himself might have accepted this classification of his story. While he attended regularly to his nocturnal dreams, he was quite surprised when his donkey spoke in broad daylight. By surprising him, his donkey began to educate his imagination. With imagination activated, enhancing his physical senses, Balaam gained the ability to see what his donkey saw. Balaam’s story has offered this same opportunity to its readers. One famous Jewish interpretation, found in the classic rabbinic text Pirkei Avot, c. 200 CE, celebrated the story’s magical realism, saying:

Ten things were created on the eve of the [first] Shabbat at twilight. They are the mouth of the earth [that swallowed the rebels Korach, Dathan, and Abiram]; the mouth of the well [that accompanied the Israelites in the wilderness during Miriam’s lifetime]; the mouth of the donkey [that spoke to Balaam]; the rainbow [that Noah saw]; the manna [that fed the hungry Israelites]; the staff of Moses [that split the sea]; the Shamir [worm who cut the stones for the Temple]; the writing [on the tablets Moses brought down from Mount Sinai]; the writing instrument; and the tablets. (5:6) (Kravitz and Olitzky, 1993).

According to this text, all kinds of magical beings have existed in our world. Accepting their existence is hardly heresy; in fact, their place in creation can be explained using Biblical language. For six days, creation proceeded in an orderly manner. God ordered something to come into being; it did; God declared it good; and the day ended. Each day’s creation supplied what was necessary for the next day’s creation to come into being. Finally, on the seventh day, God rested. But in the moment before rest began, in the thin window between day six and day seven, at twilight, God created ten unusual things. They stood outside the natural order, because they were created after the step-by-step ordered logic of the first six days was complete. Still, they were part of God’s creation.

Thus, it is natural that a part of creation stands outside the generally accepted natural order. We see this magical reality at twilight – not at the literal, daily twilight, but at times when the twilight region of our consciousness is activated, in dreams, heightened emotions, special events, or powerful rituals. If we wish to educate this twilight vision, Pirkei Avot suggests, we can begin by reading Hebrew Bible, with special attention to its subversion of literalism.

References

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