Numbers 22:27

Summary

The donkey sees the angel of Yehovah and lies down under Balaam; Balaam's anger burns, and he strikes the donkey with a stick. The verse presents four sequential actions joined by the narrative vav, describing the animal's reaction and the man's violent response.

Key words

• 'atOn ("donkey", H0860) — feminine singular noun, subject of the first two verbs (Tere' and tirBatz); the same animal that struck Balaam repeatedly through the episode.
• mal'akh ("angel of", H4397) — masculine singular noun in construct state, linking directly to Yehovah to form "angel of Yehovah," the object the donkey perceives.
• tirBatz ("it lay down", H7257) — qal narrative verb, feminine subject; describes a physical collapse to the ground rather than a controlled stop.
• yichar-'af ("the anger of... burned", H2734 + H0639) — idiomatic construct chain: the verb "burned" governs the noun "nose/anger" of Balaam, a standard Hebrew expression for the onset of rage, with no separate word for "became."
• ba-maQel ("with the stick", H4731 with H9003) — preposition + noun marking the instrument used in the final action, yaKh ("he struck," H5221, hiphil), a causative form indicating Balaam actively inflicts the blow rather than merely touching the animal.

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of four wayyiqtol (narrative past) verbs — Tere' ("she saw"), tirBatz ("she lay down"), yichar ("it burned"), yaKh ("he struck") — each introduced by the narrative vav, producing a rapid sequence of cause and effect: perception leads to collapse, which leads to anger, which leads to violence. The subject shifts from the donkey (first two verbs) to Balaam (last two), a grammatical pivot that mirrors the shift in narrative focus.

The idiom yichar-'af Bil'am uses the construct noun 'af ("anger," literally "nose") as the grammatical subject of the verb "burned," a construction that Hebrew uses to describe the onset of anger without a separate copula or "became" verb. The direct object marker 'et appears twice (before "angel of Yehovah" and before "the donkey"), marking these as clear grammatical objects of their respective verbs, though the marker itself carries no independent meaning.

Differences between versions

The LXX renders mal'akh Yehovah ("angel of Yehovah") as "τὸν ἄγγελον τοῦ θεοῦ" ("the angel of God"), substituting the divine name with the generic "God." For tirBatz ("she lay down"), the LXX has "συνεκάθιδεν" ("she sat down together/with"), a different verb nuance than the Hebrew's picture of collapsing to the ground. The Vulgate expands the same clause to "concidit sub pedibus sedentis" ("she fell down under the feet of the one sitting"), adding "feet" and "sitting," details not present in the Hebrew text. The Vulgate also adds the intensifier "vehementius" ("more violently") to the final beating, a nuance absent from the Hebrew yaKh... ba-maQel ("he struck... with the stick").