Did Balaam's talking donkey, a floating axehead, and the sun standing still actually happen — or is the Old Testament full of legend?

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  Priya1w ago

  If God created the universe from nothing, a talking donkey is basically a rounding error. The miracles aren't the problem — our shrunken view of God is.

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  Kofi1w ago

  the talking donkey is literally one of my favorite parts of the whole bible. God used a DONKEY to rebuke a PROPHET. the animal had more spiritual sight than the man who was supposed to see. thats not an embarrassment to the faith thats the most perfectly on-brand God move ive ever read. i love it so much

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  Kofi1w ago

  okay but can we just admit that 'the sun stood still' is a cosmological impossibility and if it happened literally the earth would have been flung off its axis and everyone would have died. Joshua would have won a very short battle.

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  Hana1w ago

  To the person above me — I believe in the virgin birth, the bodily resurrection, and the second coming. I also believe the Joshua text uses phenomenological language about the sun because every culture describes celestial events from their vantage point. I said the SAME words in English an hour ago when I said 'the sun set beautifully tonight.' Nobody accused me of denying astronomy. Calm down.

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  Feli1w ago

  Hot take incoming: maybe we're asking the wrong question entirely. The point of the Balaam story isn't 'can donkeys talk.' The point is that a pagan sorcerer hired to curse Israel couldn't do it because God. The donkey is the hinge, not the headline. Whether it literally spoke or whether it's the narrator's way of showing Balaam's spiritual blindness — either way, the text is about sovereign God thwarting human schemes. Why are we arguing about the donkey and missing that?

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  Casey1w ago

  I grew up hearing my pastor call people who questioned these stories 'compromisers.' Went to seminary at 28. Learned about ancient Near Eastern literary genres. Now I think calling everything flatly literal is actually a failure to read the Bible the way God gave it to us, in a specific time and culture with specific forms. That's not compromise. That's literacy.

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  Casey1w ago

  I find it genuinely fascinating that Christians who would never question the Resurrection get very squirrelly about a donkey. If death couldn't hold Jesus, why is a vocal animal the sticking point? Just curious what the actual theological principle is for the line you're drawing.

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• NR

  Nina R.1w ago

  Ancient Near Eastern genre conventions are real. Scholars across the spectrum — including believing evangelical scholars — acknowledge that biblical authors used hyperbole, literary framing, and stock phrases. 'Sun standing still' may be a Hebrew idiom for a long day of battle, attested in other ancient texts. Accepting that doesn't destroy inerrancy. It properly defines it.

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  Iris1w ago

  Because if we can't trust the details we start having to decide what the 'real' point is on our own terms and that's just allegory all the way down. The details matter. Peter specifically calls the Balaam story out in 2 Peter 2:16 and treats the donkey speaking as a real event. If you want to say it's legend, you're also saying Peter was wrong. That's a much bigger problem than a talking animal.

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  Hana1w ago

  The moment you start deciding which miracles 'really' happened and which ones are 'poetry,' you've made yourself the authority over Scripture instead of the other way around. Where does it stop? Was the resurrection 'theological poetry' too? Because that's exactly where this road goes.

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  Zara1w ago

  My grandmother — born 1931, eighth-grade education, read her Bible every day until she died — never once doubted the donkey or the axe or the sun. And she had a deeper, more functional faith than half the seminary graduates I've met. I'm not sure more education is always the answer here.

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  Leo1w ago

  C.S. Lewis — who was no theological lightweight — didn't read everything in the OT as flat reportage and he wasn't considered a heretic. Neither did Origen. Neither did Aquinas on certain passages. The insistence that literalism equals faithfulness is a fairly recent and specifically American evangelical innovation, not some timeless Christian consensus.

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• C_

  Casey _x1w ago

  The floating axehead (2 Kings 6) genuinely bothers me more than any other miracle in the whole Bible. Elisha makes iron float. For a borrowed axe. No great theological stakes, no salvation involved, just... iron floating so a guy isn't embarrassed. Why does that one feel so much harder to accept than the parting of the Red Sea?

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  Ravi _x1w ago

  If you disagree that these are literal historical events, tell me: at what point in the biblical narrative does history 'start'? Abraham? Moses? David? Because wherever you draw the line feels pretty arbitrary and the people drawing it always seem to keep the miracles they personally like and ditch the ones that embarrass them.

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  Casey1w ago

  what nobody wants to say out loud is that if you require 100% flat literalism on EVERY narrative detail, you end up with a God who commanded genocide AND made iron float AND stopped the earth's rotation AND let a donkey talk and somewhere in there people stop listening entirely. there has to be a reading that is both faithful and honest and im not sure scorched-earth literalism is it

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  Jamie1w ago

  spent 15 years as a skeptic making fun of exactly these stories and honestly? coming back to faith meant accepting i was treating a 3,000 year old text like a modern Reuters news dispatch. when i stopped doing that, ironically, the stories hit me harder not softer. the donkey seeing the angel when balaam couldnt isnt embarrassing. its devastating if you let it be.

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  Priya1w ago

  I'm an atheist who reads this forum sometimes. I find it genuinely interesting that the debate here isn't 'did it happen' but 'what kind of text is making the claim.' That's actually a more sophisticated conversation than I expected. For what it's worth, the genre question seems real and worth taking seriously regardless of where you land theologically.

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• CT

  Casey T.1w ago

  I'm a Lutheran pastor and I'll be honest: I preach these texts differently than I did 20 years ago. Not because I stopped believing God acts in the world. Because I learned Hebrew and actually read what the text is doing. Literalism can be a kind of laziness dressed up as faithfulness.

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  Reese1w ago

  Appreciate the atheist stopping by but I'd push back gently — the genre question has been weaponized so many times to evacuate historical content that believers are right to be suspicious of it. Not because genre isn't real but because 'it's a literary device' has been used to deny the exodus, the conquest, the resurrection, all of it in sequence. The slope is genuinely slippery.

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  Leo L.1w ago

  Nope. Hard disagree with the first comment. Omnipotence doesn't prove any specific event actually occurred. 'God could have done it' is not the same as 'God did do it.' That's a logic error and we keep making it.

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  Ravi 211w ago

  Okay but with respect to the previous comment — your grandmother's sincere faith is beautiful and not the question. The question is whether the text demands wooden literalism or whether faithful interpretation includes understanding the literary world it came from. Those are different questions and conflating them is how we end up talking past each other.

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  Kofi K.1w ago

  Every time someone says 'genre conventions' to avoid a miracle I hear 'I don't actually believe God can intervene in creation.' Just say that. Stop dressing up unbelief in academic language.

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  Leo1w ago

  That CS Lewis point cuts both ways though. Lewis also held to a historical fall, a real Adam and Eve as category, and a genuine miraculous incarnation. He wasn't a 'the miracles are myths' guy. Using Lewis to soften OT history while keeping NT history is selective citation.

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