[31] Remember how Abraham the wise, when he began to make God his standard in all things and leave nothing to the created, takes a copy of the flaming sword—“fire and knife” it says (Gen. 22:6)—desiring to sever and consume the mortal element away from himself and thus to fly upward to God with his understanding stripped of its trammels.
[32] And thus too Balaam (“foolish people” that is) is represented by Moses as disarmed, one who neither fights nor keeps the ranks, for Moses knew well that war which the soul should wage for knowledge as its guerdon. Balaam says to the ass, who signifies the unreasoning rule of life, which is ridden by every fool: “If I had a sword I would have ere now pierced thee through” (Numb. 22:29). Well may we thank the great Contriver, that, knowing the madness of folly, he did not put into its hands, as into the hands of a madman, the sword of the power of words, to wreak widespread and unrighteous carnage among all who came in his way.
[33] And this angry cry of Balaam is ever the cry of each of the unpurified in his vanity, if he has followed the life of the merchant or the farmer or other business that men pursue for gain. Each, while good fortune encounters them in their several walks of life, sits his beast with cheerful mood and keeps a tight grip of the reins and scouts the thought of letting them drop from his hands. And all those who bid him desist, and set limits to his desires, because the future is uncertain, he charges with malice and envy, and will have it that their warning is not of goodwill.
[34] But when disappointment and misfortune befall him he does indeed recognize that these were true prophets, fully competent to guard against the chances of the future, but he lays all the blame on wholly guiltless objects, the farming, the trading, the other pursuits, which of his own judgement he followed for lucre.