Suppose you are an author, and suppose you are writing a scene of great tragedy. The God of the heavens and the earth has created man and placed him in paradise—and man has fallen. Sin and death lunge into the world, savage like hounds on a scent and inescapable like Pandora’s curses. Mankind is now in the clutches of death. How do you begin this story? Moses, in this exact situation, chose to pun.
Puns have existed since Biblical times, when the Old Testament’s authors exploited certain mechanics of the Hebrew language for wordplay. At the core of most Hebrew words lies a series of three consonants, and authors were aware that, although Hebrew words were pronounced with vowels, scribes only recorded the consonants and were content to pass down the vowels through oral tradition. A word like “serpent,” whose consonants are n-ch-sh, might have been pronounced nachash, but only written as nchsh. In these texts, without vowels to distinguish between words spelled with the same consonants, double and triple meanings arose.
This is the sort of wordplay that Moses creates in Genesis 3:1 when the serpent, n-ch-sh, appears. Depending on the vowelization, n-ch-sh does not just mean “serpent,” but also “one who reads omens” or “one who divines.” From other verses in the Pentateuch, we can see the plainly negative connotations of divination. In Leviticus 19:26, God instructs Moses to tell the congregation of Israel, “‘you shall not eat any flesh with the blood in it. You shall not interpret omens [n-ch-sh] or tell fortunes.’” Deuteronomy 18:10 is similarly proscriptive: “‘There shall not be found among you anyone who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, anyone who practices divination or tells fortunes or interprets omens [n-ch-sh], or a sorcerer.’”
Twice in the story of the prophet Balaam, n-ch-sh appears as a noun meaning “enchantment,” “sorcery,” or “divination.” In Numbers 23:23, Balaam says, “‘there is no enchantment [n-ch-sh] against Jacob, no divination against Israel.’” Numbers 24:1 records, “when Balaam saw that it pleased the Lord to bless Israel, he did not go, as at other times, to look for omens [n-ch-sh], but set his face toward the wilderness.” The two sole instances of this word in the Old Testament refer to the powers of Balaam, a wicked prophet who blesses and curses for financial gain, who is hired to curse the Israelites, and who crafts a plan to lure the Israelites into sexual immorality and worship of Baal.1 The association of n-ch-sh with Balaam, who is morally neutral in his best moments and evil in his worst, gives the consonants n-ch-sh a further negative ring.
From the moment that the serpent first slithers into Genesis, Moses’ triple pun reminds the reader of the poison in the serpent’s fangs. He is tainted, a delinquent against God's law, a stumbling block to those who would worship God rightly. This portrayal is appropriate: at the opposite end of the Bible, John confirms that the “serpent of old” is “the devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world” (Revelation 12:9). By his craftsmanship with the Hebrew language, Moses has sculpted a sinister serpent in his reader’s mind before the serpent’s first words hiss from its mouth.
In Numbers 31:16, Moses ascribes Israel’s immorality—and by extension, the worship of Baal and the plague—in Numbers 25:1-9 to Balaam.