And the man whose eyes are open,. hath said. This preface has no other object than to prove that he is a true prophet of God, and that he has received the blessing, which he pronounces, from divine revelation; and indeed his boast was true as regarded this special act, though it might be the case that pride and ambition impelled him thus to vaunt. It is, however, probable that he prefaced his prophecy in this way by the inspiration of the Spirit, in order to demand more credit for what he said. From a consideration of this purpose we may the better gather the meaning of his words. Balaam dignifies himself with titles, by which he may claim for himself the prophetic office; whatever, therefore, he predicates of himself, we may know to be the attributes of true prophets, whose marks and distinctions he borrows. To this end he says that he is "hidden in his eye," by which he means that he does not see in the ordinary manner, but that he is endued with the power of secret vision. Interpreters agree that stm shethum, is equivalent to stm sethum, which is closed or hidden. Thus some render it in the pluperfect tense: The man who had his eyes closed; and this they refer to the blindness of Balaam, since his ass saw more clearly than himself. Others, who perceive this gloss to be too poor, expound it by anti-phrasis, Whose eye was open; but, since this interpretation, too, is unnatural, I have no doubt but that he says his eyes were hidden, because in their secret vision they have more than human power. [1] For David makes use of the word to signify mysteries, when he says: "Thou hast manifested to me the hidden things [2] of wisdom." (Psalm 51:6.) Unless, perhaps, we may prefer that he was called the man with hidden eyes, as despising all human things, and as one with whom there is no respect of persons; the former interpretation, however, is the more suitable. And assuredly, when he adds immediately afterwards, the hearer of "the words of God, which saw the vision of the Almighty," it must be taken expositively. To the same effect is what is added in conclusion: "He who falls [3] and his eyes are opened;" for the exposition which some give, that his mind was awake whilst he was asleep as regarded his body, is far-fetched; and there is a tameness in the opinion of those who refer it to the previous history, where it is recorded that, after Balaam had fallen under the ass, his eyes were opened to see the angel (chap. 22:31.) Comparing himself, therefore, to the prophets, he says that he fell down in order to receive his visions; for we often read that the prophets were prostrated, or lost their strength, and lay almost lifeless, when God revealed Himself to them; for thus did it please God to cast down His servants as to the flesh, in order to lift them up above the world, and to empty them of their own strength, in order to replenish them with heavenly virtue.

Footnotes

1 - This word has occasioned much discussion among the commentators. A. V. subjoins in the margin: "Heb. who had his eyes shut, but now opened." Ainsworth says: "Shethum, the original word, is of contrary significance to Sethum, that is, closed or shut up; however, some take it to be of the same meaning, which may then be explained thus, The man who had his eye shut, but now open. And eye is put for eyes, understanding the eyes of his mind opened by the spirit of prophecy; though some of the Hebrews (as Jarchi here observeth) have from hence conjectured that Balaam was blind of one eye!" Dathe, in accordance with the most ancient interpreters, (LXX. Onkelos, and the Syriac,) agrees with the text of A. V.

2 - A. V. "And in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom." C.'s exposition in loco appears rather to agree with. A. V. than with his citation in this place. "Some interpret vstvm, besathum, as if he here declared that God had discovered secret mysteries to him, or things hidden from the human understanding. He seems rather to mean that wisdom had been discovered to his mind in a secret and intimate manner." See Cal. Soc. edit. of Psalms, [24]vol. 2, pp. 292, 293, and [25]note

3 - A. V., "falling into a trance, but having his eyes open."

Whose eyes are open - i. e., opened in inward vision, to discern things that were hidden from ordinary beholders.

He took up his parable - His prophetic declaration couched in highly poetic terms, and in regular metre, as the preceding were.
The man whose eyes are open - I believe the original שתם shethum, should be translated shut, not open; for in the next verse, where the opening of his eyes is mentioned, a widely different word is used, גלה galah, which signifies to open or reveal. At first the eyes of Balaam were shut, and so closely too that he could not see the angel who withstood him, till God opened his eyes; nor could he see the gracious intentions of God towards Israel, till the eyes of his understanding were opened by the powers of the Divine Spirit. This therefore he mentions, we may suppose, with humility and gratitude, and to the credit of the prophecy which he is now about to deliver, that the Moabites may receive it as the word of God, which must be fulfilled in due season. His words, in their meaning, are similar to those of the blind man in the Gospel: "Once I was blind, but now I see."

And he took up his parable, and said, Balaam the son of Beor hath said, and the man whose eyes (b) are open hath said:
(b) His eyes were shut up before in respect to the clear visions which he saw after.

And he took up his parable,.... His parable of prophecy, as the Targums, his prophetic speech, which, with a loud voice, he expressed in the hearing of Balak and his nobles:
and said, Balaam the son of Beor hath said; the preface to his prophecy is pompous, and seems to be full of pride and vanity, and so the Targums of Jonathan and Jerusalem represent him;"the man who is more excellent than his father hath said, to whom hidden secrets, even what was hidden from the prophets is revealed to him;''and the Jews have a saying (t) that he that has an evil eye, a haughty spirit, and a large soul, or is covetous, is one of the disciples of Balaam the wicked:
and the man whose eyes are open hath said; or, as some (u) render it, whose eyes were shut, but now open; either the eyes of his body, which were shut when the angel met him, and the ass saw him and not he, but afterwards were open, and he saw him also; or the eyes of his understanding blinded with ambition and covetousness, but were open to see his mistake, at least so far as to be sensible that he could never prevail upon God to allow him to curse Israel; or rather open, by the spirit of prophecy coming on him, whereby he saw and foretold things to come.
(t) Pirke Abot, c. 5. sect. 19. (u) So V. L. Montanus, Tigurine version, &c.

the man whose eyes are open--that is, a seer (1-Samuel 9:9), a prophet, to whom the visioned future was disclosed--sometimes when falling into a sleep (Genesis 15:12-15), frequently into "a trance."

Numbers 24:3 and Numbers 24:4 contain the preface to the prophecy: "The divine saying of Balaam the son of Beor, the divine saying of the man with closed eye, the divine saying of the hearer of divine words, who sees the vision of the Almighty, falling down and with opened eyes." For the participial noun נאם the meaning divine saying (effatum, not inspiratum, Domini) is undoubtedly established by the expression יהוה נאם, which recurs in Numbers 14:28 and Genesis 22:16, and is of constant use in the predictions of the prophets; and this applies even to the few passages where a human author is mentioned instead of Jehovah, such as Numbers 24:3, Numbers 24:4, and Numbers 24:15, Numbers 24:16; also 2-Samuel 23:1; Proverbs 30:1; and Psalm 36:2, where a נאם is ascribed to the personified wickedness. Hence, when Balaam calls the following prophecy a נאם, this is done for the purpose of designating it as a divine revelation received from the Spirit of God. He had received it, and now proclaimed it as a man העין שׁתם, with closed eye. שׁתם does not mean to open, a meaning in support of which only one passage of the Mishnah can be adduced, but to close, like סתם in Daniel 8:26, and שׁתם in Lamentations 3:8, with the שׁ softened into ס or שׂ (see Roediger in Ges. thes., and Dietrich's Hebrew Lexicon). "Balaam describes himself as the man with closed eye with reference to his state of ecstasy, in which the closing of the outer senses went hand in hand with the opening of the inner" (Hengstenberg). The cessation of all perception by means of the outer senses, so far as self-conscious reflection is concerned, was a feature that was common to both the vision and the dream, the two forms in which the prophetic gift manifested itself (Numbers 12:6), and followed from the very nature of the inward intuition. In the case of prophets whose spiritual life was far advanced, inspiration might take place without any closing of the outward senses. But upon men like Balaam, whose inner religious life was still very impure and undeveloped, the Spirit of God could only operate by closing their outward senses to impressions from the lower earthly world, and raising them up to visions of the higher and spiritual world.
(Note: Hence, as Hengstenberg observes (Balaam, p. 449), we have to picture Balaam as giving utterance to his prophecies with the eyes of his body closed; though we cannot argue from the fact of his being in this condition, that an Isaiah would be in precisely the same. Compare the instructive information concerning analogous phenomena in the sphere of natural mantik and ecstasy in Hengstenberg (pp. 449ff.), and Tholuck's Propheten, pp. 49ff.)
What Balaam heard in this ecstatic condition was אל אמרי, the sayings of God, and what he saw שׁדּי מחזה, the vision of the Almighty. The Spirit of God came upon him with such power that he fell down (נפל), like Saul in 1-Samuel 19:24; not merely "prostrating himself with reverential awe at seeing and hearing the things of God" (Knobel), but thrown to the ground by the Spirit of God, who "came like an armed man upon the seer," and that in such a way that as he fell his (spirit's) eyes were opened. This introduction to his prophecy is not an utterance of boasting vanity; but, as Calvin correctly observes, "the whole preface has no other tendency than to prove that he was a true prophet of God, and had received the blessing which he uttered from a celestial oracle."
The blessing itself in Numbers 24:5. contains two thoughts: (1) the glorious prosperity of Israel, and the exaltation of its kingdom (Numbers 24:5-7); (2) the terrible power, so fatal to all its foes, of the people which was set to be a curse or a blessing to all the nations (Numbers 24:8, Numbers 24:9).

Whose eyes are open - Hebrews. Who had his eyes shut, but now open. The eyes of his mind, which God had opened in a peculiar and prophetical manner, whence prophets are called Seers, 1-Samuel 9:9. It implies that before he was blind and stupid, having eyes, but not seeing nor understanding.