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Japanese A donkey carried Jesus into Jerusalem, and that ride gives the animal its meaning in Scripture: the working beast of ordinary households became the sign of a humble king who comes in peace. Zechariah promised a king “lowly, and riding upon an ass” (Zechariah 9:9), and Jesus kept that promise in the days before the cross.
The Gospels slow down to tell how he found it. Jesus sent two disciples into a village, where they would find “a colt tied, whereon yet never man sat: loose him, and bring him hither. And if any man ask you, Why do ye loose him? thus shall ye say unto him, Because the Lord hath need of him” (Luke 19:30–31). Mark adds that they found it “tied by the door without in a place where two ways met” (Mark 11:4). A borrowed animal, tied by a door, was the one the Lord needed. Most of what the Bible says about donkeys has that same humble shape: plain creatures, carrying loads for ordinary people, and taken up by God for his purposes.
Why did Jesus ride a donkey into Jerusalem?
Because the prophet had said the king would come that way, and because of what that way meant. Zechariah’s full promise reads: “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass” (Zechariah 9:9). The very next verse explains the donkey. “I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim, and the horse from Jerusalem, and the battle bow shall be cut off: and he shall speak peace unto the heathen” (9:10). The horse and chariot were the strength of war. This king lays them down and comes on the animal of the farm and the road, to speak peace.
The psalms had already taught Israel where to put its trust: “Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will remember the name of the LORD our God” (Psalm 20:7), and “An horse is a vain thing for safety” (Psalm 33:17). On Palm Sunday that trust rode into Jerusalem. Matthew quotes Zechariah with a word Jesus had used of himself: “Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass” (Matthew 21:5). The Greek word is praus, the same one Jesus chose when he said, “learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart” (Matthew 11:29). The donkey shows us the heart of the one who rides it.
Matthew mentions two animals, “an ass tied, and a colt with her” (Matthew 21:2), while Mark and Luke speak of the colt that no one had ridden, and John says simply that Jesus “found a young ass” (John 12:14). John adds an honest line about the disciples: “These things understood not his disciples at the first: but when Jesus was glorified, then remembered they that these things were written of him” (John 12:16). We are often slow in the same way, and understand afterward what the Lord was doing among us. There is more on the day itself in the significance of the triumphal entry.
Did kings and judges ride donkeys in the Bible?
Yes, and that is why a donkey could carry a king without shame. The Song of Deborah calls on Israel’s leaders as “ye that ride on white asses, ye that sit in judgment” (Judges 5:10). The judge Jair “had thirty sons that rode on thirty ass colts, and they had thirty cities” (Judges 10:4). When Ziba met King David on the road with a pair of saddled donkeys, he said, “The asses be for the king’s household to ride on” (2 Samuel 16:2). For Solomon’s anointing David gave his own animal, though the King James Version calls it a mule: “cause Solomon my son to ride upon mine own mule” (1 Kings 1:33).
Long before, Jacob had blessed Judah, the tribe of kings, with a strange picture: “The sceptre shall not depart from Judah … Binding his foal unto the vine, and his ass’s colt unto the choice vine” (Genesis 49:10–11). Justin Martyr, writing his defence of the Christians to the emperor Antoninus Pius, saw it fulfilled on the road to Jerusalem: “the foal of an ass stood bound to a vine at the entrance of a village, and He ordered His acquaintances to bring it to Him then; and when it was brought, He mounted and sat upon it, and entered Jerusalem.”
God once used lost donkeys to find a king. Saul’s father sent him out with a servant because “the asses of Kish Saul’s father were lost” (1 Samuel 9:3). The search brought him to the prophet Samuel, who told him, “as for thine asses that were lost three days ago, set not thy mind on them; for they are found” (9:20), and soon poured oil on his head (10:1). Saul went looking for animals and came home with a crown.
What does Balaam’s donkey teach?
Balak, king of Moab, sent for the prophet Balaam with one request: “curse me this people” (Numbers 22:6). Balaam set out on his donkey. “The angel of the LORD stood in the way for an adversary against him” (Numbers 22:22), with a drawn sword. The donkey saw the angel three times and three times turned aside, and three times Balaam beat her. “And the LORD opened the mouth of the ass, and she said unto Balaam, What have I done unto thee, that thou hast smitten me these three times?” (22:28). Then she asked the gentlest question in the story: “Am not I thine ass, upon which thou hast ridden ever since I was thine unto this day?” (22:30).
Only after that “the LORD opened the eyes of Balaam” (22:31), and the angel told him the truth: “the ass saw me, and turned from me these three times: unless she had turned from me, surely now also I had slain thee, and saved her alive” (22:33). The prophet hired to curse could not see what was in front of him, and the animal he rode saw God’s messenger and saved his life. Peter remembers it centuries later: “the dumb ass speaking with man’s voice forbad the madness of the prophet” (2 Peter 2:16).
The rabbis of the Mishnah put “the mouth of the donkey” in a short list of wonders, ten things “created on the eve of the Sabbath at twilight” (Avot 5:6), beside the rainbow and the manna. For us the lesson is close to home. God can speak through the humblest voice near us, and the one who refuses to stop and listen may be the one who is blind.
Is the donkey a symbol of humility and service?
Scripture shows the donkey working far more than it explains it. It carries the household and its loads. “Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass” for the hardest journey of his life (Genesis 22:3). Moses “took his wife and his sons, and set them upon an ass” for the road back to Egypt (Exodus 4:20). Abigail rode a donkey down the hill to meet David and his men (1 Samuel 25:20). Jacob’s blessing on Issachar pictures the burden-bearer exactly: “a strong ass couching down between two burdens … and bowed his shoulder to bear” (Genesis 49:14–15).
The Law cared for this servant animal, and used it to teach mercy. “If thou see the ass of him that hateth thee lying under his burden, and wouldest forbear to help him, thou shalt surely help with him” (Exodus 23:5): even an enemy’s donkey was to be lifted. The tenth commandment names it among a neighbor’s goods, “nor his ox, nor his ass” (Exodus 20:17), because for a family it was a living. And when a synagogue ruler was angry that Jesus had healed a woman bent double for eighteen years, Jesus pointed to the donkey in every stable: “doth not each one of you on the sabbath loose his ox or his ass from the stall, and lead him away to watering? And ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan hath bound, lo, these eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the sabbath day?” (Luke 13:15–16). A donkey untied for water became his picture of a daughter of God set free.
The donkey also appears among the firstborn. Every firstborn male of Israel’s animals was the Lord’s (Exodus 13:12), and the owner of a firstborn donkey had two choices: “every firstling of an ass thou shalt redeem with a lamb; and if thou wilt not redeem it, then thou shalt break his neck” (Exodus 13:13). The same verse tells Israel to redeem its firstborn sons. Many Christians read that line and think of another Lamb given in another’s place. Scripture does not draw that picture for us there, so we hold it gently.
People sometimes ask what a donkey means spiritually, or in a dream. Scripture gives no list of hidden messages for animals; its meanings live in its stories. The donkey’s meaning is in what it does in those stories.
Is the donkey stubborn in the Bible?
Not in the way the common saying means it. Proverbs speaks of “a bridle for the ass” (Proverbs 26:3), as any farmer would, and when God answers Job “out of the whirlwind” (Job 38:1), he shows him the wild donkey he set free, who “scorneth the multitude of the city, neither regardeth he the crying of the driver” (Job 39:7). But the one donkey in Scripture that refused to go forward was right to refuse. Balaam’s donkey stood still because she saw the angel. Her master took her stillness for stubbornness, and it was his life she was saving.
Was there a donkey at Jesus’ birth?
None of the Gospels mentions one. Luke tells of Joseph going up to Bethlehem “with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child” (Luke 2:5), and says nothing of how she travelled. The donkey of the Christmas card comes from early Christian storytelling. The Protevangelium of James, a second-century writing outside the Bible, says that Joseph “saddled the ass, and set her upon it”. The ox and the donkey at the manger come from Isaiah’s line, “The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib” (Isaiah 1:3), which a later Latin infancy gospel, known as Pseudo-Matthew, places around the newborn Christ.
Saint Augustine joined Isaiah’s verse to Palm Sunday. Preaching on John’s Gospel, he read the two animals Matthew mentions as two peoples coming to the same Lord: the colt “on which no man had ever sat” as “the Gentile nations which had not received the law of the Lord”, and the mother donkey as “that people of His which came of the nation of Israel”, the believers from Israel who already knew “its Master’s crib.” Read that way, the two animals together picture the first Church, Jewish and Gentile believers bearing Christ into the city.
Whatever we make of the old stories, the Gospel one is enough. The Lord who had a colt untied from a doorway, and loosed a bent woman from eighteen years of bondage, still sends for ordinary things and ordinary people. The word his messengers carry has not changed: “The Lord hath need of him” (Luke 19:34).
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