Genesis 3:1
1 Now the serpent was shrewder than any of the wild animals that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Is it really true that God said, ‘You must not eat from any tree of the orchard’?” 2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit from the trees of the orchard; 3 but concerning the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the orchard God said, ‘You must not eat from it, and you must not touch it, or else you will die.’”
Numbers 24:1
1 When Balaam saw that it pleased the Lord to bless Israel, he did not go as at the other times to seek for omens, but he set his face toward the wilderness. 2 When Balaam lifted up his eyes, he saw Israel camped tribe by tribe; and the Spirit of God came upon him. 3 Then he uttered this oracle: “The oracle of Balaam son of Beor, the oracle of the man whose eyes are open,
Notes and References
"... In the light of all these interconnections, it cannot go unremarked that the root "nachash" occurs in both Genesis 3 and Numbers 23.23; 24.1. As the snake is crucial to the garden story, so the theme of the superiority of a direct divine-human relationship to the techniques of divination is central to the Balaam narrative. While the era of Genesis and the torn of Balaam are clearly not identical, the occurrence of the root in both texts is more than fortuitous, and functions as something of a key to this inter textual reading of the Balaam narrative. If this were the only point of contact between the two texts it would be little more than gratuitous coincidence. But given the scarcity of the talking animal motif, and the common concern with the issues of blessing/curse and life/death, the reader's search for the intertext leads naturally to the garden story, and to a consideration of the root "nachash" as a 'connective' between the text and the intertext ..."
Savran, George Beastly Speech: Intertextuality, Balaam's Ass, and the Garden of Eden (pp. 33-55) Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, 1994