Concept

Deir Alla Inscription

Intro

In 1967 a Dutch team digging at Tell Deir Alla, in the Jordan Valley of modern Jordan, found fragments of an ink text painted on a plastered wall. When the pieces were put together, the heading named a man every Bible reader knows: Balaam son of Beor, the seer hired to curse Israel in Numbers 22 to 24.

The text dates to around 800 BC and is not Israelite. It tells its own story about Balaam, a seer who receives a night vision from the gods and announces a coming disaster. It does not mention Israel, Moab or Balak. What it shows is that Balaam was remembered outside Israel, in the same region the Bible places him, as a famous seer of the gods. That fits the biblical picture of Balaam as a well-known foreign diviner whose reputation was worth paying for.

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In full

The Deir Alla Inscription is a set of plaster fragments written in black and red ink, discovered in 1967 by the Leiden University expedition under H. J. Franken at Tell Deir Alla in the eastern Jordan Valley, near the meeting of the Jordan and the Jabbok, in the region of ancient Gilead. The editio princeps is J. Hoftijzer and G. van der Kooij, Aramaic Texts from Deir 'Alla (Brill 1976). The fragments come from a building destroyed around 800 BC, probably by an earthquake, and the text is dated to the late 9th or early 8th century BC. Its language sits between Aramaic and Canaanite, and its classification is still debated.

The first combination of fragments opens with a heading identifying the text as the book of Balaam son of Beor, a seer of the gods. The gods come to Balaam at night; he sees a vision in accordance with the word of El; the next day he fasts and weeps, and tells those who come to him that a council of gods, the Shaddayin, has decreed darkness and disaster on the earth. It is the first text outside the Bible to name Balaam son of Beor. It shows a non-Israelite tradition about Balaam in the Transjordan. It does not confirm the specific events of Numbers 22 to 24, and its theology is plainly polytheistic, which is what the Bible would lead us to expect from a pagan diviner's circle.

Discovery

• Site. Tell Deir Alla, a mound in the eastern Jordan Valley in modern Jordan, near the confluence of the Jordan and Jabbok rivers. Some identify it with biblical Succoth, though that identification is debated.
• Excavation. The Dutch expedition of Leiden University under Hendricus J. Franken found the fragments in 1967.
• Context. The fragments lay in the debris of a building destroyed around 800 BC. The excavators attributed the destruction to an earthquake, and some scholars connect it with the earthquake dated by Amos 1.1; that link is a suggestion, not a finding.
• Publication. J. Hoftijzer and G. van der Kooij, Aramaic Texts from Deir 'Alla (Brill 1976), followed by the proceedings of a 1989 Leiden symposium, The Balaam Text from Deir 'Alla Re-evaluated (Brill 1991). Jo Ann Hackett's The Balaam Text from Deir 'Alla (1984) is the standard English study.
• Form. The text was written on plaster in black and red ink. Scholars group the fragments into two main combinations plus smaller pieces.

What the text says

1. The heading. The text identifies itself as the book of Balaam son of Beor, a seer of the gods. The name and father's name match the Bible exactly.
2. The night vision. The gods come to Balaam at night, and he sees a vision according to the utterance of El. The next morning he fasts and weeps, and when those close to him ask why, he tells them what the gods have planned.
3. The divine council. Balaam reports that the gods have met in assembly. The text names El, the gods ('lhn), the Shaddayin (a plural "Shadday gods"), and a goddess, probably Shagar or Shagar-and-Ishtar, who is told to bring darkness on the heavens.
4. The disaster. Images of birds and animals out of their places describe a world turned upside down under the decreed darkness.
5. The second combination. A harder, more fragmentary section deals with death and the underworld; its meaning is much less certain.

Relation to Numbers 22 to 24

• Same man. The Bible names Balaam the son of Beor (Numbers 22:5; Numbers 24:3-4; Joshua 13.22; Deuteronomy 23.4-5; Micah 6.5). Deir Alla uses the same name and patronymic.
• Same profession. Both present him as a professional seer who receives messages from the divine world at night. Numbers says, And God came unto Balaam at night, and said unto him, If the men are come to call thee, rise up, go with them; but only the word which I speak unto thee, that shalt thou do. (Numbers 22:20, ASV)
• Overlapping divine vocabulary. Balaam's own oracle in Numbers speaks of the one who heareth the words of God, Who seeth the vision of the Almighty (Numbers 24.4, ASV). "God" here is 'el and "the Almighty" is Shaddai ('el, Shaddai). Deir Alla uses El and the plural Shaddayin. The difference is the point: in Numbers the titles name the one God of Israel, who overrules Balaam; at Deir Alla they name a council of gods.
• Same region. Deir Alla lies in the Transjordan, east of the Jordan near Gilead. The Balaam story in Numbers unfolds on the plains of Moab across the Jordan, not far to the south.
• Different story. Deir Alla has no Balak, no Moab, no Israel, no blessing in place of a curse, and no donkey. It is a separate tradition, not a copy of Numbers or a source for it.

What it shows

1. Balaam was a remembered figure outside Israel. A Transjordanian community around 800 BC treated "the book of Balaam" as worth painting on a wall. The Bible presents Balaam as a famous foreign seer whom a king would pay to curse a nation; Deir Alla shows that reputation independently.
2. The biblical Balaam is not a late Israelite invention out of nothing. The figure's name, father, profession and region are attested in a non-Israelite text centuries before critical dates for the final form of the Pentateuch.
3. The religious world of the Balaam story is accurate. A seer who serves "the gods," speaks of El and Shaddai, and deals in curses and night visions is exactly the setting Numbers 23:8 assumes when Balaam confesses, How shall I curse, whom God hath not cursed? And how shall I defy, whom Jehovah hath not defied? (ASV)

What it does not show

1. It does not prove the events of Numbers 22 to 24. It is a different story about the same seer.
2. It does not make Balaam an Israelite prophet or a worshipper of Yahweh. Yahweh is not named in the text; its gods are a polytheistic council. The Bible likewise never treats Balaam as a faithful prophet: he died fighting with Midian (Numbers 31:8), his counsel led Israel into sin (Numbers 31.16), and the New Testament uses him as a warning (2 Peter 2.15; Revelation 2.14).
3. It does not show that Israel borrowed its religion from Balaam's circle. Shared titles such as El and Shaddai are part of a common Northwest Semitic vocabulary; Numbers uses them of one God, Deir Alla of many.

How it differs from Kuntillet Ajrud

The two finds are often confused because both are ink texts on plaster from around 800 BC that name El. They are different in almost every other way.

Evidential status

Mainstream consensus on the discovery, the date around 800 BC, the reading of the name Balaam son of Beor, and the presence of El and the Shaddayin. Debated: the language classification, the placement of many small fragments, the identity of the goddess, and the meaning of the second combination. Scholars of every view agree that it is the first extra-biblical text to name Balaam.

See also

• Biblical Archaeology, parent hub
• Kuntillet Ajrud, the other famous plaster text of around 800 BC, often confused with this one
• Numbers 22, the Balaam narrative
• Numbers 24.4, Balaam's oracle naming El and Shaddai
• H7706 - shaddai, the divine title shared by Numbers and Deir Alla
• Mesha Stele, another 9th century BC Transjordanian inscription bearing on the Bible
• Yahweh Borrowed From the Canaanites Objection Defeater, on shared El vocabulary and Israel's distinct God