A Wall at Deir Alla, and a Reputation Reversed

In 1967 excavators at Tell Deir Alla, in the Jordan Valley on the east bank, recovered fragments of a text written in red and black ink on wall plaster, brought down by an earthquake and pieced together from hundreds of pieces. It opens by naming Balaam son of Beor, a seer of the gods, and describes a night vision in which a council of deities decrees a darkening of the sky. The language is a local Aramaic or Canaanite dialect and the text is not Israelite. It is the only case in which a figure from the Hebrew Bible turns up by name and patronymic in a religious text written by somebody else.

The find changed the question. Balaam is not a character invented to make a point about foreign prophets; he was a known figure of trans Jordanian religion whom the biblical writers took up and argued about.

And argue they did. The oracles in Numbers 22 to 24 treat him as a genuine seer of the God of Israel. Later passages take the opposite view: Numbers 31 blames him for the counsel that led Israel into apostasy at Peor, Joshua 13 calls him a diviner rather than a prophet, and Deuteronomy remembers only that God turned his curse into a blessing. The New Testament follows the hostile line, and rabbinic tradition in Sanhedrin makes him the type of the wicked gentile prophet. The atlas holds both readings because the tradition does, and the plaster from Deir Alla is the only voice in the file that is not taking a side in that argument.