As Balaam was a real person then this must hold good, too, for Moses, Balak and Joshua
by
“In an unprecedented discovery, an ancient text found
at Deir Alla, Jordan, in 1967 tells about the activities of a prophet named Balaam.
Could this be the Balaam of the Old Testament?
The text makes it clear that it is. Three times in
the first four lines he is referred to as “Balaam
son of Beor,”
exactly as in the Bible”.
Those, like Dr. Eduard Meyer, who claim that Moses
never existed or wrote anything, or like the modern Israeli archaeologists for
whom the Joshuan Conquest was based on some dim, distant historical memory:
Serious archaeological mis-dating is why the Middle Bronze I nomads seem
so mysterious
(22) Serious archaeological
mis-dating is why the Middle Bronze I nomads seem so mysterious
have been completely wrong-footed by documentary
archaeological evidence for the real existence of the venal prophet Balaam, the
contemporary of Moses, Balak and Joshua.
Balaam was the seer at the time of Moses and
Joshua.
Balak king of Moab had sent for Balaam, to curse
the swarming Israelites.
Numbers 22:4: “‘This horde is going to lick up
everything around us, as an ox licks up the grass of the field’, said Balak”.
Balaam son of Beor was actually
an Edomite ruler:
Baleful Balaam
son of Beor
(22) Baleful Balaam son of Beor
When King Balak called
for him, though, he was, as we are told, situated at “Pethor, near the
Euphrates River” (v. 5), which has been identified with Pitru, on the west bank
of the Euphrates, a few miles south of the important
Carchemish.
According to vv. 5-6, “Balak said:
‘A people has come out of Egypt; they cover the face
of the land and have settled next to me. Now come and put a curse on these
people, because they are too powerful for me.
Perhaps then I will be able to defeat them and drive
them out of the land. For I know that whoever you bless is blessed, and whoever
you curse is cursed’.”
Now, regarding the extra-biblical literary
evidence for Balaam, Dr. Bryant Wood has written, “Is there any evidence to prove the existence of the
prophet, Balaam?”: http://www.christiananswers.net/q-abr/abr-a014.html
In an unprecedented discovery, an ancient text found
at Deir Alla, Jordan, in 1967 tells about the activities of a prophet named Balaam. Could this be the Balaam of the Old Testament?
The text makes it clear that it is. Three times in
the first four lines he is referred to as “Balaam son of Beor,” exactly as in the Bible. This represents the first Old Testament prophet to be dug up in Bible lands—not his tomb or his skeleton, but a text about him.
The text also represents the first prophecy of any scope from the ancient West Semitic world to
be found outside the Old Testament, and the first extra-Biblical example of a
prophet proclaiming doom to his own people.
Balaam was not an Israelite. He was hired by Balak, king of Moab, to curse the Israelites. They were camped on the east side of
the Jordan river, about to make their historic entry into the
promised land. Through God's intervention, Balaam was obliged to bless the Israelites rather than curse them (Num 22-24).
Afterwards, Balaam seems to have been the cause of
the Israelites' sin in Numbers 25 when they took Moabite and Midianite women and worshipped the Moabite god Baal-peor (Num
31:16).
Balaam was eventually killed when Moses sent the Israelites against the Midianites (Num 31).
He is further condemned in Scripture in 2 Peter
2:15 (he loved the wages of
unrighteousness), Jude 11 (ungodly men ran greedily after the error of Balaam for reward) and Revelation
2:14 (he taught Balak to cast a stumbling block before the children of
Israel, to eat things sacrificed to idols, and to commit fornication).
The remarkable text found at Deir Alla consists of
119 fragments of plaster inscribed with black and red ink. It was among the rubble of a building destroyed in
an earthquake. It seems to have been one long column with at least
50 lines, displayed on a plastered wall.
According to the excavators' dating, the disaster was
most likely the severe earthquake which occurred in the time of King Uzziah (Azariah) and the prophet Amos in about 760 BC (Amos
1:1; Zec
14:5). The lower part of
the text shows signs of wear, indicating that it had been on the wall for some
time prior to the earthquake.
Written in Aramaic, the text begins with the title
“Warnings from the Book of Balaam the son of Beor. He was a seer of the gods.” It is in red ink, as are other
portions of the text where emphasis is desired. The reference to the “Book of Balaam” indicates that the text was part of a pre-existing
document and therefore the original date of the material is much earlier than
the plaster text itself. Balaam goes on to relate a vision concerning impending judgment from the gods, and
enters into a dispute with his listeners.
There are a number of similarities between the text
and the account of Balaam in the book of Numbers. To begin with, the events described in Numbers 22-24 took place in the same general area where the text
was found. At the time of the Numbers 22-24 incident, the Israelites were camped on the Plains
of Moab, across the Jordan river from Jericho.
Deir Alla is located about 25 miles north of this
area, where the Jabbok river flows into the Jordan valley. Balaam was from Pethor, near “the river” (Num
22:5), in “Aram” (Num
23:7; Dt 23:4).
The reference to Aram has led most scholars to conclude that Balaam was
from northern Syria, in the vicinity of the Euphrates river. That does not fit well with the Biblical
account, however, since Balaam's home seems to have been close to where the
Israelites were camped (Num 22:1-22; 31:7-8).
In view of Balaam being revered at Deir Alla, one would expect that
Deir Alla was his home.
This is exactly what William Shea has proposed, based
on his reading of the name Pethor in an inscribed clay tablet found at Deir Alla (1989:108-11). In this case, the river of Numbers
22:5 would be the Jabbok
river and the naharaim (two rivers) of Deuteronomy
23:4 would be the Jabbok and Jordan rivers.
With regard to the references to Aram, Shea suggests that the original place name was Adam, with the “d” being miscopied as “r,” since the two
letters are nearly identical in ancient Hebrew. Adam was a town about eight miles southwest of Deir Alla,
on the east bank of the Jordan
river, where the Jabbok meets the Jordan.
Balaam evidently was well known as a “cursing prophet,” for Balak specifically summoned Balaam for the
purpose of cursing Israel (Num
22:6). Much of the Deir
Alla text was given to curses uttered by the prophet. The term “shadday-gods”
is used on two occasions in the text. Shadday is one of the names
for God in the Old Testament,
used mainly in the book of Job.
….
The Deir Alla text presents a problem to those who
dismiss the Biblical account of the Exodus, Wilderness Wanderings and Conquest as legendary, as is the
trend in scholarship today. It is clear that Balaam was a real person who
operated on the east side of the Jordan river. He was known as a cursing prophet and continued to be revered hundreds of years after
his death. His persona as revealed in the Deir Alla text precisely matches that
of the Balaam of Numbers 22-24.
If Balaam was a real person, what about Balak, Moses, Joshua and all of the other persons named in the Biblical
narrative? They must have been real as well, and the events described
authentic.
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