Balaam - Balaam and The Deir Alla Inscription

Balaam and The Deir Alla Inscription

For more details on this topic, see Deir Alla Inscription.

In 1967, at Deir Alla, Jordan, archaeologists found an inscription apparently containing a previously unknown prophecy by Balaam written in a previously unattested dialect with Aramaic and South Canaanite characteristics and employing an idiosyncratic script. The inscription is datable to ca. 840–760 BCE; it was painted in red and black inks, apparently to emphasize the text, on fragments of a plastered wall: 119 pieces of inked plaster were recovered. According to the story in the inscription, Balaam wakes up weeping and tells his people that the gods appeared to him in the night telling him about a goddess threatening to destroy the land. She is to cover the sky and reduce the world to complete darkness. Meindert Dykstra suggests that "the reticence of OT scholarship to take account of the text may be attributable to its damaged state, the difficulty of reconstructing and reading it, and the many questions it raises of script, language, literary form and religious content."