A plastered wall in a Jordan Valley sanctuary once carried a long, red-and-black inked story about a night vision given to “Balaam son of Beor, seer of the gods.” The building collapsed, the plaster shattered, and archaeologists spent years piecing the flakes back together. The text is not about Israel and its gods are not Israel's God — but its visionary bears exactly the name, patronymic and profession of the Balaam of Numbers, in the region where the Bible places him.
- What it is
- Ink-on-plaster wall text in an Aramaic dialect, reassembled from over a hundred fragments
- Date of artifact
- c. 840–760 BC
- Discovered
- Tell Deir Alla, Jordan Valley, 1967 (Henk Franken's excavation)
- Where it is now
- Jordan Archaeological Museum, Amman
- Related to
- Balaam son of Beor, the foreign seer of the book of Numbers
- Scripture
- Numbers 22–24
What this find showsBalaam son of Beor was a famous seer in Transjordanian tradition independent of the Bible — a figure other peoples also told stories about.
What it does not proveThe inscription is centuries later than the events Numbers describes and portrays a polytheistic prophet; it does not corroborate the talking donkey, the oracles over Israel, or any biblical scene.
Sources & further reading