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Home > Magazines > BAR > September/October 1985

Fragments from the Book of Balaam Found at Deir Alla

Text foretells cosmic disaster

By André Lemaire

The date was March 17, 1967, a Friday. A Dutch expedition led by Professor Henk J. Franken of the University of Leiden was excavating a mound named Tell Deir Alla in the middle Jordan Valley, east of the river, in Jordan. The site lay halfway between the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea, barely a mile north of what was known in Biblical times as the Jabbok River and now is called the Zerqa, a tributary of the Jordan. Some scholars have identified Deir Alla with Biblical Succoth, where Jacob built a house for himself and booths […]

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Endnotes

1.

Extract from the archaeological notes published in Jacob Hoftijzer and Gerrit van der Kooij, Aramaic Texts from Deir ‘Alla (ATDA), (Leiden, 1976), p. 18.

2.

Henk J. Franken, “Texts from the Persian Period from Tell Deir ‘Alla,” Vetus Testamentum (VT) 17 (1967), pp. 480–481.

3.

Hoftijzer and van der Kooij, ATDA.

4.

Moawiyeh Ibrahim and van der Kooij, “Excavations at Tell Deir ‘Alla, Season 1979,” Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 23 (1979), p. 50.

5.

Hoftijzer and van der Kooij, ADTA, p. 16.

6.

Joseph Naveh, “The Date of the Deir ‘Alla Inscription in Aramaic Script,” Israel Exploration Journal 17 (1967), pp. 256–258.

7.

Cf. Jo Ann Hackett, The Balaam Text from Deir ‘Alla (Chico, California, 1984), p. 19.

8.

Cf. André Lemaire, “La disposition originelle des inscriptions sur plâtre de Deir ‘Alla,” to be published in Studi epigrafici e linguistici (SEL) 2 (1985).

9.

In the editio princeps, 13 other groups of very fragmentary pieces are listed.

10.

André Caquot and Lemaire, “Les textes araméens de Deir ‘Alla,” Syria 54 (1977), pp. 189–208.

11.

P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., “The Balaam Texts from Deir ‘Alla: The First Combination,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 239 (1980), pp. 49–60; cf. also Baruch A. Levine, “The Deir ‘Alla Plaster Inscriptions,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 101 (1981), pp. 195–205.

12.

Hackett, The Balaam Text, pp. 4, 7, 21, 31, etc.

13.

The word is shaddayin, the plural of the related Hebrew word shadday, which is usually translated “Almighty” as in El-Shadday, “God Almighty.” The philological evidence seems to indicate that shadday originally meant “the one of the mountains”; that is, a mountain god. The plural used at Deir ‘Alla may refer to a divine council where major decisions were made.

14.

Only the initial phoneme sh is extant. I have reconstructed Shamash on the basis of the disappearance of the sun suggested in the text. Another reconstruction, suggested by P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., is Sheol, goddess of the underworld and, in rabbinic literature, the realm of the underworld.

15.

Levine, “The Deir ‘Alla Inscriptions.”

16.

Cf. Lemaire, “La langue de l’inscription sur plâtre de Deir ‘Alla,” to be published in Comptes Rendus du Groupe Linguistique d’Etudes Chamito-Sémitiques.

17.

Cf. Lemaire, “Galaad et Makir,” VT 31 (1981), pp. 39–61, esp. 50–52.

18.

Cf. Ze’ev Meshel, Kuntillet ‘Ajrud, Israel Museum Catalog 175 (Jerusalem, 1978).

19.

Cf. Lemaire, “Date et origine des inscriptions hébraïques et phéniciennes de Kuntillet Ajrud,” SEL 1 (1984), pp. 131–143. See “Who or What Was Yahweh’s Asherah?” BAR 10:06, by André Lemaire.