Deir Alla Inscription

Letters on Fallen Plaster

On 17 March 1967, in the fifth season of the Leiden University excavations at Tell Deir Alla in the Jordan Valley, a Jordanian member of the excavation team named Ali Abdul-Rasul noticed traces of writing on small fragments of plaster coming out of a destruction layer. The dig was directed by Henk J. Franken; the find belongs to Abdul-Rasul, and this section of the app exists partly to keep that distinction visible, because it is exactly the sort of credit that gets absorbed into a director's name within a generation.

There were 119 fragments in the end, red and black ink on wall plaster that had fallen from a building and shattered. Reassembling them is still not finished: the surviving text is conventionally arranged into two "combinations", and even those have gaps that change the sense of whole lines. The fragments are in the Jordan Archaeological Museum in Amman, catalogued as KAI 312, and were published by the excavating team as Aramaic Texts from Deir 'Alla in 1976.

A Seer the Bible Also Knows

The first combination opens by announcing itself as the writing of Balaam son of Beor, a seer of the gods. The gods come to him in the night; he sees a vision and weeps in the morning, and when his people ask him why, he tells them what he has been shown — a council of gods, a decree, and a coming reversal in which the natural order runs backwards and birds and beasts change places. The second combination is more fragmentary and appears to concern death and the underworld.

This is not a copy of anything in the Bible, and it does not retell Numbers 22-24. What it does is name the same man, with the same patronymic, in the same role, in roughly the same country — the Transjordan, where Numbers places him — several centuries after the events Numbers describes. He is remembered there as a legitimate seer of the gods, with no hint of the Israelite tradition's ambivalence about him, and the text is not Israelite. The settled view among specialists is that both the Deir Alla text and the biblical narratives draw on a regional Balaam tradition rather than one depending on the other, and that is a more interesting result than a confirmation would have been: it means the Bible is naming a figure its neighbours also knew, in a story its neighbours would have recognised.

Nobody Can Agree What Language It Is

Fifty years on, the classification of the dialect is genuinely unresolved, and it is not a technicality — the language tells you whose tradition the text belongs to. The editors, Hoftijzer and van der Kooij, published it as Aramaic and the title of the editio princeps still says so, though one of their arguments rested on an identification of the Aramaic definite article that has since been questioned. Klaus Beyer classified it as a separate dialect he called South Gileadite; Holger Gzella reads it as an Aramaic grammatical core carrying Canaanite vocabulary and narrative style, in effect a translation. On the other side, Jo Ann Hackett argued in 1980 that it is Canaanite, on the strength of the N-stem and other features unattested in Aramaic, and Na'ama Pat-El and Aren Wilson-Wright defended a Canaanite classification again in 2015.

The reason the argument will not end is that the text really does have both. It uses suffixed nun for masculine plurals and qof where Hebrew has tsade, which look Aramaic; it also uses the waw-consecutive, which looks Canaanite. The honest report is that this is unsettled among the people best equipped to settle it, and a reader who is told otherwise has been told something the specialists do not know. A second, smaller question sits alongside it: whether the Balaam of the plaster is the same figure as the Balaam of Numbers or a parallel development of one tradition. Most would say a shared tradition; nobody can demonstrate more than that from 119 broken pieces.

Scripture references

• Numbers 22:5 — Balak sends for "Balaam the son of Beor" — the same name and patronymic as the plaster text
• Numbers 24:15-17 — Balaam's oracle: the man whose eyes are open, who sees the vision of the Almighty
• Numbers 31:8 — Balaam killed with the kings of Midian
• Joshua 13:22 — Balaam remembered as "the soothsayer"
• Micah 6:5 — Balak and Balaam invoked centuries later as something Israel is to remember

Sources

• Holding institutionJ. Hoftijzer and G. van der Kooij, Aramaic Texts from Deir 'Alla — The Leiden University excavation at Tell Deir 'Alla — the excavating body's own publication · Documenta et Monumenta Orientis Antiqui 19, Brill, Leiden, 1976. The editio princeps. Cited here in place of a museum object page: the Jordan Archaeological Museum publishes none that could be fetched. Print onlySupports: The find, the reconstruction of the text, and the original Aramaic classification
• ScholarshipN. Pat-El and A. Wilson-Wright, "Deir 'Alla as a Canaanite Dialect: A Vindication of Hackett" — Na'ama Pat-El and Aren Wilson-Wright, University of Texas at Austin · In Epigraphy, Philology and the Hebrew Bible (SBL Press, 2015). Open PDF hosted by UT AustinSupports: The Canaanite side of the language dispute, and Hackett's 1980 argument
• ReferenceLivius: Deir 'Alla Inscription — Livius.orgSupports: A translation of Combination I and the find circumstances
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Deir Alla inscription

Further reading

• Livius: Deir 'Alla Inscription
• Wikipedia: Deir Alla inscription

Reflect

Israel's neighbours remembered Balaam as a genuine seer; Scripture remembers him as a man who knew the truth and sold it. What is the difference between hearing from God and belonging to him?