Page 23 - BCC42

Lesson 42 Hope of Israel Ministries BIBLE Correspondence Course 23

since the other rulers of the city states of Canaan ple.
are referred to as “mayor.” This, plus the size of Balaam was not an Israelite. He was
the site, confirms the importance of the city in hired by Balak, king of Moab, to curse the
the Late Bronze Age and VERIFIES the Biblical Israelites. They were camped on the east side of
reference to Hazor as “head of all these king- the Jordan River, about to make their historic
doms” (Joshua 11:10). Another of the Amarna entry into the Promised Land. Through YEHO-
Letters does give the name of the king of Hazor VAH’s intervention Balaam was obliged to bless
at this time: Abdi-Tirshi (EA 228). So not all the the Israelites rather than curse them (Numbers
kings of Hazor were named Jabin! 22-24). Afterwards, Balaam seems to have been
Finally, there is an Egyptian text from the cause of the Israelites’ sin in Numbers 25
the time of Ramesses II which mentions “Qishon when they took Moabite and Midianite women
of Jabin” (Krahmalkov 1994: 61-62). Qishon is and worshiped the Moabite god Baal-Peor
located in the Jezreel Valley, near where Debo- (Numbers 31:16). Balaam was eventually killed
rah and Barak fought the forces of Jabin later in when Moses sent the Israelites against the
the 13th century. Evidently in Ramesses’ time Midianites (Numbers 31). He is further con-
Qishon was under the control of the ling of Ha- demned in Scripture in 2 Peter 2:15 (he loved
zor, who again was named Jabin (Govier 1994: the wages of unrighteousness), Jude 11 (ungod-
2). So now, besides the two Jabins named in the ly men ran greedily after the error of Balaam for
Bible, we have at least two additional Jabins. Do reward) and Revelation 2:14 (he taught Balak to
scholars have a problem with these extra- cast a stumbling block before the children of
Biblical Jabins? Of course not! They are AC- Israel, to eat things sacrificed to idols, and to
CEPTED as authentic names of historic kings of commit fornication).
the great city state of Hazor. The SAME recogni- The remarkable text found at Deir Alla
tion should be accorded the Jabins in the Old consists of 119 fragments of plaster inscribed
Testament. with black and red ink. It was among the rubble
of a building destroyed in an earthquake. It
Balaam Son of Beor
A portion of the Deir Alla text concerning Balaam son of
In an unprecedented discovery, Beor.
an ancient text found at Deir Alla,
Jordan, in 1967 tells about the activ-
ities 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 pro-
phet proclaiming doom to his own peo-

Archaeology and the Bible