So many questions about Balaam

In Numbers 22-24 we first meet Balaam (or Bil'am, בלעם) son of Beor, a prophet hired by Balak king of Moab, to curse Israel. 

Amazingly, we know Balaam son of Beor also from extra-biblical material; the Deir 'Alla Plaster Inscriptions (Context of Scripture 2.27, Baruch A. Levine) writes about and translates the reconstructed fragments of an inscribed plaster wall from the 9th-8th century BC, slightly north of Moab in Ammonite territory. 

In those inscriptions he is a prophet who receives messages from the gods, providing a remarkable parallel to the biblical story. 

Balaam gets mentioned quite a lot in the Bible, which is surprising for a bit-player. His name comes up 60 times in the OT and a further three times in the NT. However, 51 of those 63 times are in Numbers 22-24, which is some impressive name repetition! He is mentioned again in Numbers 31, Deuteronomy 23, Joshua 13 and 24, Nehemiah 13 and Micah 6. The emphasis in the OT seems to be varied. 

He is also mentioned in the New Testament as an archetypal incitement to greed, in 2 Peter 2:15, Jude 11 and Revelation 2:14. 

In Deuteronomy 23, Joshua 24, Nehemiah 13 and Micah 6, God's determination to bless Israel despite human attempts to curse them. However in Joshua 13 the problem is his sinning through divination and being put to death as a cleansing of the land. 

Later on within Numbers (31) the Balaam/Balak saga is conflated with what becomes known as the Peor incident, in Numbers 25. In Numbers 31:15-18 Moses is upset that women who are not virgins, as well as boys, have been allowed to live in an attack on Midian. The reasoning is that the women who are not virgins are those who followed Balaam's advice to seduce Israelite men, which occurs in Numbers 25 but is not linked to Balaam in that place. 

That said, there are a few issues in Numbers 25 which are not clear, such as a plague which is stopped but is never explicitly said to begin (although 25:3a, "Yhwh's anger burned against Israel", may be an elliptical reference to the plague beginning). All this is to say the lack of a reference to Balaam is perhaps not that unexpected.

I do have some questions about Balaam, which are about 1) his location and 2) his patronym. 

Balaam of Pethor 

Numers 22:5, Balaam is at Pethor, his native land (NIV), that is the land of the children of his people (ASV), which is by "the river", i.e. the Euphrates. This description is filled out in Deuteronomy 23, as Pethor is further explained as in Aram Naharaim, or Aramea by the (two) rivers, which is identified as north-west Mesopotamia. You can see it right up the top of this map in red (made in Accordance Bible), while Beth Peor and Bezer are the names in red down the bottom, which are part of Moab, also in red below those towns. I've overlaid modern borders for some scale.

It doesn't take long to work out why people have problems with Pethor as Balaam's base and hometown. The plains of Moab, opposite Jericho either side of the Jordan River, are almost 600km away from each other as the crow flies, which is a long long way away. One might even suggest prohibitively far away to make sense in the story. If the details are correct, that Balak sent his messengers 600km to ask, and then they returned unsuccessful, and then they were sent back, whereupon he was willing to come with them (the talking donkey notwithstanding), then they have walked upwards of 2,500km in order to gain some support. The distances are staggering. 

Added to this is when Balak meets Balaam, he asks why he didn't come immediately in response to his "urgent summons" (22:37), which is laughable - the amount of time it would have taken to make two return trips of that distance would make haste or delay essentially negligible. 

It is of course possible that The River is a different river. The Nile could justifiably also be called The River, and the Jordan, for those in that area, could similarly be their The River. Further to this, it is always possible that Aram is Adam, a place attested to elsewhere in the Scriptures (such as in Josh 3:16, as well as a suggestion elsewhere in place of Aram), due to the easily confused pair of letters, the Hebrew daleth and resh, ד/ר. 

If Balaam was indeed from Adam, not Aram, and The River was the Jordan and not the Euphrates, then Balaam is slightly less exotic and the story becomes much less confusing, from that aspect at least. That would also fit more with the archaeological evidence discussed above. 

Balaam son of Beor or Bezer

The other issue I want to try to understand is why, in 2 Peter 2:15, Balaam is called the son of Bezer and not of Beor, as he is throughout the OT. Where has Peter got this from?

The patronymic, Beor, is written both plene and defectively within the same passage; that is, both בעור and בער. 

There were two things I immediately noticed upon hearing the name Beor. First off, there is a nice assonance between the three names in the passage: Beor, Balaam, Balak. This is nice, and a lovely coincidence (if it is that). Second, Beor sounds a lot like Peor, and apart from the B/P exchange, Peor is spelled the same as Beor (the plene spelling). 

I don't know what to make of that. Peor is clearly a real place in the Transjordan, known elsewhere as Beth Peor (not to be confused with another Peor within Canaan). 

If I had to guess, I would say Beor is how you spell Peor if you want it to rhyme with Balak and Balaam, so that Beor, rather than being a patronym, is a toponym. 

If this were the case, it could mean that 2 Peter preserves the name of Balaam's father, Bezer, so he is Balaam son of Bezer of Peor. 

However, it's not that easy. Bezer rhymes just as easily as does Beor, and you don't have to change anything. And Bezer is also a place, near to the plains of Moab (Deut 4:43; Josh 20:8; 21:36; 1 Chr 6:78; 8:78). 

So which place is his place? Is it Peor, Pethor, or Bezer? 

I think it's safest to go with what the OT has to say, rather than imagining that Peter has access to something that has escaped everyone else's notice for a millennium. This still doesn't explain how the patronym Bezer turns up in 2 Peter. 

The Greek behind it is Bosor, which is how the LXX consistently translates Bezer. However, it seems some scribes had some issues with that, as Vaticanus has Beor, and the original hand of Sinaiaticus combines Beor and Bosor into the horrific portmanteau Beorsor, which I take it is Beor + Bosor. UBS5 gives Bosor an A rating, suggesting that this is the most likely reading and that Siniaticus represents an attempt to correct the text.

There has been much work on 2 Peter and Jude's sources (very little of which I'm across), but I'm unaware of where the Bezer (Bosor) source may have come from, or why Peter didn't go with Beor (unless Sinaiaticus alone preserves the original text). 

Edit/update - I checked Norman Hillyer's UBC (1,2 Pet; Jude) and he suggests Βοσορ (Bezer) is a play on בשר (flesh); Peter then thinks Balaam is then a son of the flesh rather than being confused about who is father is. Why confuse us with the nearby town Bosor/Bezer I'm not sure. That said, the Greek has του, the genitive article, so it broadly means "belonging to", either as the son, or another type of belonging, as Hillyer suggests. 

Conclusion

All in all, there are a whole bunch of riddles associated with Balaam, son of Beor, of Pether. I don't know if I solved any of them, but I hope I have at least scratched the surface and edged towards some possible resolutions. 

Cross dressing to get out of war - Deuteronomy 22:5

I've been marking this week, and the set passage includes a verse which people often laugh about because it's so weird. It's the (in)famous prohibition against cross-dressing, which is normally translated as follows:

A woman must not wear men’s clothing, nor a man wear women’s clothing, for the LORD your God detests anyone who does this. (NIV11)

It's a pretty straightforward verse, two parallel clauses followed by an explanation:

A     A woman must not wear men's clothing
A`    and a man must not wear women's clothing
B            for the LORD your God detests anyone who does this.

But when we dig into the Hebrew there are a couple of extra features which are obscured by the translation:

1. The word order in the first two clauses is (1) prohibition, (2) man, (3) woman. The only real difference is the placement of the word for clothing (which are different, see below), which in A comes between (1) and (2), and in A` comes between (2) and (3). 
2. The word for clothing is different. In A the word is כלי, which is elsewhere translated vessel/cup or weapon or article. In A` the word is an unremarkable word for clothing/garment.
3. The word for man, in contrast with the usual word for woman or wife, אשׁה ('ishsha), is not, as we might expect, אישׁ ('ish) or even the broader אדם ('adam), but גבר (gever), a word which often has militaristic connotations - "warrior" works well in lots of contexts.
4. The word for getting dressed is only there in A`, it's just the verb "to be" in A. 

All this suggests to me that perhaps it's not (just) a command against cross-dressing, although that wouldn't be massively out of place in the Pentateuch, especially when you consider other commands against gender confusion (note that in a few verses the command will be against unnaturally mixing seed, animals and fabric). But additionally, I think that there's a very real possibility that preparations for war are on the horizon, as they are about to cross over to take the promised land by force. Rather than a man's clothing, it could be the armour or weaponry of a (male) warrior. As such, the verse could reasonably translated to prohibit women from fighting in the place of men, and to warn men against escaping by cross-dressing:

A     The equipment of a man shall not be upon a woman,
A'     and a man shall not dress [in] garments of a woman
B            For an abomination [against] Yhwh your God [are] all these deeds.

Mulan, then, would be in trouble, and while Mrs Doubtfire might not be the explicit target, trying to get out of wartime duties by cross-dressing is an abomination to Yhwh.

Duane Christensen (WBC) notes that these chapters are focussed around "four central issues: warfare, marriage, social ethics, and humanitarian commands." (2002; p466) This verse then could be not so much about marriage as it is about warfare, shaping Israel to be a nation who are prepared to fight for the land to which Yhwh has brought them.

Matthew 22.34-46 and the Shema

still thinking about the trinity (first talk this Sunday. see previous post for details).

in Deuteronomy 6, we have the Shema: "Hear O Israel, the Lord your God is One." and following that is the command to love your neighbour as yourself.

and then when Jesus in Matthew 22 quotes the command, which sums up all the prophets, it's interesting that he follows it with a question about Psalm 110, one of the most popular texts in the NT for pointing to Jesus' identity as the Christ.

So my question is, is Jesus (or the evangelist) saying something about the Shema, in particular, questioning the identity of Yhwh as a monad, and perhaps making room in the description of Yhwh for the Christ?

or is there not really much of a link between Matt 22.34-40 and Matt 22.41-46? (or is it just a different link?)

a new reading group

a friend has asked if i want to come along to an LXX (the greek translation of the hebrew scriptures) reading group.
cool!
apparently only few are christians; most are jewish, trying to get a different perspective on their scriptures.


i've never made much effort to get into the septuagint, except to have a look when the hebrew just seems wacky.
unfortunately whenever i think that the LXX will fix it up, it generally doesn't.
some things have been quite interesting however, such as in Deuteronomy 30:14(13)

ESV: But the word is very near you. It is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it.
LXX: The word is very near to you, in your mouth, and in your heart, and in your hands to do it.

so it's actually just making a bit clearer that doing it (the commandment that Yhwh commands Israel) isn't just about your words or your thoughts but your hands - something that could actually be implicit in the 'do it' - indeed the LXX could be a little tautologous by adding that. although at the very least poetically, it's good to have 'mouth, heart and hands' - a real sense of completeness.

anyway, that's on tomorrow. no idea how it'll go. but do pray that some great conversations may come out of it as we chat about how God reveals himself in his Word.

God - The Ultimate Terrorist?

with no more SOCM, i am able to go to the Christianity and Contemporary Thought seminars held by CASE, and heard this talk by Andrew Cameron, entitled Terrorism and Christianity.

as the talk went on, with various definitions of Terrorism being bandied about, i kept thinking more and more (no pun intended), that God would actually fit many of the definitions of a terrorist.
Oliver O'Donovan's definition is (paraphrased, from memory), "one who furthers their viewpoint by intimidation", excluding those who would set up a viable, alternative government.
but would not this include God? i present the following reasons:

And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. (Matthew 10:28)
For the Lord your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God. (Deuteronomy 4:24)
Honour everyone. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honour the emperor. (1 Peter 2:17)

God obviously presents a choice of Him, or destruction. if you're not on the God-Train, you're going to get run over.

Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.” (John 18:36)

there is no viable alternative government (at least in the here-and-now) proposed. rather (as in 1 Peter 2:17 ob cit.) we are to honour, not least pray for, the secular governments placed over us.

this sounds not at all dissimilar to many terrorist manifestos, there is simply a claim to legitimacy, of heritage, of third-knowledge, and the proven ability to carry out any and all threats.

of course the thing with terrorism is the unacceptability of their methods and the questionability of their ends. God, being the creator of all that is seen and unseen, is righteous. though perhaps not not a terrorist.

is this an acceptable apologetic angle, or has psychodougie gone too far this time?

ps sorry about the lack of blogging of late. i have no excuse, my priorities have simply been elsewhere.