Balaam’s home, ‘by the River’ (Numbers 22:5). ⚠ In the Hebrew Bible ha-nahar without qualification normally means the EUPHRATES, and Deuteronomy 23:5 places Pethor ‘of Aram-naharaim’ — which would put Balaam some four hundred miles from Moab and make the round trip a matter of months. Assyrian records mention a town Pitru on the Sajur near its junction with the Euphrates, which is the usual identification and the basis for the approximate coordinates given here. ⚠ Against it: the Deir ‘Alla plaster inscription remembers a Balaam son of Beor in the Jordan Valley itself, and the Hebrew of v5 says only ‘the land of the children of his people’ — which the Douay-Rheims, following the Latin, reads instead as ‘the children of Ammon’, a great deal nearer. The distance is a real and unresolved question, not a settled fact.