The gentile seer of Numbers 22-24, hired by Balak of Moab to curse Israel and made to bless them instead — but who then taught Balak to seduce Israel into idolatry and immorality for a fee (Numbers 31:16, now on these pages). In the New Testament he becomes the type of the teacher who sells his gift for money: Jude condemns those who 'for pay abandoned themselves to the error of Balaam' (1:11), and 2 Peter 2:15 and Revelation 2:14 use him the same way. Greed dressed up as prophecy. ⭐ He is also one of very few non-royal figures in the Hebrew Bible attested by name in an inscription found outside it. In 1967 a Dutch expedition at Tell Deir 'Alla, in the Jordan Valley, recovered a text written in ink on wall plaster: its opening line reads the misfortunes of the Book of Balaam son of Beor, the man who was a seer of the gods. It dates to roughly the eighth century BC and tells of Balaam receiving a terrifying night vision and weeping. ⚠ The plaster is broken and many readings are contested, and it is not a copy of Numbers but an independent local tradition centuries later — what it establishes is that the name was known in Transjordan and attached to a visionary, which is exactly how Numbers introduces him. ⚠⚠ And this entry was written from Jude, so it carried only the verdict. Read Numbers 22 on its own and Balaam refuses the fee twice, insists he cannot pass 'the mouth of Jehovah MY God', asks permission a second time rather than assuming it, and accepts no payment in the chapter at all. The condemnation is not invented — Numbers 31:16 says it outright — but a reader who meets only the condemnation will not recognise the man in vv18-19. Both portraits are in the Bible and this library prints both. ⚠ He does not survive the chapter that convicts him — Numbers 31:8 kills him in the same half-verse as five Midianite kings, and Joshua 13:22 (not yet on these pages) remembers the same death independently, decades later, calling him 'the soothsayer'. ⭐ Deuteronomy 23:5-6 (already on these pages) is the Torah's own retelling, in two verses and a vocabulary Numbers never used: Balaam was hired to curse — qalal, the covenant-curse root, not the arar and qabab of Numbers 22-24 — and Jehovah your God was not willing to listen to Balaam, and turned the curse into a blessing for you, because Jehovah your God loved you. It is the reason given for barring Moab and Ammon from the assembly for ever.