The “Fire from Heshbon” and a Censored King of Judah

What has Balaam to do with Josiah? Ancient stories are not always what they seem, and different biblical passages often intersect with each other in unexpected ways. In this article, I examine a speculative theory about an unknown king of Judah by investigating some problematic passages in the Old Testament.

Problem #1: A War That Never Happened

In the book of Numbers, just prior to the famous story of the seer Balaam and his talking ass, the Israelites conquer the kingdom of an Amorite king named Sihon, whose capital is the city of Heshbon, east of the Jordan River.

When archaeologists sponsored by the Seventh-Day Adventist church excavated Heshbon (modern-dan Tell Hisban) in the 1960s, they seem to have anticipated finding the remains of a Bronze Age city that would corroborate the story of the exodus and Israel’s conquest of the Transjordan region in Numbers. Instead, they found no trace of occupation from the time in question. Heshbon was a real city, but it had flourished as the capital of an Ammonite kingdom at a much later time, during the late Iron Age (7th and 6th centuries; see MacDonald, p. 92).

The Story of Ezer and Elead (and What It Means for the Exodus)

Tucked away amidst the genealogies of Chronicles almost no one reads, the tale of two cattle-rustling brothers from Ephraim might just be the most obscure story in the Bible. Like many such tales in the Old Testament, this one is brief and contains only the most essential details:

The sons of Ephraim…Ezer and Elead. Now the men of Gath, who were born in the land, killed them, because they came down to raid their cattle. And their father Ephraim mourned many days, and his brothers came to comfort him. He went in to his wife, and she conceived and bore a son; and he named him Beriah, because evil (beraah) had befallen his house. His daughter was Sheerah, who built both Lower and Upper Beth-horon, and Uzzen-sheerah. (1 Chr. 7:20-24)

The Story of Balaam: How Biblical Tradition Turned a Prophet of God into an Arch-Heretic

A video based on this article is now available. See it here.

In 1967, inscriptions written on a crumbled plaster wall were discovered during the excavation of Tell Deir ‘Alla in Jordan. Dated to the early 8th century BCE and written in a local Canaanite dialect, the inscriptions drew great attention when their title, written in red ink, was translated and found to say “Text of Balaam son of Beor, seer of the gods.” This remarkable find provided independent attestation of local tradition about a seer named Balaam who was already well-known to us from the Bible, and deciphering the fragmentary texts has been an ongoing task of archaeologists and linguistic experts since then.

The biblical Balaam passages are not without their own difficulties. The main story of Balaam in Numbers 22–24 is contradicted by other brief references in Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Joshua, as well as three mentions of him in the New Testament. The importance of Balaam to the development of Christian theology is also remarkable, as we shall see once we untangle the development of the Balaam legend.

The Twelve (or So) Tribes of Israel

The identity of Israel in the Bible is closely linked to the notion that the ancient nation was an alliance of twelve distinct tribes, each with its own territory. Reading the Old Testament in its canonical order, we encounter tales about Jacob the patriarch and his twelve sons who all moved to Egypt. Their descendants are depicted as remaining divided into distinct clans, which would later journey to Palestine, carve up the land, and then conquer their allotted portions.

History is not so simple, however, and neither are the traditions we find in the Bible itself. Not all biblical authors were aware of this storybook picture of Israel’s tribes, and many of the text’s later claims are rooted as much — or more so — in theology and politics as in history. Themes that have captured the imagination of exegetes for millennia, like the myth of the “lost tribes of Israel”, take on new significance when examined closely.