Tell Deir ʿAlla Phase IX: A Rural Iron Age Village in the Jordan Valley at the Heart of Religious Literature Formation
Excavated by H. J. Franken (1960-1978), and G. van der Kooij, M. M. Ibrahim and Z. A. Kafafi (1976-2009)
This project will support the publication of the final report on Iron Age Phase IX at Tell Deir ʿAlla (Tall Dayr ʿAlla, تَلّ دير علا), Jordan. Tell Deir ʿAlla, located in the central Jordan Valley, is a key settlement mound for understanding the Bronze and Iron Age archaeology in the southern Levant. Excavated intermittently between 1960 and 2009, the site represents nearly fifty years of archaeological fieldwork. Phase IX gained international fame following the 1967 discovery of a plaster inscription mentioning Balaam the Seer, a figure also known from the Bible (Num. 22–24). It constitutes one of the most significant extra-biblical references to a biblical figure and one of the first attestations of a written ‘book’. While this inscription has rightly attracted significant scholarly attention, its interpretation has largely proceeded in isolation from the village's full archaeological context.
The monograph will provide the first comprehensive publication of Phase IX, a rural village destroyed in a conflagration around 800 BCE. It will contextualize the Balaam inscription within its domestic architecture, spatial organization, artefact assemblages, and local economy, thereby addressing a major lacuna in current scholarship. The volume will integrate decades of excavation data and research, which culminated in numerous (unpublished) theses and reports, with new scientific analyses to reconstruct the social environment in which the Balaam inscription was produced and also refine the chronology of this crucial archaeological context.
By situating one of the most significant Iron Age texts within its full archaeological and social context, this publication will make a fundamental contribution not only to Levantine archaeology but also to broader debates on the early formation of religious literature, including traditions that culminated in the Hebrew Bible, as early as the late 9th century BCE.
The publication project is directed by Drs. Diederik J. H. Halbertsma and Michel de Vreeze.
