Numbers 31:8

Hebrew Bible

6 So Moses sent them to the war, 1,000 from every tribe, with Phinehas son of Eleazar the priest, who was in charge of the holy articles and the signal trumpets. 7 They fought against the Midianites, as the Lord commanded Moses, and they killed every male. 8 They killed the kings of Midian in addition to those slain—Evi, Rekem, Zur, Hur, and Reba—five Midianite kings. They also killed Balaam son of Beor with the sword. 9 The Israelites took the women of Midian captive along with their little ones, and took all their herds, all their flocks, and all their goods as plunder. 10 They burned all their towns where they lived and all their encampments.

Joshua 13:22

Hebrew Bible

20 Beth Peor, the slopes of Pisgah, and Beth Jeshimoth. 21 It encompassed all the cities of the plain and the whole realm of King Sihon of the Amorites who ruled in Heshbon. Moses defeated him and the Midianite leaders Evi, Rekem, Zur, Hur, and Reba (they were subjects of Sihon and lived in his territory). 22 The Israelites killed Balaam son of Beor, the omen reader, along with the others. 23 The border of the tribe of Reuben was the Jordan. The land allotted to the tribe of Reuben by its clans included these cities and their towns. 24 Moses assigned land to the tribe of Gad by its clans.

 Notes and References

"... the preponderance of the passages on Balaam, biblical and postbiblical alike, are derogatory. The ground text is in the Balaam section itself, in the episode of the ass: Here Balaam seeks to curse Israel without divine permission (22:22, 34). Its reflex surfaces first in Deuteronomy with the explicit charge that Balaam set out to curse Israel: “The Lord your God turned the curse into a blessing for you, for the Lord your God loves you” (Deuteronomy 23:6; see Joshua 24:10; Nehemiah 13:2). Deuteronomy’s denigration of Balaam is understandable given its premise that prophets arise only in Israel, whereas their pagan counterparts are abominable magicians (Deuteronomy 18:9-15). And elsewhere Balaam is censured for another reason: “They [the Midianites] are the very ones who, at the bidding of Balaam, induced the Israelites to trespass against the Lorn in the matter of Peor, so that the Lord’s community was struck by the plague” (Numbers 31:16). Balaam, that is, had advised Balak to demoralize Israel’s fighting force by using Midianite women to seduce it into the service of their cult. That this tradition is as old as that of Deuteronomy, if not older, is now demonstrable by the eighth-century Deir ‘Alla inscription, which also tells of Balaam advising the establishment of an idolatrous cult. Both pejorative traditions are combined in Joshua 13:22, “Together with the others [the Midianites] that they slew, the Israelites put Balaam, the augur, to the sword.” That he was an augur points to his condemnation by Deuteronomy 18:10-13, and that he was slain with the Midianites whom he incited against Israel points to Numbers 31:8, 16 ..."

Milgrom, Jacob Numbers: The Traditional Hebrew Text with the New JPS Translation (pp. 470-471) Jewish Publication Society, 1990

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