Bold Blasphemers, Balaam, and Waterless Springs

Peter describes the false teachers with a barrage of images: arrogant, self-willed, morally corrupt, irrational like animals, stains at the community’s feasts, greedy, and spiritually empty like springs without water. In the middle of the warning he reaches back to Balaam, “who loved the wages of unrighteousness,” and even recalls the donkey that rebuked the prophet’s madness. That explicit biblical memory sends the reader to Numbers 22–24. An extraordinary historical “aha” sits beside the canonical connection: an Iron Age plaster inscription from Deir Alla, around 800 BC, also names “Balaam son of Beor” as a seer. It does not prove the Numbers narrative or identify the inscription’s events with the Bible, but it shows that a Balaam son of Beor tradition genuinely circulated in the ancient Transjordanian world.