SETH SANDERS:
A Pagan “Prophet Like Moses”: Balaam and the Problem of Other People’s Revelation (TheTorah.com). Conclusion:
A careful look at the biblical account of Balaam shows that the same is true of this material: it too has a past of its own that we may begin to recover with the help of source criticism, a careful look at diverse rabbinic tradition, and the Deir Alla inscription. More specifically, the Balaam’s legend points to the diversity, and thus the threat, of prophetic and divine sources of knowledge. Parashat Balak presents him as such a powerful source of external authority because he is not one of us, capable of giving us truths from outside. Other parts of the Tanach present him as a seducer and an object of hate, perhaps for the very same reason. He is a symbol of the Torah’s disturbing but purposefully multiple sources, which Sifrei and Gittin so memorably pull apart but which are woven together in the Torah itself. As someone else’s revealer enshrined in our own scripture, he helps reveal the Old Testament of the Old Testament.
Also, I like this evaluation of the Deir Alla text:
It is not that the text is Aramaic, Canaanite, or some mishmash of the two, but that it represents an older stream of language from which the two had not yet diverged. From the viewpoint of Northwest Semitic dialects, Balaam in fact does speak from a long time ago and a galaxy far, far away. What connects these disparate linguistic observations is the words’ otherworldliness: Balaam’s language is just strange enough to evoke another space and time while being basically comprehensible.
