Deir Alla

Deir Alla has been suggested to be the biblical Sukkot in Transjordan.[3][4] Some believe it to be the biblical Pethor.[5][6] It was also suggested by an early traveler to the site, Selah Merrill, who found parallels with names in the Hebrew Bible.[7]

Deir Alla is identified with the Byzantine period town of Tar'elah or Dar'elah, which the Jerusalem Talmud identifies with biblical Sukkot.[8]

The tell is 50 by 200 meters and rises to 27 meters above the plain. A series of Dutch excavations sponsored by the Netherlands Organisation for the Advancement of Pure Research began in 1960, under the auspices of the department of theology, University of Leiden. These excavations continued for five seasons until 1967.[9][10][11][12] The excavation made its most dramatic discovery in 1967, an ink wall inscription relating a hitherto-unknown prophecy of Balaam, who thereby becomes the first Old Testament prophet to be identified in an inscription.[13] After a long interruption, work resumed in 1976, initially under Franken, for several seasons.[14][15][16] After another long break, occasional seasons were conducted beginning in 1994 until 2008.[17]

At the end of the 1964 campaign, 11 clay tablets, 3 inscribed in a West Semitic Early Canaanite script, 7 bearing only dots, and one uninscribed, were discovered. The tablets were found in the destruction layer of storerooms dated by a cartouche of Queen Twosret of Egypt to around 1200 BC. Earlier objects were also found there so the tablets may well predate the destruction.[18][19][5] In the later excavations several more clay tablets were found, for a total of 15.[20]

The town was a sanctuary and metal-working centre, ringed by smelting furnaces built against the exterior of the city walls,[24] whose successive rebuildings, dated by ceramics from the Late Bronze Age, sixteenth century BCE, to the fifth century BCE, accumulated as a tell based on a low natural hill. The hopeful identification of the site as the biblical Sukkot is not confirmed by any inscription at the site.

Deir Alla was the first Bronze Age city excavated in Jordan. The initial expectations were of establishing a relative chronology of Palestine pottery in the transition between the Bronze Age to the Iron Age, established through meticulous stratigraphy. It was intended to span a gap between established chronologies at Jericho and Samaria.[25]

The oldest sanctuary at Deir Alla dates to the Late Bronze Age;[26] it was peacefully rebuilt at intervals, the floor being raised as the tell accumulated height, and the squared altar stone renewed, each new one placed atop the previous one. The final sanctuary was obliterated in a fierce fire; the blackened remains of an Egyptian jar bearing the cartouche of Queen Twosret gives a terminus post quem of c. 1200 BCE, a date consonant with other twelfth-century urban destruction in the Ancient Near East. Unlike some other destroyed sites, Deir Alla's habitation continued after the disaster, without a break, into the Iron Age; the discontinuity was a cultural one, with highly developed pottery of a separate ceramic tradition post-dating the destruction.

As well as being the site of the Deir Alla Inscription, Deir Alla is also the site of Battle of Fahl between the Muslim Caliphate and the Byzantine Empire. There are several tombs of Sahabah (followers of Muhammad) in Deir Alla:

• Abu Ubaidah ibn al-Jarrah
• Dhiraar bin Al-Azwar
• Sharhabeel ibn Hasana

• Een Verhalla voor het Oprapen. Opgravingen de Deir Alla in de Jordaanvallei, Leiden: Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, 1989. ISBN 90-71201-09-0

• Cities of the ancient Near East

• Photos of Deir Alla at the American Center of Research