Almon-diblathaim

Almon-diblathaim is a wilderness encampment named in the itinerary of Israel's final approach to the plains of Moab. It surfaces in two verses of the Numbers list and is connected under a single heading to a similarly-named site, Beth-diblathaim, in Jeremiah's oracle against Moab, and to the "wilderness of Diblatha" in Ezekiel.

The Itinerary Stop

Almon-diblathaim appears in the staged register of Numbers 33 as the camp between Dibon-gad and the mountains of Abarim. The site is named on arrival and again on departure, fixing its position in the sequence: "And they journeyed from Dibon-gad, and encamped in Almon-diblathaim" (Num 33:46), and "And they journeyed from Almon-diblathaim, and encamped in the mountains of Abarim, before Nebo" (Num 33:47). The two verses bracket the camp without describing what happened there — the itinerary records the stop alone, placing it within the surveyed witness immediately before the move to Abarim and the eventual descent to the plains of Moab by the Jordan at Jericho.

A Probable Identification with Beth-diblathaim

Almon-diblathaim is linked to Beth-diblathaim, a Moabite town listed in Jeremiah's oracle of judgment against Moab: "and on Dibon, and on Nebo, and on Beth-diblathaim," (Jer 48:22). The grouping is suggestive — Dibon and Nebo in Jeremiah's list mirror Dibon-gad and the Nebo of the Numbers itinerary (Num 33:46-47), placing Beth-diblathaim in the same Moabite cluster as the Numbers camp. Across these passages the identification is left as probable rather than asserted; the texts share the toponymic element "diblathaim" and share the geographic neighborhood, but neither passage explicitly equates the two.

The Wilderness of Diblatha

Ezekiel's oracle against the mountains of Israel extends the divine hand of judgment "from the wilderness of Diblatha, in all their habitations" (Ezek 6:14). The closing clause — "and they will know that I am Yahweh" (Ezek 6:14) — frames the desolation as a recognition formula. Diblatha is flagged as another probable correlate to the Numbers site; in the surveyed witness the name appears without an "Almon-" or "Beth-" prefix and is given as a wilderness boundary marker rather than a settled town. The shared root holds the three references together within the grouping; the texts themselves do not set the equivalence beyond the name.