You could, and in fact there has been Erlang implementations on top of the JVM[1][2], however you will never be able to get the same runtime characteristics of Erlang running on BEAM due to the fundamental differences in memory management: BEAM is first and foremost designed for reliability, predictability and soft real-time behaviour.

[1] https://github.com/trifork/erjang/ [2] https://github.com/jerlang/jerlang