Moab stele (840BC) account of Mesha King of Moab 2 kings 3:4-8

Mesha Stele

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

Mesha Stele

The Mesha Stele in its current location. The brown fragments are pieces of the original stele, whereas the smoother black material is Ganneau's reconstruction from the 1870s.
Material	Basalt
Writing	Moabite language
Created	c.840 BC
Discovered	1868-70
Present location	Louvre
Identification	AP 5066

The Mesha Stele (also known as the "Moabite Stone") is a stele (inscribed stone) set up around 840 BCE by King Mesha of Moab (a kingdom located in modern Jordan). Mesha tells how Kemosh, the God of Moab, had been angry with his people and had allowed them to be subjugated to Israel, but at length Kemosh returned and assisted Mesha to throw off the yoke of Israel and restore the lands of Moab. Mesha describes his many building projects.^[1]
The stone was discovered intact by Frederick Augustus Klein, an Anglican missionary, at the site of ancient Dibon (now Dhiban, Jordan), in August 1868, who was led to it by a local Bedouin.^[2] Before it could be seen by another European, the next year it was smashed by local villagers during a dispute over its ownership. A "squeeze" (a papier-mâché impression) had been obtained by a local Arab on behalf of Charles Simon Clermont-Ganneau, and fragments containing most of the inscription (613 letters out of about a thousand) were later recovered and pieced together. The squeeze and the reassembled stele are now in the Louvre Museum.^[2]
The Mesha stele is the longest Iron Age inscription ever found in the region, and constitutes the major evidence for the Moabite language. The stele, whose story parallels, with some differences, an episode in the Bible's Books of Kings (2 Kings 3:4-8), provides invaluable information on the Moabite language and the political relationship between Moab and Israel at one moment in the 9th century BCE.^[3] It is the most extensive inscription ever recovered that refers to the kingdom of Israel (the "House of Omri"); it bears the earliest certain extra-biblical reference to the Israelite God Yahweh, and — if French scholar André Lemaire's reconstruction of a portion of line 31 is correct — the earliest mention of the "House of David" (i.e., the kingdom of Judah).^[2] Although its authenticity has been disputed over the years, and some Biblical minimalists suggest the text was not historical, but a biblical allegory, the stele is regarded as genuine and historical by the vast majority of biblical archaeologists today.