Back نقش ميشع Arabic مسلة ميشع ARZ Meşa kitabəsi Azerbaijani Estela de Moab Catalan Méšova stéla Czech Mescha-Stele German Meŝa-steleo Esperanto Estela de Mesa Spanish سنگ یادبود موآبی Persian Mesan steela Finnish

Mesha Stele

Mesha Stele
The Mesha Stele at the Louvre: The brown fragments are pieces of the original stele, whereas the smoother black material is Ganneau's reconstruction from the 1870s.
MaterialBasalt
WritingMoabite language
Createdc. 840 BCE
Discovered1868–70
Present locationLouvre
IdentificationAO 5066

The Mesha Stele, also known as the Moabite Stone, is a stele dated around 840 BCE containing a significant Canaanite inscription in the name of King Mesha of Moab (a kingdom located in modern Jordan). Mesha tells how Chemosh, the god of Moab, had been angry with his people and had allowed them to be subjugated to the Kingdom of Israel, but at length, Chemosh returned and assisted Mesha to throw off the yoke of Israel and restore the lands of Moab. Mesha also describes his many building projects.[1] It is written in a variant of the Phoenician alphabet, closely related to the Paleo-Hebrew script.[2][3]

The stone was discovered intact by Frederick Augustus Klein, an Anglican missionary, at the site of ancient Dibon (now Dhiban, Jordan), in August 1868. A "squeeze" (a papier-mâché impression) had been obtained by a local Arab on behalf of Charles Simon Clermont-Ganneau, an archaeologist based in the French consulate in Jerusalem. The next year, the stele was smashed into several fragments by the Bani Hamida tribe, seen as an act of defiance against the Ottoman authorities who had pressured the Bedouins to hand over the stele so that it could be given to Germany. Clermont-Ganneau later managed to acquire the fragments and piece them together thanks to the impression made before the stele's destruction.[4]

The Mesha Stele, the first major epigraphic Canaanite inscription found in the Southern Levant,[5] the longest Iron Age inscription ever found in the region, constitutes the major evidence for the Moabite language, and is a "corner-stone of Semitic epigraphy",[6] and history.[7] The stele, whose story parallels, with some differences, an episode in the Bible's Books of Kings (2 Kings 3:4–27), 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");[8] it bears the earliest certain extrabiblical reference to the Israelite god Yahweh.[9][8] It is also one of four known contemporaneous inscriptions containing the name of Israel, the others being the Merneptah Stele, the Tel Dan Stele, and one of the Kurkh Monoliths.[10][11][12] Its authenticity has been disputed over the years, and some biblical minimalists suggest the text was not historical, but a biblical allegory. The stele itself is regarded as genuine and historical by the vast majority of biblical archaeologists today.[13]

The stele has been part of the collection of the Louvre Museum in Paris, France, since 1873.[2] Jordan has been demanding its return to its place of origin since 2014.[14]

  1. ^ Rollston 2010, p. 53–54.
  2. ^ a b "Stèle de Mecha". Musée du Louvre. 830. Retrieved 11 September 2021.
  3. ^ a b Rollston 2010, p. 54.
  4. ^ David, Ariel (13 September 2018). "When God Wasn't So Great: What Yahweh's First Appearance Tells About Early Judaism". Haaretz.com. Retrieved 11 October 2018.
  5. ^ Meyers, Eric M.; Research, American Schools of Oriental (1997). "Moabite Stone". The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East. Oxford University Press. p. 39. ISBN 978-0-19-511218-4. the Moabite Stone and as the Mesha Stone / Inscription, was the first (1868) of the major epigraphic documents discovered in either Cis- or Transjordan and couched in a language closely related to Hebrew
  6. ^ Albright 1945, p. 250: "The Moabite Stone remains a corner-stone of Semitic epigraphy and Palestinian history"
  7. ^ Katz, Ronald (1986). The Structure of Ancient Arguments: Rhetoric and Its Near Eastern Origin. New York: Shapolsky / Steinmatzky. p. 76. ISBN 9780933503342.
  8. ^ a b Niehr, Herbert (1995). "The Rise of YHWH in Judahite and Israelite Religion: Methodological and Religio-Historical Aspects". In Edelman, Diana Vikander (ed.). The Triumph of Elohim: From Yahwisms to Judaisms. Leuven: Peeters Publishers. p. 57. ISBN 978-9053565032. OCLC 33819403. The Meša inscription (ca. 850 BCE) clearly states that YHWH was the supreme god of Israel and of the Transjordanian territory occupied by Israel under the Omrides.
  9. ^ Cite error: The named reference Lemaire1994 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  10. ^ Lemche 1998, pp. 46, 62: "No other inscription from Palestine, or from Transjordan in the Iron Age, has so far provided any specific reference to Israel ... The name of Israel was found in only a very limited number of inscriptions, one from Egypt, another separated by at least 250 years from the first, in Transjordan. A third reference is found in the stele from Tel Dan – if it is genuine, a question not yet settled. The Assyrian and Mesopotamian sources only once mentioned a king of Israel, Ahab, in a spurious rendering of the name."
  11. ^ Maeir, Aren M. (2013). "Israel and Judah". The Encyclopedia of Ancient History. New York: Blackwell: 3523–3527. The earliest certain mention of the ethnonym Israel occurs in a victory inscription of the Egyptian king MERENPTAH, his well-known 'Israel Stela (ca. 1210 BCE); recently, a possible earlier reference has been identified in a text from the reign of Rameses II (see RAMESES I–XI). Thereafter, no reference to either Judah or Israel appears until the ninth century. The pharaoh Sheshonq I (biblical Shishak; see SHESHONQ I–VI) mentions neither entity by name in the inscription recording his campaign in the southern Levant during the late tenth century. In the ninth century, Israelite kings, and possibly a Judaean king, are mentioned in several sources: the Aramaean stele from Tel Dan, inscriptions of SHALMANESER III of Assyria, and the stela of Mesha of Moab. From the early eighth century onward, the kingdoms of Israel and Judah are both mentioned somewhat regularly in Assyrian and subsequently Babylonian sources, and from this point on there is relatively good agreement between the biblical accounts on the one hand and the archaeological evidence and extra-biblical texts on the other.
  12. ^ Fleming, Daniel E. (1 January 1998). "Mari and the possibilities of Biblical memory". Revue d'Assyriologie et d'archéologie orientale. 92 (1): 41–78. JSTOR 23282083. The Assyrian royal annals, along with the Mesha and Dan inscriptions, show a thriving northern state called Israël in the mid—9th century, and the continuity of settlement back to the early Iron Age suggests that the establishment of a sedentary identity should be associated with this population, whatever their origin. In the mid—14th century, the Amarna letters mention no Israël, nor any of the biblical tribes, while the Merneptah Stele places someone called Israël in hill-country Palestine toward the end of the Late Bronze Age. The language and material culture of emergent Israël show strong local continuity, in contrast to the distinctly foreign character of early Philistine material culture.
  13. ^ Gottwald, Norman Karol (1 January 2001). The Politics of Ancient Israel. Westminster John Knox Press. p. 194. ISBN 9780664219772. In fact, the conduct of the military operations and the ritual slaughter of captives is so remarkably similar to the style and ideology of biblical accounts of 'holy war' that many interpreters were at first inclined to regard the Mesha Stele as a forgery, but on paleographic grounds, its authenticity is now undisputed.
  14. ^ "Centre planning protest to demand return of Mesha Stele from Louvre". Jordan Times. 12 April 2016. Retrieved 19 April 2023.
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