Mesha’s Stele and the House of David

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The Mesha Stele details the victories of King Mesha of Moab over the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. It was found at Dibon, Moab’s capital, and dated to the ninth century B.C.E. The stone contains a possible reference to the “House of David” as Judah’s rulers, which seems to support King David as a historical figure. Thanks to recent photographic evidence, our authors argue that this reading can now be confirmed.

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Footnotes

1. Siegfried H. Horn, “Why the Moabite Stone Was Blown to Pieces,” BAR, May/June 1986.

2. André Lemaire, “‘House of David’ Restored in Moabite Inscription,” BAR, May/June 1994.

3. Bruce E. Zuckerman, Archaeological Views: “New Eyeballs on Ancient Texts,” BAR, November/December 2011; Todd R. Hanneken, Archaeological Views: “Digital Archaeology’s New Frontiers,” BAR, March/April 2017.

4. See Thomas E. Levy and Mohammad Najjar, “Edom & Copper,” BAR, July/August 2006.

Endnotes

1.
See Michael Langlois, “The Kings, the City and the House of David on the Mesha Stele in Light of New Imaging Techniques,” Semitica 61 (2019), pp. 23–47, esp. pp. 24–26 for the RTI images.

2.
See Isabel Bonora Andujar, “L’estampage de la stele de Mésha,” in Thomas Römer, ed., Mésha et la Bible (Paris, Collège de France, 2018), pp. 28–33.

3.
Several scholars contest this reading on various grounds, but we believe their arguments are unfounded. See Matthieu Richelle, “A Re-Examination of the Reading BT DWD [House of David] on the Mesha Stele,” in Hillel Geva and Alan Paris, eds., Ada Yardeni Volume, Eretz-Israel 34 (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2021), pp. 152*–159*; Israel Finkelstein, Nadav Na’aman, and Thomas Römer, “Restoring Line 31 in the Mesha Stele: The ‘House of David’ or Biblical Balak?” Tel Aviv 46 (2019), pp. 3–11; Nadav Na’aman, “The Alleged ‘Beth David’ in the Mesha Stele: The Case Against It,” Tel Aviv 46 (2019), pp. 192–197.

4.
For more, see André Lemaire, “The Mesha Stele: Revisited Text and Translation,” in Meir and Edith Lubetski, eds., Epigraphy, Iconography, and the Bible (Sheffield: Sheffield Press, 2022), pp. 22–23.