Set in Stone? Another Look at the Mesha Stele

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The Mesha Stele might contain a reference to the “House of David.” Some scholars believe this reading can now be confirmed, thanks to new photographic evidence, as published in the Winter 2022 issue of BAR. However, others disagree. Take another look at the Mesha Stele, a ninth-century BCE Moabite victory stela, and see if the reading of the “House of David” is indeed set in stone.

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Footnotes

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

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

3. André Lemaire and Jean-Philippe Delorme, “Mesha’s Stele and the House of David,” BAR, Winter 2022.

Endnotes

1. For recent scholarly analyses of the stela based on new photographic evidence, see Heather Parker, The Levant Comes of Age: The Ninth Century BCE Through Script Traditions, 2 vols., Ph.D. Dissertation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2013), p. 171; 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; Matthieu Richelle, “A Re-Examination of the Reading BT DWD (‘House of David’) on the Mesha Stele,” in Shmuel Ahituv, Hannah Cotton, and Matthew Morgenstern, eds., Ada Yardeni Volume, Eretz-Israel 34 (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2021), pp. 152*—159*.

2. Nathaniel Greene and Heather Parker, “Field of View: Northwest Semitic Palaeography and Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI),” in J.M. Hutton and A.D. Rubin, eds., Epigraphy, Philology, and the Hebrew Bible (Atlanta: SBL, 2015), p. 226.

3. On the squeeze, Lemaire and Delorme draw (in red) the top-right extremity of the X clearly above the “nose” of the letter bet to its right (the nose is the left-hand angle of the triangle that is the head of bet). And yet in their drawing of taw on the stone, the taw does not extend above that “nose.”