Why the Moabite Stone Was Blown to Pieces
Ninth-century B.C. inscription adds new dimension to Biblical account of Mesha’s rebellion
You have already read your free article for this month. Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.
Already a library member? Log in here.
Institution user? Log in with your IP address or Username
Endnotes
For a fully documented history of the discovery of the Moabite Stone, see Siegfried H. Horn, “The Discovery of the Moabite Stone,” in Carol L. Meyers and M. O’Connor, eds., The Word of the Lord Shall Go Forth: Essays in Honor of David Noel Freedman (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1983), pp. 497–505.
All regnal dates for the kings of Israel and Judah are presented here according to Edwin R. Thiele’s The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1983). Some scholars using alternate chronological schemes have come to slightly different dates than those of Thiele’s system. For example, John Bright, using William F. Albright’s chronology (Bulletin of American Schools for Oriental Research 100 [December 1945], pp. 16–22), in his A History of Israel, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia, 1972), unnumbered pages after p. 474, dates the accession of Ahaziah of Israel to 850 B.C. instead of 853 B.C. and the date of Jehoshaphat’s death to 849 B.C. instead of 848 B.C. as presented here.
Some commentators, however, consider Jehoshaphat’s name a later addition and believe that the king of Judah who participated in the Moabite campaign was Jehoshaphat’s son Jehoram, a namesake, and also brother-in-law, of the king of Israel. See, for example, The Jerusalem Bible (New York, 1966), p. 457, note c.
For a translation of the Assyrian record of the battle of Qarqar in which King Ahab of Israel participated, see James B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (Princeton, New Jersey, 1950), pp. 178–279.
See James A. Montgomery and Henry S. Gehman’s summary of the scholarly discussion on this subject in their Commentary on the Books of Kings (New York, 1951), pp. 363–364.
Yohanan Aharoni, “Arad,” in Michael Avi-Yonah, ed., Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, I (Jerusalem, 1975), pp. 85–87.
Ze’ev Meshel, “Did Yahweh Have a Consort?” BAR 05:02; Meshel and Meyers, “The Name of God in the Wilderness of Zin,” Biblical Archaeologist 39 (1976), pp. 6–10.
John Gray, “The Desert God ‘At
Albert T. Olmstead, History of Palestine and Syria (New York, 1931), pp. 389–393. A similar view is held by Anton Jirku, Altorientalischer Kommentar zum Alten Testament (Leipzig, 1923), p. 163.