ISRAEL - Written Record of King David Discovered

The Mesha Stele, also called the Moabite Stone, is a basalt stone slab that has provided historians and linguists with the largest source of the Moabite language to date. Researchers have only now been able to verify with a considerable degree of certainty that the stele contains explicit references to King David. 

The stele was discovered in fragments in 1868 roughly 15 miles east of the Dead Sea and currently resides in the Louvre Museum in Paris. While it was damaged in 1869, a paper-mache impression of the inscription was captured before the damage occurred.

The text contains allusions to the Israelite god as well as the “House of David” and the “Altar of David.” However, until today, scholars could not be entirely sure that these references to King David were being correctly deciphered.

The Moabite phrase “House of David” consists of five letters: bt dwd. “Bt” is similar to today’s Hebrew word for house—bayit—which is beit in its construct form. And “dwd” can be thought of like modern Hebrew’s daled vav (the letter, in this case, is actually waw) daled which spells the name “David.”

Until now, only the first and fourth letters of the series, bet and waw were completely clear. In a late-2022 article entitled “Mesha’s Stele and the House of David” in the winter issue of Biblical Archeology Review researchers André Lemaire and Jean-Philippe Delorme re-examined the evidence.

Encyclopedia Britannica characterized the relationship between Moabite and the Hebrew of its time as differing “only dialectically.” According to Dearman and Jackson’s 1989 book Studies in the Mesha Inscription and Moab: “It is probable that Moabite and Hebrew were, for the most part, mutually intelligible.” 

-www.jpost.com, 12 January 2023