The Rise and Fall of the Assyrian Empire by Zenaide Ragozin
Author:Zenaide Ragozin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jovian Press
APPENDIX TO CHAPTER VI. THE STELE OF MESHA, THE MOABITE
THE DESTINIES OF MOAB, LIKE those of all the small states and principalities that form the group of Palestine, lie too much outside the orbit of Assyria to be introduced separately or at any length in the great historical drama of which that country has the title part. In that drama they have a place in so far only as they come in contact or collision with the chief actor. The Jewish kingdoms themselves would make no exception, were it not for the peculiar interest which attaches to them for us, and which makes us refer to them principally the events in which, to an indifferent eye, they played in reality but a subordinate part. As it is, Israel and Judah must always take in a history of Assyria a prominent place, which would be disproportionate, but for their importance on other than strictly political grounds.
Not so with Moab. Yet one monument, discovered about twenty years ago, has given it a claim to attention. It is a stone in the shape of a stele, covered with a long inscription, which seems to have been set up by King Mesha, in memory of his country’s deliverance from the rule of Israel, to whom it had been subject and had paid tribute for about forty years. Moab, like Edom and some other nations of Palestine, was so nearly akin to the Hebrews in race as to speak the same language, so the inscription “is written in the Moabite dialect, i.e., in a language which is, with slight difference, that of the Bible. The characters are the ancient Hebrew characters, the so-called Samaritan or Phoenician ones.” “It is not only the oldest Hebrew literary monument in existence, but the most ancient specimen of alphabet writing. The stele was standing, half buried in the ground, at the foot of a hill by the side of Dibon, the ancient capital of Moab, and was unfortunately broken in the digging, so that it had to be patched out of twenty pieces, and the surface was so badly injured that half the writing would have been irrecoverably lost had not the discoverer had the forethought of ordering a stamping to be taken before the stele was removed. This enabled the scholars at the Louvre, where it now stands, to complete the text by reproducing the lost parts on a layer of plaster applied on the damaged portions of the surface. The difference shows very clearly.
But great as is the philological importance of this “find,” its historical contents arc at least as interesting. The inscription relates to a time and to events so familiar from Bible history, that a Sunday school child who knew its lesson well would have no trouble in placing it, and connecting it with the story told in Second Kings, the tragical end of which was given in a preceding chapter. There we are informed that “Mesha, king of Moab, was a sheep master, and
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