The name that God gave himself — Yahweh (YHWH) — is found in the Hebrew Bible and also in other ancient documents.

The Bible was written in Hebrew. And ancient Hebrew is related to other ancient languages in and around Canaan. One such language was found on an inscription know as the Mesha Stele or the Moabite Stone. The Moabite language and the Hebrew language belong to the same family, the Northwest Semitic family.

Within the context of Israel’s exodus from Egypt, God gave his name to Moses. His name is pronounced something like “Yahweh.” Other nations of the ancient Near East learn to identify Him by that same name. Yahweh was known as the One who had united himself in close association with Israel. The Mesha Stele (or Moabite Stone) is an instance of pagan nations calling God by that name.

My interests in the Moabite Stone are related to 1) the ancient Hebrew language, 2) the development of Hebrew, 3) the cracking the Byblos syllabary by examining other ancient languages, 4) the theology of the nations that surrounded Israel and 5) historical events recorded in the Bible and also found in non-Biblical texts.

One can see that there are many reasons to be interested in the Mesha Stele. Finding a reprint of it that I can use for translation work was not trivial. I found the earliest transliterated copy in M. Héron de Villefosse’s monograph under the title of Notice des monuments provenant de la Palestine, Paris, 1876. I have reproduce an image of the relevant pages here (click on it to get an enlarged view).

Newer photographs are regularly released, as in the case of this article which contributes to an ongoing debate about line 12 of the text: Lemaire, Andre. 2007. “New Photographs and ryt or hyt in the Mesha Inscription, Line 12.” Israel Exploration Journal. 57 (2):204

Expensive, hard to find, but also of importance is Studies in the Mesha inscription and Moab edited by Andrew Dearman. 492.6 S933 Published Atlanta, Ga. : Scholars Press, c1989.