The Moabites

Abstract

The Moabites play one of the most nuanced roles of any of Israel’s close neighbors: The heroine of the book of Ruth has all of its action centered upon the person and identity of a woman, Ruth, who happens to be identified as “Moabite.” Much of the scholarly attention on the Moabites not filtered through the Bible focuses on the “Mesha Stele,” a long inscription commissioned by a Moabite king in the middle of the ninth century BCE. Since it is the longest text of its type from this time period originating from one of the smaller polities in the Levant, the Mesha Stele offers an invaluable opportunity to look at a native text and the views of the king, Mesha, who produced it. The stele gives us native insight into Moabite religious and royal ideology, and at the same time provides a large percentage of what we know of the Moabite language and dialect.