Dating to the 9th-century BCE and written in a language and alphabet very similar to biblical Hebrew, the inscription on the Mesha Stele describes King Mesha of Moab’s victory over the king of Israel—paralleling a story told in 2Kings 3. The text makes repeated reference to King Omri, who according to the Hebrew Bible was the sixth ruler of the northern kingdom of Israel, which broke away from the southern kingdom of Judah after the death of Solomon. The Jerusalem Post reports on new evidence in a scholarly debate about whether the stele also mentions an earlier biblical monarch:

The text contains allusions to the Israelite god [and perhaps to] 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 stele was discovered in fragments in 1868 roughly fifteen miles east of the Dead Sea and currently resides in the Louvre Museum in Paris. While it was damaged in 1869, a papier-mâché impression, [known as a “squeeze”], of the inscription was captured before the damage occurred.

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, [meaning “house of”]. 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.”

[In] 2018, the Louvre took new, high-resolution pictures [of the original] and projected light onto them coming directly through the 150-year-old squeeze paper. Thus, researchers were able to glean a much clearer picture of the ancient records. This . . . is how they were able to see evidence of the other three letters, taw (like modern Hebrew tav), dalet, and dalet.

A new translation of the entire stele by one of these scholars can be found here.

Contributing to the Jewish state’s current controversy over efforts to reform its judicial system, observes Peter Berkowitz, is its lack of a written constitution. Berkowitz encourages Israelis to seek a way out of the present crisis by looking to the founding document they do have: the Declaration of Independence.

The document does not explicitly mention “democracy.” But it commits Israel to democratic institutions not only by insisting on the equality of rights for all citizens and the establishment of representative government but also by stressing that Arab inhabitants would enjoy “full and equal citizenship.”

The Israeli Declaration of Independence no more provides a constitution for Israel than does the U.S. Declaration of Independence furnish a constitution for America. Both documents, however, announced a universal standard. In 1859, as civil war loomed, Abraham Lincoln wrote in a letter, “All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”

Something similar could be said about Ben Gurion’s . . . affirmation that Israel would be based on, ensure, and guarantee basic rights and fundamental freedoms because they are inseparable from our humanity.

Perhaps reconsideration of the precious inheritance enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence could assist both sides in assuaging the rage roiling the country. Bold and conciliatory, the nation’s founding document promises not merely a Jewish state, or a free state, or a democratic state, but that Israel will combine and reconcile its diverse elements to form a Jewish and free and democratic state.