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.

Stephen Daisley writes about the slaying of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim:

Yaron and Sarah were murdered in a climate of lies and vilification and hatred. . . . The more institutions participate in this collective madness, the more madness there will be. The more elected officials and NGOs misrepresent the predictable consequences of asymmetric warfare in densely populated territories, where much of the infrastructure of everyday life has a dual civilian/terrorist purpose, the more the citizenries of North America and Europe will come to regard Israelis and Jews as a people who lust unquenchably after blood.

The most intolerant anti-Zionism is becoming a mainstream view, indulged by liberal societies, more concerned with not conflating irrational hatred of Israel with irrational hatred of Jews—as though the distinction between the two is all that well defined anymore.

For years now, and especially after the October 7 massacre, the call has gone up from the pro-Palestinian movement to put Palestine at the heart of Western politics. To pursue the struggle against Zionism in every country, on every platform, and in every setting. To wage worldwide resistance to Israel, not only in Wadi al-Far’a but in Washington, DC. “Globalize the intifada,” they chanted. This is what it looks like.