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.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.