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.
Read more on Jerusalem Post: https://www.jpost.com/archaeology/article-728354