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The Bible in stone
Merneptah Stele
Black granite slab · late 13th century BC · found 1896 at Thebes
This tall slab of black granite was set up by the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah, a son of Ramesses II, in the late 13th century BC. The archaeologist Flinders Petrie found it in 1896 in the ruins of Merneptah’s funerary temple at Thebes, and it is now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Most of its hieroglyphic text is a victory song about Egypt’s defeat of the Libyans, who had tried to push into the Nile Delta.
Near the end, the poem lists foes beaten in Canaan: Ashkelon, Gezer, Yanoam — and Israel, which “lies desolate”, as the line is often rendered. It is the oldest known mention of the name Israel outside the Bible. The scribe wrote the towns with the sign for a land or city, but Israel with the sign for a people. By one view, this shows a people not yet tied to a city or a kingdom; by another, Egyptian scribes used such signs too loosely to tell. The stele is also read in more than one way in the debate about the date of the exodus. The Bible names Ashkelon and Gezer among the towns of Canaan (Judges 1:18, 29).
Key verses
Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with men, and you have prevailed.”So the Egyptians appointed taskmasters over the Israelites to oppress them with forced labor. As a result, they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh.But they did not drive out the Canaanites who lived in Gezer. So the Canaanites dwell among the Ephraimites to this day, but they are forced laborers.And Judah also captured Gaza, Ashkelon, and Ekron—each with its territory.Sources
Adapted and shortened from the Tyndale Open Bible Dictionary · CC BY-SA 4.0
Tyndale Open Bible Dictionary © 2023 Tyndale House Publishers · CC BY-SA 4.0 — Inscriptions: Inscriptions on Monuments; Put (Place)
Adapted from Tyndale Open Bible Dictionary: articles chosen, shortened and retold in our own words (history, nature and daily life only) and, in languages other than English, machine-translated. The original work by Tyndale House Publishers is available for free at tyndaleopenresources.com.
