Modern discovery has as yet thrown little contemporary light on the period of Israelitish history which extends from the conquest of Canaan to the time when the kingdom of David was rent into the two monarchies of Israel and Judah. The buried ruins of Phoenicia have not yet been explored, and we have still to depend on the statements of classical writers for what we know, outside the Bible records, of Hiram the Tyrian king, the friend of David and Solomon. It is certain, however, that state archives already existed in the chief cities of Phoenicia, and a library was probably attached to the ancient temple of Baal, the Sun-god, at Tyre, which was restored by Hiram. It was from the Phoenicians that the Israelites, and the nations round about them, received their alphabet. This alphabet was of Egyptian origin. As far back as the monuments of Egypt carry us, we find the Egyptians using their hieroglyphics to express not only ideas and syllables, but also the letters of an alphabet. Even in the remote epoch of the second dynasty they already possessed an alphabet in which the twenty-one simple sounds of the language were represented by special hieroglyphic pictures. Such hieroglyphic pictures, however, were employed only on the public monuments; for books and letters and business transactions the Egyptians made use of a running hand, in which the original pictures had undergone great transformations. This running hand is termed “hieratic,” and it was from the hieratic forms of the Egyptian letters that the Phoenician letters were derived.

We have already seen that the coast of the Delta was so thickly peopled with Phoenician settlers as to have acquired the name of Keft-ur, or Caphtor, “greater Phoenicia;” and these settlers it must have been who first borrowed the alphabet of their Egyptian neighbours. For purposes of trade they must have needed some kind of writing, by means of which they could communicate with the natives of the country, and their business-like instincts led them to adopt only the alphabet used by the latter, and to discard all the cumbrous machinery of ideographs and syllabic characters by which it was accompanied. It was doubtless in the time of the Hyksos that the Egyptian alphabet became Phoenician. From the Delta it was handed on to the mother country of Phoenicia, and there the letters received new names, derived from objects to which they bore a resemblance and which began with the sounds they represented. These names, as well as the characters to which they belonged, have descended to ourselves, for the Phoenician alphabet passed first from the Phoenicians to the Greeks, then from the Greeks to the Romans, and finally from the Romans to the nations of modern Europe. The very word alphabet is a living memorial of the fact, since it is composed of alpha and beta, the Greek names of the two first letters, and these names are simply the Phoenician aleph, “an ox,” and beth, “a house.” Just as in our own nursery days it was imagined that we should remember our lessons better if we were taught that “A was an Archer who shot at a frog,” so the forms of the letters were impressed on the memory of the Phoenician boys by being likened to the head of an ox or the outline of a house.

But before the alphabet was communicated to Greece by the Phoenician traders, it had already been adopted by their Semitic kinsmen in Western Asia. Excavations in Palestine and the country east of the Jordan would doubtless bring to light inscriptions compiled in it much older than the oldest which we at present know. Only a few years ago the gap between the time when the Phoenicians first borrowed their new alphabet and the time to which the earliest texts written in it belonged was very great indeed. But during the last fifteen years two discoveries have been made which help to fill it up, and prove to us at the same time what may be found if we will only seek.

The Moabite Stone, erected by King Mesha, at Dibon.

One of these discoveries is that of the famous Moabite Stone. In the summer of 1869, Dr. Klein, a German missionary, while travelling in what was once the land of Moab, discovered a most curious relic of antiquity among the ruins of Dhiban, the ancient Dibon. This relic was a stone of black basalt, rounded at the top, two feet broad and nearly four feet high. Across it ran an inscription of thirty-four lines in the letters of the Phoenician alphabet. Dr. Klein unfortunately did not realise the importance of the discovery he had made; he contented himself with copying a few words, and endeavouring to secure the monument for the Berlin Museum. Things always move slowly in the East, and it was not until a year later that the négociations for the purchase of the stone were completed between the Prussian Government on the one side and the Arabs and Turkish pashas on the other. At length, however, all was arranged, and it was agreed that the stone should be handed over to the Germans for the sum of L80. At this moment M. Clermont-Ganneau, a member of the French Consulate at Jerusalem, with lamentable indiscretion, sent men to take squeezes of the inscription, and offered no less than L375 for the stone itself. At once the cupidity of both Arabs and pashas was aroused; the Governor of Nablus demanded the treasure for himself, while the Arabs, fearing it might be taken from them, put a fire under it, poured cold water over it, broke it in pieces, and distributed the fragments as charms among the different families of the tribe. Thanks to M. Clermont-Ganneau, most of these fragments have now been recovered, and the stone, once more put together, may be seen in the Museum of the Louvre at Paris. The fragments have been fitted into their proper places by the help of the imperfect squeezes taken before the monument was broken.

When the inscription came to be read, it turned out to be a record of Mesha, king of Moab, of whom we are told in 2 Kings iii. that after Ahabs death he rebelled against the king of Israel, and was vainly besieged in his capital Kirharaseth by the combined armies of Israel, Judah and Edom. Mesha describes the successful issue of his revolt, and the revenge he took upon the Israelites for their former oppression of his country. The translation of the inscription is as follows:

“I, Mesha, am the son of Chemosh-Gad, king of Moab, the Dibonite. My father reigned over Moab thirty years, and I reigned after my father. And I erected this stone to Chemosh at Kirkha, a (stone of) salvation, for he saved me from all despoilers, and made me see my desire upon all my enemies, even upon Omri, king of Israel. Now they afflicted Moab many days, for Chemosh was angry with his land. His son succeeded him; and he also said, I will afflict Moab. In my days (Chemosh) said, (Let us go) and I will see my desire on him and his house, and I will destroy Israel with an everlasting destruction. Now Omri took the land of Medeba, and (the enemy) occupied it in (his days and in) the days of his son, forty years. And Chemosh (had mercy) on it in my days; and I fortified Baal-Meón, and made therein the tank, and I fortified Kiriathaim. For the men of Gad dwelt in the land of (Atar)oth from of old, and the king (of) Israel fortified for himself Ataroth, and I assaulted the wall and captured it, and killed all the warriors of the wall for the well-pleasing of Chemosh and Moab; and I removed from it all the spoil, and (offered) it before Chemosh in Kirjath; and I placed therein the men of Siran and the men of Mochrath. And Chemosh said to me, Go take Nebo against Israel. (And I) went in the night, and I fought against it from the break of dawn till noon, and I took it and slew in all seven thousand (men, but I did not kill) the women (and) maidens, for (I) devoted them to Ashtar-Chemosh; and I took from it the vessels of Yahveh, and offered them before Chemosh. And the king of Israel fortified Jahaz and occupied it, when he made war against me; and Chemosh drove him out before (me, and) I took from Moab two hundred men, all its poor, and placed them in Jahaz, and took it to annex it to Dibon. I built Kirkha, the wall of the forest, and the wall of the city, and I built the gates thereof, and I built the towers thereof, and I built the palace, and I made the prisons for the criminals within the walls. And there was no cistern in the wall at Kirkha, and I said to all the people, Make for yourselves, every man, a cistern in his house. And I dug the ditch for Kirkha by means of the (captive) men of Israel. I built Aroer, and I made the road across the Arnon. I built Beth-Bamoth, for it was destroyed; I built Bezer, for it was cut (down) by the armed men of Dibon, for all Dibon was now loyal; and I reigned from Bikran, which I added to my land, and I built (Beth-Gamul) and Beth-Diblathaim and Beth-Baal-Meón, and I placed there the poor (people) of the land. And as to Horonaim, (the men of Edom) dwelt therein (from of old). And Chemosh said to me, Go down, make war against Horonaim and take (it. And I assaulted it, and I took it, and) Chemosh (restored it) in my days. Wherefore I made ... year ... and I....”

The last line or two, describing the war against the Edomites, is unfortunately lost beyond recovery. The rest of the text, however, it will be seen, is pretty perfect, and is full of interest to Biblical students. The whole inscription reads like a chapter from one of the historical books of the Old Testament. Not only are the phrases the same, but the words and grammatical forms are, with one or two exceptions, all found in Scriptural Hebrew. We learn that the language of Moab differed less from that of the Israelites than does one English dialect from another. Perhaps the most interesting fact disclosed by the inscription is that Chemosh, the national god of the Moabites, had come to be regarded not only as the supreme deity, but even as almost the only object of their worship. Except in the passage which alludes to the dedication of women and maidens to Ashtar-Chemosh, Mesha speaks as a monotheist, and even here the female Ashtar or Ashtoreth is identified with the supreme male deity Chemosh. Like the Assyrian kings, moreover, who ascribed their victories and campaigns to the inspiration of the god Assur, Mesha ascribes his successes to the orders of Chemosh. He uses, in fact, the language of Scripture; as the Lord said to David, “Go and smite the Philistines” (1 Sam. xxii, so Chemosh is made to say to Mesha, “Go, take Nebo;” and as God promised to “drive out” the Canaanites before Israel, so Mesha declares that Chemosh drove out Israel before him from Jahaz. Mesha even sets up a stone of salvation to Chemosh, like Eben-ezer, “the stone of help,” set up by Samuel (1 Sam. vi; and the statement that Chemosh had been “angry with his land,” but had made Mesha “see his desire upon all his enemies,” reminds us of the well-known passages in which the Psalmist declares that “God shall let me see my desire upon mine oppressors,” and the author of the Book of Judges recounts how that “the anger of the Lord was hot against Israel.”

The covenant name of the God of Israel itself occurs in the inscription, spelt in exactly the same way as in the Old Testament. Its occurrence is a proof, if any were needed, that the superstition which afterwards prevented the Jews from pronouncing it did not as yet exist. The name under which God was worshipped in Israel was familiar to the nations round about. Nay, more; we gather that even after the attempt of Jezebel to introduce the Baalim of Sidon into the northern kingdom, Yahveh was still regarded as the national god, and that the worship carried on at the high places, idolatrous and contrary as it was to the law, was nevertheless performed in His name. The high-place of Nebo, like so many of the other localities mentioned in the inscription, is also mentioned in the prophecy against Moab contained in Isa. xv. xvi. It is even possible that the words of the verse in the Book of Isaiah in which it is named have undergone transposition, and that the true reading is, “He is gone up to Dibon and to Beth-Bamoth to weep; Moab shall howl over Nebo and over Medeba.” The inscription informs us that Beth-Bamoth, “the house of the high-places,” was the name of a place near Dibon, the name of which appears in the last verse of Isaiah xv. under the form of Dimon, the letter b being changed by the prophet into m, in order to connect it with the word dam, “blood.” Kirkha, “the wall of the forest,” the modern Kerak, is called Kir of Moab and Kir-haresh or Kir-hareseth by Isaiah, and Kir-heres by Jeremiah, which by a slight change of vocalisation would signify “the wall of the forest.” The form Kir-haraseth is also used in the Book of Kings.

The story told by the Stone, and the account of the war against Moab given in the Bible, supplement one another. Dr. Ginsburg has suggested that the deliverance of Moab from Israel was brought about during the reign of Ahaziah, the successor of Ahab, and that Joram, the successor of Ahaziah, was subsequently driven out of Jahaz, which lay on the southern side of the Arnon; but that after this the tide of fortune turned, Joram summoned his allies from Judah and Edom, ravaged Moab, and blockaded Mesha in his capital of Kirkha. Then came the sacrifice by Mesha of his eldest son on the wall of Kirkha so that “there was great indignation against Israel,” and the allied forces retreated back “to their own land.”

The Moabite Stone shows us what were the forms of the Phoenician letters used on the eastern side of the Jordan in the time of Ahab. The forms employed in Israel and Judah on the western side could not have differed much; and we may therefore see in these venerable characters the precise mode of writing employed by the earlier prophets of the Old Testament. This knowledge is of great importance for the correction and restoration of corrupt passages, and more especially of proper names, the spelling of which has been deformed by copyists.

Just, however, as the writing of two persons at the present day must differ, so also the writing of two nations like the Moabites and Jews must have differed to some extent. Moreover, there must have been some distinction between the more cursive writing of a papyrus-roll and the carefully cut letters of a public monument like that of Mesha. Indeed, that such a distinction did exist we have proof in a passage (Isa. vii which has been mistranslated in the Authorised Version, but which ought to be rendered: “Take thee a great slab, and write upon it with the graving-tool of the people: Hasten spoil, hurry booty.” Here words which were afterwards to be made more emphatic by becoming the name of one of Isaiah’s children, were written in a way that all could read, not in the running hand of a scroll, but in the large clear characters of a public document. What these characters exactly were, a recent discovery has enabled us to learn.

Hebrew inscriptions of an early date have long been sought for in vain. We knew of one or two inscribed fragments from the neighbourhood of the Pool of Siloam at Jerusalem, and of a few seals which might be referred to the period before the Babylonish Captivity; but, unfortunately, none of these could be assigned to a definite date, and even the conclusion that some of them were pre-exilic was after all little more than a guess. The seals are usually distinguished by the absence of any symbols or other devices, as well as by a horizontal line drawn across the middle, which divides the inscription into two halves. The proper names also which occur on them are, in the majority of cases, compounded with the sacred name Yahveh. Several of these seals have been found in Babylonia and Mesopotamia, and may therefore be regarded as memorials of the Jewish exile. But the legends they bear are always short, and consist of little else than proper names; and as their date was uncertain, it was impossible to draw any solid inferences from them as to the character of the writing employed in Judah or Israel before the age of Nebuchadnezzar.

It is quite otherwise now. An inscription of some length has been discovered in Jerusalem itself, which is certainly as old as the time of Isaiah, and may be older still. In the summer of 1880, one of the native pupils of Mr. Schick, a German architect long settled in Jerusalem, was playing with some other lads in the so-called Pool of Siloam, and while wading up a channel cut in the rock which leads into the Pool, slipped and fell into the water. On rising to the surface, he noticed what looked like letters on the rock which formed the southern wall of the channel. He told Mr. Schick of what he had seen; and the latter, on visiting the spot, found that an ancient inscription, concealed for the most part by the water, actually existed there.

The Pool is of comparatively modern construction, but it encloses the remains of a much older reservoir, which, like the modern one, was supplied with water through a tunnel excavated in the rock. This tunnel communicates with the so-called Spring of the Virgin, the only natural spring of water in or near Jerusalem. It rises below the walls of the city, on the western bank of the valley of the Kidron; and the tunnel through which its waters are conveyed is consequently cut through the ridge, that forms the southern part of the Temple Hill. The Pool of Siloam lies on the opposite side of this ridge, at the mouth of the valley called that of the Cheesemakers (Tyropoeon) in the time of Josephus, but which is now filled up with rubbish, and in large part built over. According to Lieutenant Conder’s measurements, the length of the tunnel is 1,708 yards; it does not, however, run in a straight line, and towards the centre there are two culs de sac, of which the inscription now offers an explanation. At the entrance on the western or Siloam side its height is about sixteen feet; but the roof grows gradually lower, until in one place it is not quite two feet above the floor of the passage.

The Siloam Inscription (tracing from a squeeze, taken 15th July, 1881, by
Lieuts. Conder and Mantell, R. E.).

The inscription occupies the under part of an artificial tablet in the wall of rock, about nineteen feet from where the conduit opens out upon the Pool of Siloam, and on the right-hand side of one who enters it. After lowering the level of the water, Mr. Schick endeavoured to take a copy of it; but as not only the letters of the text, but every flaw in the rock were filled with a deposit of lime left by the water, all he could send to Europe was a collection of unmeaning scrawls. Besides the difficulty of distinguishing the letters, it was also necessary to sit in the mud and water, and to work by the dim light of a candle, as the place where the inscription is engraved is perfectly dark. All this rendered it impossible for anyone not acquainted with Phoenician palaeography to make an accurate transcript. The first intelligible copy accordingly was made by Professor Sayce after several hours of careful study; but this too contained several doubtful characters, the real forms of which could only be determined by the removal of the calcareous matter with which they were coated. In March, 1881, six weeks after Sayce’s visit, Dr. Guthe arrived in Jerusalem, and after making a more complete facsimile of the inscription than had previously been possible, removed the deposit of lime by means of an acid, and so revealed the original appearance of the tablet. Letters which had previously been concealed now became visible, and the exact shapes of them all could be observed. First a cast, and then squeezes of the text were taken; and the scholars of Europe had at last in their hands an exact copy of the old text.

The inscription consists of six lines, but several of the letters composing it have unfortunately been destroyed by the wearing away of the rock. The translation of it is as follows:

1. “(Behold) the excavation! Now this is the history of the excavation. While the excavators were still lifting up the pick, each towards his neighbour, and while there were yet three cubits to (excavate, there was heard) the voice of one man calling to his neighbour, for there was an excess in the rock on the right hand (and on the left). And after that on the day of excavating the excavators had struck pick against pick, one against the other, the waters flowed from the spring to the Pool for a distance of 1,200 cubits. And (part) of a cubit was the height of the rock over the head of the excavators.”

The language of the inscription is the purest Biblical Hebrew. There is only one word in it that rendered “excess” which is new, and consequently of doubtful signification. We learn from it that the engineering skill of the day was by no means despicable. The conduit was excavated in the same fashion as the Mont Cenis tunnel of our own time, by beginning the work simultaneously at the two ends; and, in spite of its windings, the workmen almost succeeded in meeting in the middle. They approached, indeed, so nearly to one another, that the noise made by the one party in hewing the rock was heard by the other, and the small piece of rock which intervened between them was accordingly pierced. This accounts for the two culs de sac now found in the centre of the channel; they represent the extreme points reached by the two bands of excavators before they had discovered that, instead of meeting, they were passing by one another.

It is most unfortunate that the inscription contains no indication of date; but the forms of the letters used in it show that it cannot be very much later in age than the Moabite Stone. Indeed, some of the letters exhibit older forms than those of the Moabite Stone; but this may be explained by the supposition that the scribes of Jerusalem were more conservative, more disposed to retain old forms, than the scribes of king Mesha. The prevalent opinion of scholars is that the tunnel and consequently the inscription in it were executed in the reign of Hezekiah. According to the Chronicler (2 Chr. xxxi, Hezekiah “stopped the upper watercourse of Gihon, and brought it straight down to the west side of the city of David,” and we read in 2 Kings x, that “he made a pool and a conduit, and brought water into the city.” The object of the laborious undertaking is very plain. The Virgin’s Spring, the only natural source near Jerusalem, lay outside the walls, and in time of war might easily pass into the hands of the enemy. The Jewish kings, therefore, did their best to seal up this spring, which must be the Chronicler’s “upper water-course of Gihon,” and to bring its waters by subterranean passages inside the city walls. Besides the tunnel which contains the inscription another tunnel has been discovered, which also communicates with the Virgin’s Spring. But it is tempting to suppose that the most important of these the tunnel which contains the inscription must be the one which Hezekiah made.

The supposition, however, is rendered uncertain by a statement of Isaiah (vii. While Ahaz, the father of Hezekiah, was still reigning, Isaiah uttered a prophecy in which he made allusion to “the waters of Shiloah that go softly.” Now this can hardly refer to anything else than the gently flowing stream which still runs through the tunnel of Siloam. In this case the conduit would have been in existence before the time of Hezekiah; and, since we know of no earlier period when a great engineering work of the kind could have been executed until we go back to the reign of Solomon, it is possible that the inscription may actually be of this ancient date. The inference is supported by the name Shiloah, which probably means “the tunnel,” and would have been given to the locality in consequence of the conduit which here pierced the rock. It was not likely that when David and Solomon were fortifying Jerusalem, and employing Phoenician architects upon great public buildings there, they would have allowed the city to depend wholly upon rain cisterns for its water supply. Since the inscription calls the Pool of Siloam simply “the Pool,” we may perhaps infer that no other reservoir of the kind was in existence at the time; and yet in the age of Isaiah, as we learn from Isa. xxi, 11, there was not only “a lower pool,” in contradistinction to “an upper one,” but also “an old pool,” in contradistinction to a new one. As Dr. Guthe’s excavations have laid bare the remains of four such pools in the neighbourhood of that of Siloam, there is no difficulty in finding places for all these reservoirs. But they could hardly have existed when the Pool of Siloam was still known as simply “the Pool,” nor could the name of Shiloah have well been given to the locality if another tunnel, observed by Sir Charles Warren on the eastern side of the Temple Hill, had been already excavated. This second tunnel starts, like the Siloam one, from the Virgin’s Spring, and was designed to bring the water of the spring within the walls of the city. A shaft is cut for seventy feet into the hill, where it meets another perpendicular shaft, which rises for a height of fifty feet, and then meets a flight of steps, which lead into a broad passage, ending in another flight of steps and a vaulted chamber. Niches for lamps were found here at intervals, intended to light the persons who went to draw the water by means of a bucket. As lamps of the Roman period were discovered in the chamber, the tunnel must have been known and used up to the time of the capture of Jerusalem by Titus, and it is probably not older than the reign of Herod. In any case, the comparative excellence of its workmanship goes to show that it was made at a later date than the tunnel of Siloam.

Whatever doubts, however, may still hang over the date of the inscription, there can be no question that it has thrown most important light on the topography of Jerusalem in the period of the kings. It is now clear that the modern city occupies very little of the same ground as the ancient one; the latter stood entirely on the rising ground to the east of the Tyropoeon valley, the northern portion of which is at present occupied by the mosque of Omar, while the southern portion is uninhabited. The Tyropoeon valley itself must be the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, where the idolaters of Jerusalem burnt their children in the fire to Moloch. It must be in the southern cliff of this valley that the tombs of the kings are situated; the reason why they have never yet been found being that they are buried under the rubbish with which the valley is filled. Among the rubbish must be the remains of the city which was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, and whose ruins were flung into the gorge below. Between the higher part of the hill, now occupied by the mosque of Omar, and its lower uninhabited portion, Dr. Guthe has discovered traces of a valley which once ran into the valley of the Kidron at right angles to it, not far from the Virgin’s Spring, and divided in old days the City of David from the rest of the town. Here, as well as in the now obliterated Valley of the Cheesemakers, there probably still lie the relics of the dynasty of David; but we shall only know the story they have to tell us when the spade of the excavator has come to continue the discoveries which the inscription of Siloam has begun.