Merneptah Stele

Merneptah Stele, also known as the Israel Stele, is a black granite slab about ten feet (over 3 m) tall, inscribed for the Egyptian king Merneptah. Merneptah, the thirteenth son and successor of Ramesses II (1279-1213 BC), was a king of Egypt's Nineteenth Dynasty who reigned from 1213 to 1203 BC. The stele dates from his fifth year, about 1208 BC. It is famous for holding the earliest known mention of Israel outside the Bible, and the only accepted one from ancient Egypt. It is now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, catalogued as JE 31408.

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Discovery and the Stone

The excavator Flinders Petrie found the stele in 1896 in the ruins of Merneptah's funerary temple in western Thebes. Petrie's own report places it in the temple's first court, where it had stood against the south wall and then fallen forward. At dinner on the evening of the find, Petrie said, "This stele will be better known in the world than anything else I have found." The stone had first been carved for Amenhotep III (1386-1349 BC). The stone was taken from Amenhotep's ruined funerary temple, and Merneptah's own text was carved on its back.

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What the Inscription Says

Most of its 28 lines form a hymn celebrating Merneptah's victory over the Libyans in the fifth year of his reign. His enemy was a coalition of Libyans and Sea Peoples. Egyptian texts call the Libyans Tjehenu, and the Rebu or Lebu were one of their groups. The hymn praises Merneptah by setting him against Merey, king of the Rebu or Lebu, casting him as Egypt's righteous ruler and Merey as the vicious Libyan king. The closing lines turn to a campaign in Canaan. They declare Tehenu "wasted", Hatti, the Hittite kingdom, "pacified", and Canaan "plundered". The same lines name three towns of Canaan, Ashkelon, Gezer and Yanoam, along with Israel. Ashkelon, a port on the Mediterranean coast, and Gezer, in the foothills between the coast and Jerusalem, were towns of southern Canaan that held key points on the trade routes running along the coast and up into the highlands. Yanoam, listed after them, lay farther north, but its exact site is debated. The line on Israel reads "Israel is laid waste, his seed is not", or in another translation "Israel is wasted, its seed is not". In Scripture, Gezer is the Canaanite city whose people Ephraim did not drive out (Joshua 16:10; Judges 1:29). Ashkelon is among the cities Judah captured (Judges 1:18).

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Israel on the Stele

In the hieroglyphs, Ashkelon, Gezer and Yanoam carry the classifier signs of city-states. Israel's name is written differently, with signs that mark it as a people rather than a city-state or a foreign land. The words "his seed is not" are conventional victory language, often used of defeated nations, and the boast is figurative. Michael Hasel, professor of archaeology at Southern Adventist University, argues that the seed here is literal grain rather than offspring, which would make Israel a settled people with a farming economy. Virtually all scholars who have studied the question take the stele to place Israel in Canaan sometime before about 1209 BC. Gary Rendsburg, a biblical scholar at Rutgers University, proposed in 1992 that this Israel was instead still in Egypt.

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Egypt and Canaan in Merneptah's Day

Merneptah's campaign, about 1208 BC, came near the end of the Late Bronze II period (1400-1200 BC), when Egypt held a grip on Canaan. After this campaign, that hold began to weaken markedly.

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Why It Matters for the Bible Reader

Israel came out of Egypt in 1446 BC, since Solomon began the temple "in the four hundred and eightieth year" after it (1 Kings 6:1), and the conquest of Canaan began about 1406 BC; some date the Exodus to about 1250 BC. By the Bible's own chronology, then, the stele falls in the period of the judges, when the LORD "raised up judges" and Israel was still settling in Canaan (Judges 2:16). The book of Exodus does not name the pharaoh of the oppression or of the Exodus. Many early Egyptologists dated the Exodus to Merneptah's reign, but most scholars read the stele as placing Israel already in Canaan by his fifth year.

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Other Evidence Proposed

Frank Yurco, an Egyptologist who studied at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute and became an authority on the reign of Merneptah, assigned a set of battle reliefs on a wall of the Karnak temple to Merneptah's campaign into Canaan, and took one scene to show a battle against Israel. A 2019 study reports that Peter Brand, an Egyptologist at the University of Memphis, agrees the reliefs are Merneptah's. A 1991 article in Biblical Archaeology Review accepts them as his too, calling Yurco's examination of the royal names on them "certainly convincing", but it disputes which scene shows Israel. A fragment in Berlin, older than Merneptah, has been proposed as an earlier mention of Israel (the Berlin pedestal), but the Egyptologist James Hoffmeier rejects that reading, citing serious linguistic problems.

After the stele, the next known references to Israel outside the Bible come from the ninth century BC, in the Mesha Stele of Moab and in Assyrian inscriptions. One of these, the Kurkh inscription of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III (859-824 BC), names Ahab, king of Israel (874-853 BC), at the battle of Qarqar in 853 BC.