André Lemaire

André Lemaire (born 1942) is a French epigrapher and historian, Directeur d'Études Emeritus at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris and one of the foremost specialists in Northwest Semitic inscriptions of his generation. He has worked on Hebrew, Phoenician, Aramaic, Moabite, and Edomite material across the Iron Age Levant.

Lemaire's most widely discussed contribution is his 1994 reading of line 31 of the Mesha Stele (Moabite Stone), where he identified the phrase "bt[d]wd" — "House of David" — paralleling the same phrase on the Tel Dan Stele discovered by Avraham Biran the previous year. The pair of independent extrabiblical references to the Davidic dynasty was a major shift in the historiographical debate, providing 9th-century BC inscriptional evidence for a Judahite royal house bearing David's name and effectively closing the door on the strongest minimalist claims that David was a literary invention.

He has also produced extensive analysis of the Siloam Tunnel inscription (Hezekiah's waterworks, 2 Kings 20:20), the Samaria, Arad, and Lachish ostraca, and Phoenician dedicatory inscriptions from across the Mediterranean. His "Inscriptions hébraïques" (1977) remains a standard corpus, and he has edited dozens of inscriptions for the official "Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum" project.

Lemaire occupies a methodologically careful position within mainstream epigraphy: he is not a confessional scholar, but his readings consistently produce data that support the existence and approximate dates of figures and institutions named in the Hebrew Bible. He has been a frequent contributor to Biblical Archaeology Review and remains an active voice on questions of inscription authenticity, including the contested Jehoash Tablet and James Ossuary.