2007

In the opening of his recent discussion of the relationship of the inscription on the Mesha stele to the Omri dynasty in Ahab Agonistes, André Lemaire classifies this text as a ‘commemorative/memorial royal inscription.’ This classification is explicitly opposed to an understanding of the text's genre as ‘a fictive story or pure literature,’ a view Lemaire attributes to me. The disagreement involves the argument I opened at the 1998 Oslo congress that the historicism, dominating both the rhetoric and perspective of biblical archaeology, was not shared by authors of ancient texts. In this short presentation, I used the Deir Alla Inscription and the Mesha Stele as examples to make my point. In so doing, I also questioned the historicity of the narratives on these inscriptions. In discussing the genre of the Mesha inscription, I defined its function as giving honour to the divine Chemosh and – noting that it had been set up at a sanctuary to this deity – I concluded that it was a dedicatory inscription. I argued further that its narrative, rather than being historiography, belonged to a definable literary tradition of stories about kings of the past. This was argued from the comparable traits I saw in the inscriptions of Idrimi and Sargon. In my more detailed comparative study of this inscription, presented for the European Seminar for Historical Methodology at its meeting in Rome in 2001, I described the stele as oriented towards monumental display and defined its genre in accord with its function as a commemorative or memorial inscription, following Miller in his 1974 article.