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Or else, what means that of the Psalmist, "The mountains skipped like rams, and the little hills like lambs!"? And again, that in Second of the Kings, chap. iii. ver. 4, "And MESHA, King of Moab, was a sheep master, and rendered unto the King of Israel an hundred thousand lambs," and what follows, "and an hundred thousand rams, with the wool!" Mind it! it was the King of Israel!
It is called 'The Moabite Stone, and was set up by Mesha, king of Moab. Of course, this does not take us back actually to the days of Moses, but still it is so old that Moses may well have used the same kind of writing. We have seen that most nations in those old times had their books, and we know that each nation had always one book that it valued more than the rest.
"These therefore begat Joktan": He also begat "Hadoram, and Uzal, and Diklah, and Obal, and Abimael, and Sheba; and Ophir, and Havilah, and Johab: All these were the sons of Joktan. And their dwelling was from Mesha, as thou goes, unto Sephar a mount of the east." Ver. 31. "These are the sons of Shem, after their families, after their tongues, in their lands, after their nations."
And Hadoram, and Uzal, and Diklah, And Obal, and Abimael, and Sheba, And Ophir, and Havilah, and Jobab: all these were the sons of Joktan. And their dwelling was from Mesha, as thou goest unto Sephar a mount of the east. These are the sons of Shem, after their families, after their tongues, in their lands, after their nations.
So entirely, in fact, had the conception of a goddess vanished from the mind of the Moabite, that, as we learn from the Moabite Stone, the Babylonian Istar, the Ashtoreth of Canaan, had been transformed into a male deity, and identified with Chemosh. It was to Ashtar-Chemosh, Mesha tells us, and not to Ashtoreth, that he devoted the captive women of Israel.
In the time of Ahab, Mesha, the son of Chemosh-melech, sent each year 100,000 lambs and 100,000 rams. Mesha subsequently succeeded in shaking off the foreign yoke. He has left us a record of his victories, the so-called Moabite Stone, which was discovered among the ruins of his capital, Dibon.
The name, however, of this channel is not the only means we have of identifying it. The Scripture says that the Pison compasses the land of Havilah. One we may call the Cushite Havilah, the other the Joktanite Havilah. The dwelling-place of the brother of Nimrod is not mentioned, but it is stated that the Joktanite Havilah dwelt in "Mesha."
But when this was the case, the necessary result was that the female character of the deity was forgotten. Istar was conceived of as a god, and accordingly on the Moabite Stone Ashtar is identified with Chemosh, the patron-god of Mesha, just as in Southern Arabia also Atthar is a male divinity. The worship of Ashtoreth absorbed that of the other goddesses of Canaan.
When the Moabite Stone was engraved, it is clear from the forms of the letters that the Phoenician alphabet had long been in use in the kingdom of Mesha.
The Mesha inscription furnishes facts bearing on Moabite handwriting and language, the belief in the god Chemosh, the practices belonging to his cult, the war between the Moabites and Israel. Thus the facts reach us pell-mell, without distinction of nature. This mixture of heterogeneous facts is one of the characteristics which differentiate history from the other sciences.
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