Perhaps the most significant Bible character to come from Moab was Ruth. She is mentioned in the genealogy of Jesus Christ (Matthew 1:5).
Ruth in Boaz Field by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, 1828
Mesha was the king of the Moabites who was forced to pay tribute to the king of Israel. The Bible tells us that this tribute suddenly stopped: “when Ahab died, Mesha, king of Moab, rebelled against the [new] king of Israel…” (2 Kings 3:5).
Location of Kingdom of Moab
Mesha’s account of his rebellion against Israel is found on a large stone monument known as the Moabite Stone (Mesha Stele). The Moabite Stone is a dark-coloured, basalt monument about four feet high by two feet wide, dating to the reign of King Mesha in about 850 B.C. This artifact is another important source that corroborates the biblical account of the early Israelites.
Moabite Stone
The stone inscription was discovered by a German missionary, V. Klein in 1868 at Dibon (ancient Moab; present-day Jordan) who unfortunately took neither copy nor squeeze of it. The Berlin Museum entered into negotiations for the purchase of it, but while these were proceeding slowly, M. Clermont-Ganneau, then dragoman of the French consulate at Jerusalem, sent agents to take squeezes and tempt the Arabs to sell it for a large sum of money. This led to interference on the part of the Turkish officials, with the result that in 1869 the Arabs lighted a fire under the Stone, and by pouring cold water on it broke it into pieces which they carried away as charms. M. Clermont-Ganneau, however, succeeded in recovering a large proportion of these, and with the help of the squeezes was able to rewrite the greater part of the inscription. The last and most definitive edition of the text was published by Professors Smend and Socin in 1886 from a comparison of the fragments of the original (now in the Louvre) with the squeezes (in Paris and Bale) and photographs.
