Bible Synapse
Merneptah Stele
Inscription · c. 1208 BC · Before the kings · also called Israel Stele, Victory Stele of Merneptah
See it on the map and timeline
- Date
- c. 1208 BC (the stele’s text, from Merneptah’s fifth year)
- Found
- Mortuary temple of Merneptah, western Thebes (Luxor), Egypt, 1896. Found by Flinders Petrie in 1896 in the ruins of Merneptah’s mortuary temple on the west bank at Thebes. A broken second copy of the text is known from the temple of Karnak.
- Now
- Egyptian Museum, Cairo (JE 31408)
- Passages
- Judges 1:27–29, Judges 1:18, Joshua 10:33
What it is
A black granite slab more than 3 metres tall, first carved for Amenhotep III and re-inscribed on its back in the fifth year of the pharaoh Merneptah. Most of the 28 lines praise the king for beating back a Libyan invasion of Egypt. The closing lines turn to Canaan and list places the king claims to have crushed, among them Ashkelon, Gezer and Yanoam, and then a people called Israel, which is ‘laid waste, its seed is not’.
How it connects to the Bible
This is the oldest certain mention of Israel outside the Bible. The sign written with the name marks a people rather than a city or a country, which fits the picture in Judges of Israel as tribes living in the hill country alongside Canaanite towns such as Gezer and Ashkelon. Most scholars think this group lived in the hill country at the centre of Canaan.
What scholars debate
What kind of group ‘Israel’ was in about 1208 BC, and how it relates to the tribes of the biblical story, is debated. A few scholars have proposed other readings of the name, but most Egyptologists read it as Israel.