ABSTRACT
Moab and the Moabites have been invented and reinvented multiple times over the past three millennia. This chapter explores the textual and archaeological evidence for these inventions, the earliest of which appeared in the late second millennium BCE. At some point in the early first millennium, Moab’s kings consolidated distinct patrimonial groups scattered across west-central Jordan to build a territorial polity, an event described in the Mesha Inscription. The scribes of Israel and Judah drew on their kingdoms’ relationships with Moab for inspiration in their texts, regularly casting it and its peoples in a disparaging light. Moab’s sovereignty was compromised beginning in the 8th century when the kingdom became a vassal of the Assyrian Empire. Documentation about the Moabite kingdom gradually started to decline in the 6th century BCE and the history of its final centuries is uncertain. Nevertheless, the memory of Moab was preserved in later texts and the polity’s name was preserved in the names of the region’s settlements. Moab, both the territory and the polity, has inspired, and continues to inspire, new inventions in the modern age.
