ABSTRACT
The task of delineating the process by which the Iron Age communities in the central highlands of Jordan coalesced into the culturally and territorially defined polities referred to in the Hebrew Bible and contemporary textual sources is not an easy one. By the mid-9th century BCE, however, a mosaic of autonomous regional communities appears to have emerged, as tacitly acknowledged in the Mesha Inscription by references to ‘the land of Medeba’, ‘the land of ‘Atarot’, and Mesha’s own identification with Dibon and its surrounding territory. Although there may have been incipient attempts at political unification prior to Mesha’s reign, as reflected for example in the story of Balak (Numbers 22-24), which assumes the existence of a Moabite monarchy, the contrasting account in 2 Kings (1.1; 3.4-27) seems to confirm the pivotal nature of the political events memorialized on his stela. Moreover, the rhetoric (and formal syntax) of the inscription suggests a carefully crafted attempt to construct a broader national identity by invoking an older collective image, ‘the land of Moab’, while subtly shifting the locus of regional identities from kinship to that of geography.
