(A) According to the readings of SS in ll. 11, 16, 26, the prefixed preposition Ὁ is used to express the genitive.
iv. RELIGION. —Up to a certain point the Moabite religion was henotheistic, and the rela- tion of Chemosh to Moab was exactly that of J” to Israel (see CHEMOSH). On the strength of a winged sun-disk on the gem containing the name Chemoshyehi, Baethgen regards Chemosh as God of the Sunshine, and a manifestation of Molech. The Greeks identified Chemosh with Ares. Sanctu- aries to Baalpeor (wh. see), and possibly Nebo (wh. see), and other gods, neither destroy the parallel with Israel, nor prove that Moab failed to pay a special, unique homage to Chemosh. Even the occurrence on the Stone of a deity Ashtar- (οι Ishtar-) chemosh would not destroy the parallel with Israel. Ashtar-chemosh (see ASHTORETH in vol. i. p. 171°) is a distinguished from Chemosh ; and probably El Shaddai, El Elyon, Jahweh Zeba’oth, are not sufficiently similar com- pounds to be urged against this view. But if in- scriptions of Solomon or Ahab were preserved, the might name other deities beside Jahweh. Accord- ing to Baethgen, Ashtar-chemosh is a name which claims for ἘΠΕ ΞΟΞΕ the attributes of Ishtar. Chemosh had his temples, priests, sacrifices, and offerings. The inhabitants of conquered cities were ‘devoted’ to him, i.e. massacred in his honour (Stone, ll. 12, 17). Mesha sacrificed his firstborn to Chemosh, as Ahaz offered his son to Molech.
But there is no extant evidence that any Moab- ites regarded Chemosh as the one God, in a mono- theistic sense; or that there was any attempt by priestly legislation to purify the ritual from super- stition and immorality; or that there was any ethical or spiritual movement parallel to the minis- try of the prophets in Israel.
v. PEOPLE AND History. —The patriarchal narratives in Gn preserve a tradition, which may be unhesitatingly accepted as historical, to the effect that Moab was very closely akin to Israel, and that up to a certain point the history of Israel is also the history of Moab. Moab is the son of Lot and the brother of Ammon, Lot is the nephew of Abraham, and accompanies him in the migra- tion first from Ur and then from Haran. In other words, Lot (i.e. Moab with Ammon), Ish- mael, the Bné Keturah and Edom, once formed with Israel that loose confederation of kindred tribes which bore the common name Hebrews, and followed Abraham from Mesopotamia into Canaan. According to these narratives, Lot shared for a time the nomad life of the other Hebrews in Western Palestine, but was the first of the allied clans to leave the confederacy. Lot settled in Sodom and Gomorrah, but after the calamity which overwhelmed those cities the Bné Lot be- took themselves to the pasture-lands E. of Jordan, and, as the separate political organizations of Moab and Ammon, occupied the territory in which they remained till they disappeared from history. Thus Moab passed from the nomad stage into that of agriculturists and city-dwellers at a much earlier date than Israel. Possibly the Khabiri of the Amarna tablets are the Hebrews at their first entry into Palestine before the confederacy began to break up.
We do not know the exact limits of the territory first occupied by Moab, but it probably: stretched northward from the Arnon, along the eastern
MOAB, MOABITES
banks of the Dead Sea and the Jordan. We read in Dt 910 ‘the Emim dwelt therein ‘‘[in the land of Moab)” aforetime, a people great, and many, and tall, as the Anakim: these also are accounted Rephaim, as the Anakim ; but the Moabites call them Emim.’ J” gave this land to Moab as He gave the land of the Horites to Edom. In Gn 14° the Emim are at Kiriathaim, a town north of the Arnon, spoken of later on as Moabite. The statement is quite consistent with the position of ch. 14, as the birth of Moab, i.e. its first appear- ance as a distinct tribe, is not related till 1937, If we could trust the synchronisms with Baby- lonian and Elamite history based on the names in 141, the incident happened shortly before the restoration of Babylonian supremacy by Ham- murabi, B.C. 2200; and Moab made its appearance somewhat later (HCM p. 161 ἢ). But the archzo- logical relations of Gn 14 are still quite uncer- tain (cf. L. W. King, Letters, etc., of Hammurabi, Introd.). The antiquarian note, Dt 2, is a late addition, and, according to Holzinger on Gn 145 and Steuernagel on Dt 2”, the Emim are purely lepeuilery. (ef. Emi).
The OT says nothing more about Moab till the time of the Exodus. From the Amarna tablets and other Egyptian, Babylonian, and sneytian monuments we gather that Babylonia and the Hittites ee eat influence in Syria before c. B.C. 1400; and that for some time before that date Syria was an Egyptian province, but that, apparently, about 1400, Egyptian authority was breaking down throughout Syria. Moab is not mentioned in the Amarna tablets at present pub- lished (Winckler, Petrie). It lay rather out of the way of the main routes between Syria and Egypt and the East, and especially was not on the ptian line of march into Palestine. Pos-
sibly, therefore, both as to politics and culture, the 8
relations of Moab with the great empires were slight and superticial. On the other hand, Moab commanded the great routes from Western Pales- tine and Northern Syria into Arabia (HGAHL 430, 597 ff., 626); and probably during this early period and throughout its history ἘΠ τῇ remained in touch with its Arab kinsfolk: thus the Mesha inscription shows traces of the influence of Arabic. Yet there is evidence of the connexion of Moab with Egypt. According to Sayce (Patr. Pal. 153), Moab was included in the Canaanite province of Egypt at the time when the Amarna tablets were written; but Edom then encroached on what was afterwards Moabite territory. Ramses I. (c. 1300) fought several campaigns to restore the Egyptian dominion in Syria. In the list of his conquests on the base of one of six colossal figures at Luxor there occurs the name Muab (Patr. Pal. p. 21). Karhu, in a similar list at Karnak (Patr. Pal.