Mesha Stele (Moabite Stone), 840 B.C.E., Louvre Museum. Wikimedia adapted
The Tribe of Gad and The Mesha Stele
Published: July 1, 2013
|
Last Updated: September 7, 2026
See Mishnah Qiddushin 3:4, and Bavli Gittin 75a, among other sources.
For a discussion, see Jacob Milgrom’s commentary on Numbers in the JPS Torah Commentary, pp. 494-496.
Seminal in this regard was Fredrik Barth’s work, especially as presented in his 1969 edited volume, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference(Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1969). For a sophisticated discussion, see Andreas Wimmer, “The Making and Unmaking of Ethnic Boundaries: A Multilevel Process Theory,” American Journal of Sociology 113 (2008), 970-1022.
Bruce Routledge, Moab in the Iron Age: Hegemony, Polity, Archaeology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
On the archaeology of Madaba in these eras, see Timothy Harrison, “The Land of Medeba and Early Iron Age Madaba,” in Studies on Iron Age Moab and Neighbouring Areas in Honour of Michele Daviau (ed. Piotr Bienkowski; Leuven: Peeters, 2009), 27-45.
There are textual and interpretive problems with the last clause here that I am ignoring. See the articles by Aaron Schade and André Lemaire in the Israel Exploration Journal,volumes 55 and 57 (2005 and 2007), respectively.
