968 REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1896. 



yourselves treasures upon etirth, wbere motb and rust dotli consume 

 * * * vi u Youi riches are corrupted, and your garments are 

 motlieaten." 2 "Whose foundation is in the dust, which are crushed 

 before the moth," and "He buildeth his house as the moth."^ It is 

 quite plain that at least in most of the passages the Tineidae, or clothes 

 moths, are referred to. 



PALESTINIAN ANTIQUITIES. 



The next group consisted of a selection of objects from the antiquities 

 and art of the peO})les who were connected with the history told in the 

 Scriptures. They were put on exhibition for the purpose of enabling 

 the student or visitor to place himself in the position of one who lived 

 in the times and the lands in which the books of the Bible were 

 composed. 



Of monuments and relics found in Palestine itself, the following were 

 shown : 



Cast of the Moabite stone. — In II Kings iii it is related that 

 Mesha, the king of Moab, paid tribute to the kings of Israel, but that 

 after the death of Ahab ho rebelled. Thereupon Ahab's son, Joram, 

 allied with Jehoshaphat, king of Judah, invaded Moab and shut up 

 Mesha in Kir-Hareseth, situated a little to the east of the southern end 

 of the Dead Sea. Mesha, in this emergency, ottered his first born son 

 as a sacrifice, in the presence of the invading army, to Ohemosh, the 

 principal divinity of the Moabites; whereupon the Israelites withdrew. 

 Tiuis far the Biblical account. 



In 1868 the Eev. A. F. Klein, a German missionary, discovered at 

 Dhiban, the ruins of Dibon, the ancient capital of Moab,^ a stone or stela 

 with an inscription celebrating the achievements of Mesha. It was of 

 dark blue basalt, 3 feet 8i inches high, 2 feet 3^ inches wide, and 1 foot 

 1.78 inches thick, rounded at both ends and inscribed with thirty-four 

 lines. The stone was in possession of the Beni Humaydah, a wild 

 Arab tribe east of the Jordan. The Arabs, considering the stone so 

 eagerly sought after by Europeans to be possessed of supernatural 

 power, lit a fire under it and then threw cold water upon it, breaking 

 it into fragments, which were distributed as charms among the diflerent 

 families of the tribe. M. Clermont G-anneau, at that time chancellor of 

 the French consulate, had, previous to the breaking of the stone, been 

 so fortunate as to obtain a paper impression of the entire inscription. 

 Afterwards by careful work he succeeded in collecting most of the 

 fragments, so that six-sevenths of the inscription has been preserved 

 and two-thirds of the stone itself is now in the Louvre at Paris. 



In the inscri])tion Mesha relates that Omri and Ahab had oppressed 

 the land of Moab for many years, until he recovered several cities from 



1 James v, 2. s Jq^ xxvii, 18. 



* Job iv, 18, 19. 4 Numbers xxi, 30; xxxii, 34; Isaiah xv, 2. 



