The Merneptah Stele: The Oldest Written Record of the Name 'Israel'

In 1896, Flinders Petrie’s excavation team was clearing the first courtyard of Merneptah’s mortuary temple at Thebes when they uncovered a massive black granite slab standing more than ten feet (over three meters) tall. The stone wasn’t new. It had originally been carved and erected by Amenhotep III generations earlier; Merneptah’s craftsmen flipped it around and inscribed their own pharaoh’s victory hymn on the back. Near the end of that twenty-eight-line hymn, one name stood out — a name that, as far as anyone could tell, had never appeared in any text outside the Hebrew Bible: Israel.

What the Text Says

Line 27 of the inscription lists a string of military conquests in Canaan: “Canaan is plundered with every evil; Ashkelon is carried off; Gezer is captured; Yano’am is made non-existent; Israel is laid waste, his seed is not.” Egyptologists date the campaign — and the inscription — to around 1208 BCE, Merneptah’s fifth regnal year. That makes it the oldest surviving reference to Israel from any source outside the biblical text.

One Hieroglyph That Sparked a Decades-Long Debate

Egyptian hieroglyphic writing attaches a “determinative” sign after a noun to signal what kind of thing it is. In this inscription, Canaan, Ashkelon, Gezer, and Yano’am are each marked with the determinative for a city or territory — a throw stick plus three hill signs. Israel gets a different one: a seated man and woman over three plural strokes, the sign Egyptian scribes normally used for a people rather than a place.

Egyptologist Michael G. Hasel built a close argument around that distinction, concluding that “Israel functioned as an agriculturally based or sedentary socioethnic entity” in the late thirteenth century BCE (Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 296 [1994]: 45–61). Kenneth A. Kitchen reached a similar verdict: “The Israel of Merenptah’s stela was, by its perfectly clear determinative, a people (= tribal) grouping, not a territory or city-state” (On the Reliability of the Old Testament, Eerdmans, 2003). Other scholars urge caution, though — the stele’s scribes were not perfectly consistent in their use of determinatives elsewhere in the text, so the sign alone shouldn’t be asked to carry more weight than it can bear.

The Merneptah Stele, c. 1208 BCE, granite · Egyptian Museum, Cairo (JE 31408) · Photo by Olaf Tausch, CC BY 3.0.

What It Proves — and What It Doesn’t

Before 1896, no text outside the Bible mentioned Israel by name. That silence gave real traction to minimalist arguments that early Israel was a later literary construction with little historical grounding. The Merneptah Stele closed that gap, at least partially: it shows that by the end of the thirteenth century BCE, Egyptian scribes recognized a group in Canaan that they called Israel and considered worth boasting about defeating. A pharaoh commemorating his own military triumphs had no reason to invent an enemy’s name.

What the stele does not do is equally important to say plainly. It doesn’t narrate the exodus, describe a conquest, or corroborate any specific episode from Joshua or Judges. It doesn’t say where exactly this “Israel” was located — most scholars place it somewhere in the central hill country, but the text itself is silent on that point — or how large or organized the group was. As Larry D. Bruce notes, what the inscription establishes is that “an entity by the name of Israel existed in Canaan” by the late thirteenth century BCE — a fact, not a narrative (Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 62.3 [2019]: 463–493).

A pharaoh’s boast, carved to celebrate an enemy’s destruction, turned out to be the oldest surviving evidence that the enemy’s name was real. It’s the same irony found in the Tel Dan Stele’s “House of David” three centuries later — a victory monument written by outsiders became, against its own intent, a witness for the people it meant to erase.

The original stele remains on display at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

References

• Michael G. Hasel, “Israel in the Merneptah Stela,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 296 (1994): 45–61
• Kenneth A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003)
• Larry D. Bruce, “The Merenptah Stele and the Biblical Origins of Israel,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 62.3 (2019): 463–493

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