| Moabite | |
|---|---|
| Region | Formerly spoken in northwestern Jordan |
| Era | early half of 1st millennium BC[1] |
| Phoenician alphabet | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | obm |
obm | |
| Glottolog | moab1234 |
The Moabite language, also known as the Moabite dialect, is an extinct sub-language or dialect of the Canaanite languages, themselves a branch of Northwest Semitic languages, formerly spoken in the region described in the Bible as Moab (modern day central-western Jordan) in the early 1st millennium BC.
The body of Canaanite epigraphy found in the region is described as Moabite; this is a very small corpus limited primarily to the Mesha Stele and a few seals.[2]
Moabite, together with the similarly poorly-attested Ammonite and Edomite, belonged to the dialect continuum of the Canaanite group of northwest Semitic languages, together with Hebrew and Phoenician.[3]
The major problem with the study of the Moabite language is the lack of material upon which to base a study. We are fortunate to have a major inscription in the Mesha Stone . This is a basalt stele found in Diban, Transjordan, dating from sometime after 850 BC, set up by Mesha, king of Moab, to celebrate his victory over Israel. Apart from this text, however, we have only two other fragmentary ninth century inscriptions, with various seals to represent later Moabite. The better preserved of these two inscriptions seems to be a fragment of another inscription by Mesha… the second preserves only a few letters which can be made into a couple of conjectured words…. our knowledge of the grammar and other linguistic features of Moabite is dependent almost completely on one inscription alone.