the ninth-century BCE king of Moab mentioned in 2 Kings 3:4. After its discovery in 1868 by the Alsatian priest F. A. Klein, the stone was shattered by the local Bedouin, but in subsequent years approximately two-thirds of the fragments were recovered by the French orientalist C. Clermont-Ganneau, who, with the help of an impression taken before the stone was broken, was able to reconstruct the monument, which is now in the Louvre. Because its language is closely related to biblical Hebrew and its