Tel Dan Stele

The Tel Dan Stele

The Tel Dan Stele was a black basalt stele erected by an Aramaean (Syrian) king in northernmost Israel, containing an Aramaic inscription to commemorate his victory over the ancient Hebrews. Fragments of the stele were discovered at Tel Dan in 1993 and 1994.

Although the name of the author does not appear on the existing fragments, it is most likely a king of neighboring Aram Damascus, either Hazael or his son, Ben-Hadad III.

The inscription has been dated to the ninth or eighth centuries B.C.E. It has generated great interest because of its apparent reference to the "House of David," constituting the earliest known confirmation outside of the Bible of the Davidic dynasty.

Background

The stele was discovered at Tel Dan, previously named Tell el-Qadi, a mound where a city once stood at the northern tip of Israel. Fragment A was discovered in 1993, and fragments B1 and B2, which fit together, were discovered in 1994. The 8th-century limit is determined by a destruction layer caused by a well-documented Assyrian conquest in 733/732 B.C.E. Because that destruction layer was above the layer in which the stele fragments were found, it is clear that it took place after the stele had been erected, then broken into pieces which were later used in a construction project at Tel Dan, presumably by Hebrew builders. It is difficult to discern how long before that Assyrian conquest these earlier events took place.

The period of Aramean Supremacy and military conquest as depicted in the Tel Dan Stele against the Kingdoms of Judah and Israel was dated to ca. 841 - 798 B.C.E. in correspondence the beginning of the reign of Jehu, King of Israel (841-814 B.C.E.), until the end of the reign of Jehoahaz, King of Israel (814/813-798 B.C.E.). This also corresponds to the end of the reigns of both Achazyahu (Ahaziah), King of Judah of the House of David (843 - 842 B.C.E.) and the reign of Yoram (Joram), King of Israel (851 - 842 B.C.E.). This chronology was based on the posthumously published work of Yohanan Aharoni (Tel Aviv University) and Michael Avi-Yonah, in collaboration with Anson F. Rainey and Ze'ev Safrai. This dating of Aramean military supremacy over the Kingdoms of Judah and Israel was published in 1993 before the discovery of the Tel Dan Stele, thus, not reflecting any bias as to the dating of either the stele nor the Aramean conquest in the Southern Levant.

Attention is concentrated on the letters 'ביתדוCHANGE, which is identical to the Hebrew for "house of David," although another reading would be as a place name such as Bethdod (the BYT syllable meaning 'house' as in Bethlehem and the last syllable DWD meaning possible 'beloved', 'kettle', or 'uncle' being found in Ashdod .

If the reading is correct, it is the first time that the name "David" has been recognized at any archaeological site. Like the Mesha stele, the Tel Dan Stele seems typical of a memorial intended as a sort of military propaganda, which boasts of Hazael's or his son's victories. (Some epigraphers think that the phrase "house of David" also appears in a partly broken line in the Mesha Stele.)

The stele's account

A line by line translation by André Lemaire is as follows (with text missing from the stele, or too damaged by erosion to be legible, represented by "[.....]"):

1. [.....................].......[...................................] and cut [.........................]
2. [.........] my father went up [....................f]ighting at/against Ab[....]
3. And my father lay down; he went to his [fathers]. And the king of I[s-]
4. rael penetrated into my father's land[. And] Hadad made me—myself—king.
5. And Hadad went in front of me[, and] I departed from ...........[.................]
6. of my kings. And I killed two [power]ful kin[gs], who harnessed two thou[sand cha-]
7. riots and two thousand horsemen. [I killed Jo]ram son of [Ahab]
8. king of Israel, and I killed [Achaz]yahu son of [Joram kin]g
9. of the House of David. And I set [.......................................................]
10. their land ...[.......................................................................................]
11. other ...[......................................................................... and Jehu ru-]
12. led over Is[rael...................................................................................]
13. siege upon [............................................................]

Biblical parallels

The writings may coincide with certain events recorded in the Old Testament, though the poor state of preservation of the fragments has engendered much contention on this issue. In the Bible, 2 Kings 8:7-15 tells how the Israelite prophet Elisha appointed Hazael to become king of Syria in order to punish Israel for her sins. While war raged between Syria on one side and the combined forces of Israel and Judah on the other, present Syrian king, Ben-Hadad, lay ill in Damascus. He sent Hazael with a generous gift to Elisha:

Hazael went to meet Elisha, taking with him as a gift forty camel-loads of all the finest wares of Damascus. He went in and stood before him, and said, "Your son Ben-Hadad king of Aram has sent me to ask, 'Will I recover from this illness?'" Elisha answered, "Go and say to him, 'You will certainly recover'; but the Lord has revealed to me that he will in fact die."

Elisha then prophesied that Hazael himself would become king and wreak havoc against Israel, predicting that "You will set fire to their fortified places, kill their young men with the sword, dash their little children to the ground, and rip open their pregnant women." Hazael returned to Ben-Hadad and reported: "He told me that you would certainly recover." The next day, however, he murdered Hazael by suffocating him and succeeded him as king.

Elisha soon appointed the Israelite commander Jehu to usurp the throne in the northern capital of Samaria. Jehu immediately complied, killing both Joram of Israel and his ally, Ahaziah of Judah, in the process (2 Kings 8:28 and 2 Kings 9:15-28).

Jehu is hailed by the biblical writers as a champion of God who destroyed the Temple of Baal in Samaria and did away with the descendants of King Ahab—including Joram, his mother Jezebel, and 60 of his kinsmen. However, the Tel Dan Stele appears to put events in a very different light, with Hazael himself claiming credit for the deaths of Joram and Ahaziah. If the claim is accurate, it raises the possibility that Hazael saw Elisha and Jehu as his agents in organizing the coup against the House of Ahab, in which both Joram and Ahaziah were killed.

Dispute over the phrase "House of David"

Because it mentions both "Israel" and the "House of David," the Tel Dan Stele is often quoted as supporting evidence for the Bible account. However, this reading has been criticized. Although the overwhelming majority of archaeologists and epigraphers hold to the readings "Israel" and "House of David," a small number of Biblical scholars object to this reading on literary grounds.

The critics have suggested other readings of ביתדוד, usually based on the fact that the written form "DWD" can be rendered both as David and as Dod (Hebrew for "beloved") or related forms.

In ancient Hebrew, to separate words, a word divider represented by a dot would be placed between the letters. For example, the phrase "House of David" would be written as בית•דוד. However, in the Aramaic Tel Dan Stele we find the phrase ביתדוד, which does not have a word divider. Anson Rainey, defending the reading of "House of David," writes that "a word divider between two components in such a construction is often omitted, especially if the combination is a well-established proper name." Gary Rendsburg provides additional evidence for Rainey's point and points out that the phrase Bit + X is the Aramaean, Assyrian, and Babylonian way of referring to an Aramaean state. (Note: in this pattern, Bit is equivalent to BYT, "house of," and X is usually the name of the person who was regarded as the founder of a dynasty.) Rendsburg adds, "One might even venture that the Assyrian designation Bit-Humri "house of Omri" for the kingdom of Israel reached Assyrian scribes through Aramaean mediation." (Omri was a king of Israel who reigned 844-873 B.C.E. and founded a dynasty that ruled it through the reigns of four kings. During their reigns, Israel came into military conflict with Assyria. Assyrian records mention King Ahab, Omri's son, as "Ahab the Israelite" who fought against Assyria.)

On this subject, Philip Davies writes:

But let’s leave this wishful thinking and return to the critical six letters, BYTDWD, to see what they really might mean. Admittedly there are two verbal elements here, of which the first is beth, house. But the probability is that the second element completes a place-name, such as Beth Lehem (House of Bread) or Bethlehem (one word), as it is commonly written in Latin letters. It seems intrinsically more likely that a place-name composed with beth would be written as one word, rather than a phrase meaning “House of David,” referring to the dynasty of David. Such a place name could be Beth-dod (the w serving as rudimentary vowel, a so-called mater lectionis; the same last three letters are consistently used to spell the last syllable of the Philistine city of Ashdod) or Bethdaud (with a slightly different vowel pronunciation). All these place-names are quite reasonable suggestions...There are other possibilities...For example, in a contemporaneous inscription, the famous Mesha stele or Moabite stone,c the phrase ’R’L DWDH (‏אראל דודה‎) appears. The second word remains somewhat of a puzzle. Some scholars, though a minority, translate it “David” and regard it as the name of the founder of the ruling dynasty of Judah...But the final heh makes this meaning unlikely. The noun dawidum is also found in a cuneiform text from Mari (18th century B.C.E.), offering another possible clue, though the meaning of this term remains unclear. In the Bible DWD can mean “beloved” or “uncle,” and in one place (1 Samuel 2:14), it means “kettle.” So a number of ways of understanding DWD present themselves, most of them more plausible than translating “David.”

George Athas proposes that the three extant fragments of the inscription have been placed in a wrong configuration (for the popular configuration, see the figure above). He argues that Fragment A (the largest) should be placed well above Fragments B1 and B2 (which fit together). He also suggests that ביתדוד is actually a reference to Jerusalem, arguing that it is the Aramaic equivalent of "City of David." He also provides evidence for the authenticity of the fragments (called into question by some, such as Russell Gmirkin), and downdates the inscription, proposing that the author is not Hazael, as is popularly touted, but rather his son Bar Hadad.

It has been argued by Thomas L. Thompson that, even if it could be shown that the terms "of the house of David" and "of the house of Omri" were used to describe the kings of Judah and Israel at that time, we should not conclude that they saw David and Omri as recent ancestors who had founded dynasties in the modern sense, other interpretations of the term "house of" in this context are possible.

Conservative scholars object to these reinterpretations, often noting that they are suggested by Biblical scholars who have no formal qualifications in the relevant fields. In favor of the reading 'House of David', archaeologist Kenneth Kitchen writes in response to the contrary views of Thomas L. Thompson:

'(i) The name "David" may be unusual, but is not unparalleled. Long centuries before, it was borne by a West Semitic chief carpenter in about 1730 B.C.E. on an Egyptian stela formerly in the collection at Rio de Janeiro. (ii) Dwd is neither the name (which Thompson admits) nor an epithet of a deity. Others are beloved of deities (for which references are legion!), but male deities are not beloved of others, human or divine (only goddesses are beloved of their divine husbands in Egypt). (iii) Mesha's stela is ninth, not eighth, century. (iv) On Mesha's stela dwd(h) is not a divine epithet of YHWH or anyone else.' '(v) Contrary to TLT, "House of X" does mean a dynastic founder, all over the Near East, in the first half of the first millennium B.C.E.; it was an Aramean usage that passed into Assyrian nomenclature, and examples are common. (vi) Again, the expression, in part of its usage, is like the British "House of Stuart," etc. Such usages were not peculiar to Aram, Assyria, and Judah either: in Egypt, the official title given to the Twelfth Dynasty (Turin Canon) was "Kings of the House (lit. 'Residence') of Ithet-Tawy" = 'the Dynasty of Ithet-Tawy." And the Thirteenth Dynasty was duly entitled "Kings who came after the [House of] King Sehetepibre" (founder of the Twelfth Dynasty). (vii) The charge of forgery is a baseless slur against the Dan expedition, without a particle of foundation in fact.'

Also in favour of the reading 'House of David', archaeologist William Dever writes:

'On the "positivist" side of the controversy, regarding the authenticity of the inscription, we now have published opinions by most of the world's leading epigraphers (none of whom is a "biblicist" in Thompson's sense): the inscription means exactly what it says. On the "negativist" side, we have the opinions of Thompson, Lemche, and Cryer of the Copenhagen School. The reader may choose.'

A minority view is that DWD is the Hebrew rendering of Thoth (pronounced, according to the Ancient Greeks, as Toot - as in Tutmose), thus the expression might refer to a temple of Thoth. The Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen points out that there is no known temple of Thoth in the area. Others believe that ביתדוד refers to an unknown geographic location.

See also

Template:ANE portal

• David, the section on "Historicity of David"
• Mesha Stele
• Jewish history

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

In chronological order:

• Biran, Avraham and Naveh, Joseph (1993). An Aramaic Stele Fragment from Tel Dan. Israel Exploration Journal 43: 81–98.
• Biran, Avraham and Naveh, Joseph (1995). The Tel Dan Inscription: A New Fragment. Israel Exploration Journal 45: 1–18.
• Rainey, Anson F. (1994). The 'House of David' and the House of the Deconstructionists. Biblical Archaeological Review 20 (6): 47.
• Rendsburg, Gary A. (1995). On the Writing ביתדוד in the Aramaic Inscription from Tel Dan. Israel Exploration Journal 45: 22–25.
• Thompson, Thomas L. (1999). Bible and History: How Writers Create a Past. ISBN 0465006221. 
• Schniedewind, William M. and Zuckerman, Bruce (2001). A Possible Reconstruction of the Name of Hazael's Father in the Tel Dan Inscription. Israel Exploration Journal 51: 88–91.
• Gmirkin, Russell (2002). Tools, Slippage, and the Tel Dan Inscription. Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 16 (2).
• Athas, George (2003). The Tel Dan Inscription: A Reappaisal and a New Interpretation, JSOTSupp 360; CIS 12. Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press. ISBN 0567040437. 
• Mykytiuk, Lawrence J. (2004). Identifying Biblical Persons in Northwest Semitic Inscriptions of 1200-539 B.C.E., SBL Academia Biblica series. Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 110–132, 277. ISBN 1589830628. 

Credits

New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here:

• Tel Dan Stele  ^history

The history of this article since it was imported to New World Encyclopedia:

• History of "Tel Dan Stele"

Note: Some restrictions may apply to use of individual images which are separately licensed.