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, an archaeological site in Israel in the upper Galilee next to the Golan Heights. The site is quite securely identified with the biblical city of Dan, where an important Israelite shrine once stood, which was much criticized by the biblical writers as being an unauthorized place of sacrifice and the site of one of the infamous "golden calves" of the northern kingdom.

Fragment A of the stele was discovered in 1993, and fragments B1 and B2, which fit together, were discovered in 1994. The stele is thought to be no later than the eighth-century B.C.E. because it was found above a destruction layer caused by a well-documented Assyrian conquest in 733/732 B.C.E. This level destruction must have taken 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.

The "House of David"

Perhaps ironically, far less interest has been raised about the above-mentioned Syrian view of the deaths of Joram and Ahaziah that in the apparent mention in the Tel Dan Stele of the "House of David." The majority of archaeologists and epigraphers hold to the readings of both "Israel" and "House of David." However some 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. It is also argued that "of the house of David" does not prove the existence of an actual Davidic dynasty, only that the kings of Judah were known as belonging to such a "house."

In favor 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...: 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.'

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. 

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