An Israeli archaeologist has discovered a fragment of a stone monument with inscriptions bearing the first known reference outside the Bible to King David and the ruling dynasty he founded, the House of David.
Scholars of biblical history say this is strong corroborating evidence for the existence and influence of the House of David in early Jewish history and in the traditions of both Judaism and Christianity. In their excitement, they are using words like “phenomenal,” “stunning” and “sensational” to emphasize the importance of the discovery in biblical archaeology.
The broken monument, or stele, was found in the ruins of a wall at Tel Dan, the site of an ancient city in northern Israel near the Syrian border and at one of the sources of the Jordan River. The discovery was made this summer by Dr. Avraham Biran, an archaeologist at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Jerusalem. Biran has been director of excavations at Tel Dan since 1966.
Biran says the stele is inscribed with 13 truncated lines of Aramaic text referring to the “House of David.” From the style of the script and its references to a “king of Israel” and a king of the House of David, the archaeologist surmises that this probably was a victory stele erected in the first quarter of the ninth century B.C. by the king of Damascus after he “smote Ijon, and Dan, and Abel-beth-maachah,” in the words from I Kings 15:20.
In that case, according to Biran’s interpretation, the “king of Israel” of the inscription may be identified with Baasha and the king of the “House of David” with Asa, a descendant of David who ruled as king of Judah. A split among the Israelites after the death of Solomon in the 10th century B.C. had led to the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah, centered at Jerusalem. As related in I Kings, when war broke out between the kingdoms, Asa secured an alliance with Ben-Hadad, king of Aram at Damascus in Syria, who defeated the forces of Baasha.
“There has never before been found a reference to the House of David other than in the Bible,” Biran says in a phone interview from Jerusalem.
Other scholars agree, and note that, for that matter, no reference to David himself has ever been found before in non-biblical texts. Indeed, as Dr. Jack M. Sasson, professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says, “no personality in the Bible has been confirmed by other sources until Ahab — not David or Abraham or Adam and Eve.”
King Ahab, husband of the notorious Jezebel, lived later in the ninth century B.C., dying in 897 B.C. David is supposed to have reigned from the year 1000 to 961.
Sasson cautions that the reference to the House of David does not necessarily prove the man existed. It could be, he says, that people who considered themselves his descendants had come to revere someone by that name who had been elevated to mythical standing. “Until you find a text actually written by David, people will wonder,” he says.
Nonetheless, Dr. Eric M. Meyers, a biblical archaeologist at Duke University, says: “It’s a stunning discovery. Publication of the text should really enlighten us on the ninth century B.C., which has been a kind of dark age in biblical history.”
Hershel Shanks, editor of Biblical Archaeology Review, says the findings provide evidence supporting accounts of the Jewish monarchies in I Kings and II Chronicles. “The stele brings to life the biblical text in a very dramatic way,” he says. “It also gives us more confidence in the historical reality of the biblical text — in a broad way, not necessarily in regard to each detail.”
Biran says photographs and transcriptions of the writing on the stele will not be released until a full report is ready for publication in The Israel Exploration Journal, scheduled in about two months. Dr. Joseph Naveh, an epigrapher of ancient Semitic languages at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is in charge of deciphering and analyzing the text.
Biran says the fragment perhaps represents only one-third of the stele, which he estimates to have been at least three feet high. Despite the many gaps in the Aramaic text, he says, “the writing is very clear, a joy to behold.”
Biran surmises that in a reversal of fortune, the kingdom of Israel defeated the Arameans in another war some 30 years after the erection of the stele at Dan. The victorious King Ahab apparently had Ben-Hadad’s old stele shattered. In time the fragments were used in the construction of the pavement and surrounding walls. Archaeologists are continuing the search, hoping to find the rest of the stele.
If Biran’s preliminary analysis is confirmed, Meyers says this would support biblical accounts of some of the political events after the tribes of Judah and Benjamin split off from the 10 other tribes of Israel to form the southern kingdom of Judah, ruled by successors of David. Modern Jews trace their lineage from this kingdom, and St. Luke states that Jesus was “of the house and lineage of David.”
The other tribes formed the kingdom of Israel in the north. Scholars do not know what happened to these tribes after the end of the eighth century B.C. At that time they were taken into exile by the Assyrians and became the “lost tribes of Israel” in legend and speculative history.
The stele text, Meyers says, appears to deal with the time when “the king of Judah, Asa, raided the temple treasury to pay off the king of Syria to beat up on the king of Israel.”
In I Kings, it is written that Asa “took all the silver and the gold that were left in the treasures of the house of the Lord” and delivered them to Ben-Hadad in Damascus as an inducement for him to break his treaty with Baasha, king of Israel, and help Asa defeat this rival king. The stele also makes important references to the Aramean god of storms and warfare, Hadad, and to chariots and horsemen presumably captured by Ben-Hadad from Baasha.
With this help, Asa enjoyed a long reign and died of a festering foot disease. In II Chronicles 16:12-13, it is written that “in his disease he sought not to the Lord, but to the physicians.” Thus, “Asa slept with his fathers, and died in the one and fortieth year of his reign.” He was succeeded by a son, Jehoshaphat.
