Tel Dan Stele: the "House of David"

In July 1993, during Avraham Biran's excavations at Tel Dan, in the far north of Israel, surveyor Gila Cook noticed that a stone in a newly excavated wall had letters carved into it. It was a piece of a stele (commemorative stone) in Aramaic. In June 1994 two more fragments appeared. Biran and the epigrapher Joseph Naveh published the text in 1993 and 1995.

The one speaking in the inscription is a king of Aram-Damascus — almost all scholars think of Hazael. He recounts that he killed the king of Israel and the king of the "House of David" (in Aramaic, BYTDWD). Most read this as the campaign in which Jehoram of Israel and Ahaziah of Judah died. The Bible attributes these two deaths to Jehu (2 Kings 9); the stele attributes them to the Aramean king — an example of how an ancient victor told the story of war in his own favor.

Why it matters: for a long time there were those who said David was a legendary figure, invented centuries later. About 150 years after him, an enemy of Israel was already calling the dynasty of Judah by the name of David. The debate about the size of David's kingdom continues, but the existence of the "House of David" gained a witness from outside the Bible.