“In 1992, French scholar André Lemaire proposed the
following translation:
[Mesha Stele] “[to herd] the small cattle of the
land, and Horonen,
in it dwelt the house of [D]avid ….”. This
was a year before the Tel Dan discovery.
But the phrase turned out to be in similar form—in
this case,
missing the initial “d”.”
January 28, 2021
Christopher Eames wrote:
The Three ‘David’ Inscriptions | ArmstrongInstitute.org
The Three ‘David’ Inscriptions
Chances are you’ve heard of the famous one from Tel Dan—here are two
more.
Closeup of the Tel Dan Stele (cropped)
In 1993, the discovery of an inscription in northern
Israel rocked the archaeological world. Contained within the
ninth-century b.c.e. script was the following word: ביתדוד, bytdwd, translated as “House of David.”
This inscription was revolutionary. To that point, no
archaeological evidence was confirmed as mentioning the name of
Israel’s most famous king, David. As such, numerous minimalist scholarly works
relegated him to mere myth. Finally, here was an inscription that not only
named the king, but identified him as the head of a royal dynasty.
Of course, advocates of the David-myth theory would not let this one
through easily.
Initially only the larger of the now-three pieces was discovered—thus,
lacking more general context, there was some dismissal that the word could
refer to something else. The discovery of a second fragment added more context,
as seen below:
קתלת.אית.יהו]רם.בר.[אחאב].מלך.ישראל.וקתל[ת.אית.אחז]יהו.בר.[יהורם.מל]ך.ביתדוד
… [killed Jeho]ram son of [Ahab] king of Israel and kille[d Ahaz]iah son
of [Jehoram kin]g of the House of David …
With this side-by-side listing of the kings of Israel and Judah, it
became clear that bytdwd as “House of David,” a Judahite title
used 26 times in the Hebrew Bible, was indeed the correct interpretation.
The wider inscription, describing the deaths of kings Jehoram of Israel
and Ahaziah of Judah during battle against Hazael, fits alongside the account
in 2 Kings 9.
Really, though, the details of the inscription are overshadowed by the
single line, “House of David.”
Chances are, if you’ve followed biblical archaeology to any degree,
you’ll have heard of this Tel Dan Stele. But did you know that there are two
others?
The Mesha Stele
The Tel Dan inscription was a broken chunk of a Syrian victory stele.
The Mesha Stele is a Moabite victory stele, belonging to King Mesha and
fitting alongside the biblical account in 2 Kings 3. As such, this would be a
slightly earlier reference to King David—c. 850 b.c.e.
This fantastic, largely complete inscription, which had been found in
Jordan by local Bedouin, became known to French archaeologist Charles
Clermont-Ganneau in 1868.
In 1869, Arab intermediaries were sent to the camp in order to make a
“squeeze,” a papier-mâché, schematic copy of the impression. Some time after
this, the stele was smashed in pieces by the tribes people and distributed
among themselves—probably in order to make money off the separate pieces. Large
chunks have since been acquired and fitted together—and thanks to
Clermont-Ganneau’s “squeeze” while it was still in one piece, the majority of
the stele was able to be reconstructed.
It currently sits in the Louvre museum, in Paris.
Still, about 30 percent of the text remains obscure, with the lowest
lines difficult to read. In 1992, French scholar André Lemaire proposed the
following translation: “[to herd] the small cattle of the land, and Horonen, in
it dwelt the house of [D]avid ….”
This was a year before the Tel Dan discovery. But the phrase turned out
to be in similar form—in this case, missing the initial “d.”
The identification would be a good fit. After all, the upper section of
the stele references the territory of northern Moab; the southern portion,
including Horonen (the biblical Horonaim) could easily relate to control by
Judah, the “House of David.” There even appears to be some connection between
Horonen and David’s reign, as related in 2 Samuel 13:34 (note the Septuagint
version). And to Lemaire, any other reading proved an awkward fit. Still,
alternate theories have been put forward, including putting an additional
letter at the end of “David,” dwdh, thus turning the name into
“Daodoh.” (In Hebrew, the letter “w” can represent either the sound of “o” or
“v.”)
In 2019 Prof. Israel Finkelstein, together with Nadav Na’aman and Thomas
Römer, completed a paper utilizing new photo analysis of the Mesha Stele
squeeze, claiming that the preserved text could not be confirmed as reading
“House of David” after all, but that only the “b” was clear as the ruler of
Horonaim. Further, they stated that space allowed for only three letters,
thanks to what they identified as a dividing line in the text—thus proposing
the Moabite name “Balak,” as a centuries-old memory of the Exodus figure. (Finkelstein is famous in the
archaeological community for his theories dismissing David’s reign.)
Immediately following their release, a response was given by Associate
Prof. Michael Langlois, whose own research was about to be published. Langlois
has spent years poring over the Mesha Stele, utilizing his own new
3d digital imaging of the artifact. With this technology, Langlois was
able to identify a previously unnoticed punctuation mark in the stele, fitting
squarely with Lemaire’s original translation.
He also pointed out that there was no evidence for a dividing line in
the text—thus dismissing the above theory, and stating that “the space [for
“House of David”] is exactly perfect—no more, and no less.” (You can read more
details about the back-and-forth in Amanda Borschel-Dan’s Times of
Israel article here.)
With this most recent research, Langlois thus confirmed with about as
much certainty as is possible that the original proposal, “House of David,” was
indeed the correct reading.
For more about King Mesha, see my (Damien Mackey’s) articles:
Mesha of
Moab in the Bible
(9) Mesha of Moab in the Bible
King
Mesha of Moab builds city of Jericho
(9) King Mesha of Moab builds
city of Jericho
Unwrapping
“Hiel of Bethel”
(9) Unwrapping "Hiel of
Bethel"
Christopher Eames continues:
The Karnak Inscription
The above inscriptions apply to the middle-ninth century b.c.e.,
dating just over a century after David’s death.
This inscription would be the earliest inscription of the lot, dating to
the end of the 10th century b.c.e.—the same century in which David ruled,
according to biblical chronology (although he died during the first half of
that century).
Damien Mackey’s comment: Pharaoh Shoshenq, here, is commonly considered (since Champollion) to
have been the biblical “Shishak king of Egypt” at the time of Solomon’s son, Rehoboam
(I Kings 14:25).
I, along with other revisionists, would reject that identification,
having Shoshenq at a later period.
Christopher Eames continues:
This Egyptian inscription was highlighted some two decades
ago by the famous Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen. Part of Pharaoh
Sheshonq i’s famous Karnak temple records a lengthy list of places he
conquered within Israel and Judah (fitting alongside the accounts in 1 Kings 14
and 2 Chronicles 12 [sic]). Many of the names are eroded or destroyed. One,
however, apparently relating to a group of areas in the Negev/southern region
of Judah, is transliterated as: h[y]dbt dwt—translated by Kitchen
as “Heights of David.”
Olaf
Tausch | Wikimedia Commons
The first Egyptian word indicates heights, or highlands, fitting with
this area of Judah. The second word is slightly more problematic—the first two
letters matching the Hebrew dwd for David—but the “t” is
different.
Here again, Kitchen could see no other known option that could fit: “It
could not really be Dothan [probably the closest-spelled alternate]—no final
‘n,’ and in entirely the wrong context for a north Palestinian settlement” (On
the Reliability of the Old Testament, Page 93). Even at face value,
though, the “t” sound in Egyptian hieroglyphs is no great problem—“d” and “t”
are similar dental consonants that readily change across cultures. (For
example, our English “day” is directly related to the German tag.)
And as Kitchen points out, the name Davit for David in
Egyptian could be expected:
[I]n an Ethiopic victory inscription of the early sixth
century a.d. in southwest Arabia, the emperor of Axum cited
explicitly passages from the “Psalms of Dawit,” exactly the consonants Dwt as
found with Shoshenq (ibid).
This shows a use of a name-type that would fit the region: Ethiopia was
long intertwined with ancient Egypt and ruled over it for a time.
Kitchen continues to cite other examples of the interchangeable Egypt
“t” during the period—for example, Megiddo and Damascus are
spelled by the Egyptians with a t. As Kitchen concludes:
This would give us a place-name that commemorated David in the Negev
barely 50 years after his death [sic], within living memory of the man. The
Negev was an area where David had been prominent in Saul’s time (1 Sam. 24:1;
27; 30). His name being in such a place-name is analogous with the “field of
Abram,” also in Shoshenq’s list (ibid).
With the Karnak inscription and Mesha Stele, we have a total of three
“David” inscriptions—part of a now almost rapidly-growing body of evidence for
the king. The question is no longer if David existed, but just
how powerful he was. ….
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