The House of David Inscription from Tel Dan

In July 1993 excavators at Tel Dan, the site of ancient Dan, found a broken piece of basalt with Aramaic writing built into a wall (Tel Dan Stele account of the find by Gila Cook, architect of the excavation). Two smaller pieces turned up the following June; the excavators’ reports are named in the note on dating. Together the pieces preserve parts of thirteen lines (Tel Dan Stele lines 1–13) of a royal victory stele, which is now in the Israel Museum (Tel Dan Stele Israel Museum record).

The speaker is a king whose name is lost. He says that the king of Israel had earlier entered his father’s land, that his father died, that the god Hadad made him king and went before him, and that he killed kings who had thousands of chariots and horsemen (Tel Dan Stele lines 2–7). Then come two names, both damaged. One ends in “-ram son of” and is followed, after a gap, by “king of Israel”. The other ends in “-iahu son of” and is followed, after a gap, by “of the House of David” (Tel Dan Stele lines 7–9).

On the usual arrangement of the fragments, the king of Israel can only be Joram son of Ahab, the one king of Israel whose name ends in this way. The king of Judah who died with him was Ahaziah son of Jehoram, and the second name is restored accordingly. Kings says that the two were together at Ramoth-gilead fighting Hazael of Damascus when Joram was wounded (2 Kings 8:28–29), and that Hazael afterwards took Israel’s land east of the Jordan (2 Kings 10:32–33). Hazael is therefore the likely author. One difficulty is that the speaker writes of “my father” as his predecessor, while an Assyrian inscription calls Hazael “son of a nobody” (Shalmaneser III, Annals RIAo 40, i 25–ii 6) and Kings makes him a court official who took the throne (2 Kings 8:7–15).

The stele and Kings disagree about the deaths. In Kings it is Jehu who shoots Joram and orders Ahaziah struck down (2 Kings 9:24–27); on the stele, as it is usually restored, the Aramean king claims both (Tel Dan Stele lines 7–9). The word “killed” survives before the second name; its subject, and the whole verb before the first name, are restored. Taken literally, the two accounts conflict. Kings itself links the two men, since Elijah is told to anoint both Hazael and Jehu as agents of the same judgment (1 Kings 19:15–17).

The words “House of David”, written on the stone as a single word, bytdwd, are what made the find famous. On the usual reading, a neighbouring king, about a century and a half after David, could name the kingdom of Judah after him, as Assyrian scribes named Israel after Omri. The inscription says nothing about David himself. It shows that his dynasty was known by his name, the “house” that Nathan’s oracle promises to him (2 Samuel 7:11–16). A similar reading has been proposed for a broken line of the Mesha Stele (Mesha Stele line 31), where it is far less certain; see Moab’s Revolt and the Mesha Stele.