Journal for the Study of

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Did Biran Kill David? the Bible in the Light of Archaeology

Niels Peter Lemche and Thomas L. Thompson
Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 1994 19: 3
DOI: 10.1177/030908929401906401

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DID BIRAN KILL DAVID?

THE BIBLE IN THE LIGHT OF ARCHAEOLOGY

Niels Peter Lemche and Thomas L. Thompson

University of Copenhagen

For at least twenty years it has been a maxim of critical historical

research into the ancient Near East that one first examines data (and
conclusions drawn from them) from various sources and disciplines,
such as archaeology, chronology, palaeography and biblical exegesis,
independently from each other (to the extent that that is possible). Only
then does one legitimately attempt a synthetic or historical interpretation
and reconstruction.’ It is also a maxim of equal vintage and importance
that the compounding of ’if’ clauses in the development of an inter-
pretation makes a suggestion less likely rather than more probable, and
that this diminishment of probability is geometrically cumulative.
Historical probability is based on evidence from specific circumstances,
in principle falsifiable, and not on the basis of rationalistic originating
scenarios based on principles of non-falsifiability .2 A blatant disregard-
maybe systemic-of such important historical maxims has become so
apparent in a number of recent articles on the bytdwd inscription that
one must see this as a return to some of the worst abuses of the biblical

archaeological movement of the 1930s-1960s.

The new and already famous bytdwd inscription from Tel Dan was

1. T.L. Thompson, The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives (BZAW, 133;

Berlin: de Gruyter, 1974), p. 57; N.P. Lemche, Early Israel (Leiden: Brill, 1985),
pp. 386-92.
2. K. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Hodgeson, 1959)
= Die Logik der Forschung [Vienna: Springer, 1934]); Thompson, Historicity,
(
pp. 1-9; Lemche, Early Israel, pp. 407-10; F.H. Cryer, Divination in Ancient Israel
and its Near Eastern Environment: A Socio-Historical Investigation (JSOTSup, 142;
Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1994), pp. 38-39.

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4

found by the Israeli archeologist Avraham Biran on 21 July 1993. From

the outset, this inscription was hailed as the final and decisive proof that
David had been in fact an historical person. The ’negative’ historians-
the ’minimalists’ as we are often called-were far off the mark. Thanks
to this inscription-or at least this fragment of an inscription, biblical
archaeology could begin again the project of recreating Bible history,
after nearly a generation of skepticism. Or, so at least a visitor to the
1993 Society of Biblical Literature meeting in Washington might suppose.
One had not seen such euphoria or hope in a revival of good-old-
fashioned biblical archaeology since the discovery of Genesis 14’s first
draft at Early Bronze Ebla, when David Noel Freedman barnstormed
the American academy.’

3. In the Biblical Archaeology Review (’The "House of David" and the House
of the Deconstructionists’, BARev 20.6 [1994], p. 47) Anson F. Rainey has published
an unsolicited attack on Philip Davies (cf. P.R. Davies, ’House of David Built on

Sand’, BARev 20.4 [1994]). Rainey’s language is untruthful and approaches the
libellous. It is also so filled with misreadings that we need hardly discuss his
contribution to any great extent. However, we would ask Rainey to study the literature
mentioned here before he again addresses issues of which he is seemingly unaware.
Only a few remarks are needed to expose Rainey’s argument. The missing
word-divider: here Rainey writes, ’they took for granted that readers would know that
a word divider between two components in such a construction is often omitted,

especially if the combination is a well-established proper name’. Had Rainey been

truly informed and had he read Fred Cryer’s contribution to this topic (F.H. Cryer,
’On the Recently-Discovered "House of David" Inscription’, SJOT 8 [1994], pp. 1-
19), he would have been aware that this is exactly the issue argued by Cryer, namely,
that Bytdwd of the inscription is not a dynastic title. Rather, it is a proper name, either
of a person or of a place. Since no person carries a PN that includes byt, it is quite
obvious that bytdwd is the name of a locality. E.A. Knauf, A. de Pury and T. Römer
have demonstrated (’ Baytdawid ou Baytdod
?’ BN 72 [1994], pp. 60-69) that no such
compound as the one proposed by Biran and Naveh exists in the ANE literature.
Rainey is arguing one thing and at the same drawing conlcusions that have nothing to
do with his argument. Rainey’s introduction of the Deir ’Alla inscription is also
revealing of Rainey’s biases: Brb’r is correctly written without a word divider as he
points out, but this is unimportant. Not only is br ’son’ not the same as byt ’house’,
but names that begin with bt are not identical in form to Aramaic names that begin
with br, as even Rainey should know. Similarly, Rainey’s argument would work only
if the dwd element were a place name. Rainey mixes basic logical categories which
sound philology does not and cannot mix. As regards epigraphy, Cryer’s argument
was that Biran may not know—certainly Rainey does not know—but Naveh should

have known: the letter by letter epigraphic markers point to a date of the inscription
some 150 years later than Biran’s ill-founded
dating. The insulting final part of

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 5

A lot of bad things have been said, and can be said and will be said
about Biran and his whereabouts on and after 21 July. However, he
deserves everlasting praise for publishing the inscription so quickly and
so effectively. The archaeologist and the epigrapher involved in this new

discovery at Tel Dan both have well understood their responsibility to

the world and have lived up to it. In less than half a year of its discovery,
the international scholarly community was in possession of an edition of
the inscription as good as any edition can be-in the shape of an article
in the Israel Exploration Journal, published in November 1993.4 This
article provided us with an archaeological report of the find, a trans-
cription and a clear picture of the inscription, along with a hand-drawn
copy and a translation with philological commentary. The final part of
the article, devoted to a discussion of its content and significance, was
nevertheless premature and might better have been left to subsequent
discussions. It distorted what could have been a discussion of the
inscription and its significance for the early history of the South Levant
into an appeal for a fundamentalistic reading of the Bible. Because of the
tendentiousness of this first reading we have been forced to deal
with the historicity of biblical stories that the excavator himself is aware
are far removed both chronologically and geographically from the

inscription he found.
This unfortunate situation was hardly helped by Biran’s decision to
publish other aspects of this argument related to the inscription not in
the academic press but by way of the popular media, particularly
through an article written by the editor of the sensationalistic Biblical
Archaeology Review.’ But the fate of the Tel Dan inscription was nearly
sealed when the scholarly journals Israel Exploration Journal and Revue
Biblique published articles supporting this ’new’ biblical archaeology.
Shmuel Ahituv, in a brief 500 word note,’ first supplies us with an
answer to the missing divider of the crucial word bytdwd and

immediately ...k bytdwd becomes ’a king of byt dwd, the House of

David’, that is, the kingdom of Judah, without a word of discussion.
Then, again without argument or discussion, he quickly offers an

Rainey’s rambling remarks must be disregarded by any informed scholar on this issue.
4. A. Biran and J. Naveh, ’An Aramaic Stele Fragment from Tel Dan’, IEJ 43
(1993), pp. 81-98.
5. H. Shanks, ’David Found at Dan’, BARev 20.2 (1994), pp. 26-39.
6. S. Ahituv, ’Suzerain or Vassal? Notes on the Aramaic Inscription from Tel
Dan’, IEJ
43 (1993), pp. 246-47.

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alternative to the identity of the word hdd of line 5, not with Naveh as
the Assyrian deity Hadad but as the Aramaean king Ben-Hadad II. This
seems ’natural’ to Ahituv because he wishes to connect the stele with
the story in 1 Kings 22.’ Finally, Ahituv tries to buttress the historicity of
1 Kings 20.34.~ Here, on the basis of just three letters (mr. ’) he
reconstructs: wy’mr. ‘mri so that he can place two biblical characters,
Omri and Ben-Hadad II, at the scene of the battle!
This return to the worst excesses of the Albright era is furthered in a
note written by Zecharia Kallai.9 Kallai draws ’historical’ conclusions:
correctly, that a significant value of the stele is in its reference to the
king of Israel, confirming the Mesha stele in its use of this general
appelative. He then, however, asserts that not only does the text refer to
Judah as ’dynasty of David’, but sees the text implying that this dynasty,
in contrast to that of the unstable Omride dynasty of Israel, was recogni-
zed-in accordance with the biblical view-as ’well established’. He
does not observe that in his recreation of the inscription both ’Aram’s’
and Israel’s kings are named (’Ben-Hadad II’ and ’Omri’, respectively)
while the ‘well established’ Judaean king is not.’°
In these articles commenting on and adding to the original inter-
pretation of the stele’s inscription, standards of scholarship hardly
exceed those of BARev. Nevertheless, the most creative effort so far is
unquestionably that of Emile Puech.&dquo; Here is a very learned example of
how not to proceed with inscriptions. In Puech’s Tel Dan stele, we find
the text augmented some 200%. This is hardly reconstruction but
unrestrained fabrication. Puech reads (through his jeweled spectacles) the
names not only of Omri, king of Israel, but Bar-Hadad of Ramoth in

Gilead (rather than Ben-Hadad of Damascus), of Ahab and his son

Joram and of Jehoshaphat, whom he identifies as king of the House of

7. Not 2 Kings, as Ahituv states. But the Hadad of our stele could be identified
with any king of Aram. Ben-Hadad not only need not be the same Ben-Hadad who is
a character of the Bible stories, but bears the character of a royal title rather than of a

personal name, properly speaking: signifying the ’son of Hadad’, an eptithet that
could be attributed to more or less any king within the Aramaean cultural world.
8. Again, not 1 Kgs 2.34, as Ahituv cites.
9. Z. Kallai, ‘The King of Israel and the House of David’, IEJ 43 (1993), p. 248.
10. In this respect, too, one might find it odd that Kallai denies the ’dynastic’
quality of the Mesha stele’s reference to Omri even though it refers to his ’son’
continuing Omri’s presence in Chemosh’s territory.
11. E. Puech, ’La stele araméenne de Dan: Bar Hadad II et la coalition des
Omrides et de la maison de David’, RB 101 (1994), pp. 215-41.

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David. To cap the whole enterprise, he even finds the name of Samaria.
Within a beautifully-worded commentary he brings the reader to the
inescapable conclusion that the science of reconstructing fragmented
inscriptions requires imagination more than deduction.
Forms of circular argumentation that had been such a hallmark of the
old Albright school reappear in the bytdwd affair. Such is Ahituv’s
attempt both to identify the hdd of the inscription as a particular Ben-
Hadad II of Aram and then to shout ‘eureka’ at the fortuitous discovery
of the ’same’ Ben-Hadad in 1 Kings. He thus sees this word in the Tel
Dan inscription as supporting both the chronology of the text and the
historicity of 1 Kings. Circularity of argument is also evident in an article
by Rupert Chapman.’2 He begins his argument with Biran’s claims that
the inscription supports his dating of the underlying stratum to the time
of the Syro-Ephraimite wars. For Chapman, the seemingly clear
’reference’ to Ben-Hadad II in the inscription can be used not only to
date more precisely and firmly the strata of Tel Dan which have been
associated with the context in which the inscription allegedly was found,
but by extension can serve as a basis for recasting the pottery
chronology of Iron II elsewhere in the southern Levant. This argument,
of course, ignores also the dubious confidence placed by Biran in the
highly fragile pottery chronology commonly used by Syro-Palestinian
archaeology, the nonsense of the absolute dating (and hence association
with Ben-Hadad II) which Biran gives to the specific stratum to which
he attributed the inscription; and, finally, doubts about the accuracy of
Biran’s identification of the actual find spot.
All of these additional questions expose problems. Pottery of this
period is not very distinctive, with very few suggestive criteria for
chronological attribution, a difficulty that is compounded when one
attempts inter-site comparisons and attempts to speculate about absolute
chronology.’3 At Tel Dan itself, the archaeological evidence for dating
the stratum to which Biran wishes to assign the inscription hardly
indicates a date earlier than the late eighth century BCE, rather than the
early ninth as suggested by Biran.14 Finally, not only do Biran and

12. R. Chapman, ’The Dan Stele and the Chronology of Levantine Iron Age
Stratigraphy’ (forthcoming).
13. See on this well known problem, H. Weippert, Palästina in vorhellenistischer
Zeit (Handbuch der Archäologie, Vorderasien, II/1; Munich: C.H. Beck, 1992),
pp. 510-17.
14. This was the consensus of the seminar held on this inscription at the

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Naveh offer two very different descriptions of the in situ context of the
inscription, but Biran’s narrative of the discovery at the Society of
Biblical Literature in Washington (and implied in the IEJ article)
suggests that the archaeological context of the stele in fact was not part
of the wall as Biran has claimed, but rather was part of the fill that
overlay this wall and the associated pavement. IS One must ask whether
the inscription was found in situ at all. Certainly the archaeological
context is in no way so secure as to offer either a dating of the
inscription or any subsequent revision of south Levantine stratigraphy.
Apart from these exercises in pseudo-scholarship that we have
reviewed, the discussion that has followed the publication of the Tel Dan
inscription hardly supports the interpretation of Biran and Naveh.
Arguments against it have come from many directions: from archaeology,
paleography and philology, and from history and biblical research as well.
However, while these arguments-when perceived from the perspective
of biblical historicism-may appear overwhelmingly negative, it is the
opinion of the present writers that the bytdwd inscription is not only
historically important, but that it may be immensely valuable in
furthering our understanding of the biblical traditions, if not confirming
their historicity. It has been reported in the news media that a further
five lines and possibly more fragments of what may be part of this
inscription have been found at Tel Dan. It is to be hoped that Biran and
Naveh will be as admirably prompt in publishing these as they have with
the initial find.
The first major critical review of the original interpretation of the
inscription was published by Frederick Cryer.&dquo; This paper had been
extensively discussed prior to publication in the Old Testament senior
seminar at the University of Copenhagen. Besides Cryer and the present
authors this meeting included two professional archaeologists: John
Strange of Copenhagen, a student of Kathleen Kenyon who has been
active in excavations for at least thirty years and who is presently
heading the excavations of Tell el Fukhkhar in Jordan, and John
Woodhead, who is the assistant director of the British School of
Archaeology in Jerusalem and co-director with David Ussishkin in the

University of Copenhagen in February of 1994 (see below).

15. T.L. Thompson, ’House of David: An Eponymic Referent to Yahweh as
Godfather’, SJOT (forthcoming).
16. F.H. Cryer, ’On the Recently-Discovered "House of David" Inscription’,
SJOT 8 (1994), pp. 1-19.

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excavation of Tell Jezreel. Other persons with archaeological experience

were also present, as was the new professor of the Old Testament
in Uppsala, Stig Norin, whose interest in epigraphical matters is well
known.&dquo;
Cryer’s contribution is especially important, for his analysis of the
epigraphical evidence leads us in a totally different direction from the
one proposed by Naveh, according to whom the date of the inscription
is mid-ninth century BCE, plus or minus a couple of decades. Cryer’s
careful analysis of the shape of each individual letter present in the
inscription shows the forms there to be related to other Aramaic
inscriptions belonging generally to the last part of the eighth century
BCE or the first part of the seventh century.

Given that the archaeological context is insecure and the first

proposed date of the writing is seemingly false, what then can we say
about the content of the inscription? The critical question for Biran,
Naveh and Shanks-whether this inscription ’proves’ David to be a
historical person-is untouched by any change of our dating, whether
we opt for c. 850 BCE or c. eighth century BCE. This issue must be
determined on the basis of whether the line of the inscription in which
bytdwd was found has been correctly understood.
The first problem revolves around the fact that the Aramaic inscription
reads bytdwd, with a strange case of plene writing for an Aramaic text
of the ninth century. Some may wish to explain this as having come
under the influence of Phoenician. This cannot be excluded. However, in
biblical Hebrew the expression bet Dawid is always divided into two
words. In the Tel Dan inscription, divisions between words are in all
other cases clearly indicated by a divisional mark, similar to those which
we find in Ugaritic texts. Yet, no word separator is found between the

byt and dwd of the Tel Dan inscription. This is clearly understood as a
single word by the writer of the text. He may have been mistaken and a
poor and inconsistent writer. This also cannot be excluded. It is an
extraordinary pity, however, that he chose this particular place in which
to be mistaken! One might also argue that he did not know what
authors of biblical books knew: that a dynastic name of the kingdom of

17. In addition to this first article by Cryer, this seminar led to three other
publications besides the present one that are all related to this discussion: N.P. Lemche,
’Bemerkungen über ein Paradigmenwechsel auf Anlass einer neuentdeckten Inschrift
(forthcoming); Thompson, ’House of David’; and F.H. Cryer, ’Dwd, Dwd’ or
Dwdh?’ SJOT (forthcoming).

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Judah needed to bedivided into two words. Although we are also unable
to exclude this possibility, we need to point out that it is unlikely-not
because we must assume the writer to have been familiar with this
particular kingdom and its dynasty, but rather because the name of
Betddwid, if it were proper to divide it, would be one of a large number
of names of a single type: names which refer to states, such as the
dynastic name of the kingdom of Israel, bit Humriyya, or the names of
the Aramaic kingdoms, Bit Gusi and Bit Adini, to refer only to
contemporary political names. These are all invariably written as separate
words. For such reasons Cryer concludes that bytdwd is a single word
here and cannot be translated ’House of David’. It must rather refer to
something else than a state dynasty. A place name seems rather more
likely. Here at least we find a valid orthographic parallel in the Hebrew
Bible in that the place name Bethel ( ‘the House of El’ ) is always written
as a single word. Like the place name Afek found in the newly
discovered fragment of this same inscription, bytdwd may be a place
somewhere in the vicinity of ancient Dan!~8
At this point it is worth mentioning that discussions dealing with this
inscription-both the written discussion and the sometimes very
intensive one on the internet networks called IOUDAIOS and ANE-
have departed from the inscription itself in order to find support for
both views, on one hand that the Tel Dan inscription mentions the
dynasty of David as the name of the state of Judah, and on the other
that it does refer to something else, most likely a place name of some
sort. Thus scholars supporting either of the two views have referred to
the Mesha inscription, where line 12 reads,
w’sb. ’t. ’r’l.dwdh

Thisenigmatic passage has received very different translations. Only one

major contributor, however, John Gibson, has seriously proposed the
name of David, the king of Israel and Judah here:

I brought back from there the lion figure of David’9

18. The identification of the name bytdwd as a possible place name is not only the
conclusion of Cryer’s first article but is also supported in the following article by
Ehud ben Zvi; E.A. Knauf, A. de Pury and T. Römer, ’*Baytdawid ou *Baytdod?
Une relecture de la nouvelle inscription de Tel Dan’, BN 72 ( 1994), pp. 60-69; and
the present writers (Lemche, ‘Bemerkungen’; Thompson, ’House of David’).
19. J. Gibson, Textbook of Syrian Semitic Inscriptions. I. Hebrew and Moabite
Inscriptions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 76.

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This translation is undoubtedly impossible, not because it mentions the

name of David but because of the wording itself: dwdh, ’its David’. Since
the -h- must be the suffix pronoun referring to the place mentioned just
before, it cannot be the feminine ending in the manner that Moabite uses
the -t feminine ending. However, a name with a suffix-in spite of the
discussion about ’Yahweh’s Asherah’ in the Kuntillet Ajrud inscription-
breaks a fundamental rule of Hebrew and West Semitic. Although
we cannot entirely ignore this possibility (not all scribes had good
grammar&dquo;), it is clearly more likely that this dwdh does not reflect any
knowledge about our king David or any other person of this name.
Knowing this, some scholars have referred to the age-old discussion
about David as a surname, meaning ’General’ as is the supposed
meaning of Mari-Akkadian dawidum. This displays an ignorance of the
1
arguments put forward thirty-five years ago by Hayim Tadmor .2
Tadmor clearly showed that every known ’dawidum’ of the Mari
kingdom had been slain, and that the word was merely a dialect form of
the normal Akkadian dabdu, meaning ’defeat’!
Without assuming the presence of the name of David in the Mesha
inscription (probably belonging to the middle of the ninth century), we
need to read what is, in fact, written in that inscription. The text of the
inscription states that Mesha removed the ’r’l of his dwd. This is
probably a reference to either the sacrificial fire, the altar or, possibly,
some other cultic perquisite belonging to dwd. The word dwd could here
be an epithet or surname of some deity-even Yahweh as has been
proposed by Hans Peter Miiller, 22 since Yahweh is mentioned in the
passage preceding this line.
Recently Andr6 Lemaire has tried to present a reconstructed line
(1. 31 ) of the Mesha inscription, thereby creating a bt dwd.23 Lemaire’s
reconstruction seems well-founded. The following readable sequence of
letters is found in this line: bt...wd. Only one letter is missing. For the
gap, he substitutes a ‘d’ . However, in spite of Lemaire’s reading, the

20. It should be recalled that the Danish philologist Madvig corrected Cicero’s
Latin!
21. H. Tadmor, ’Historical Implications of the Correct Rendering of Akkadian
"dâku"’, JNES 17 (1958), pp. 129-41.
22. H.-P. Müller, Historisch-chronologische Texte, VII (TUAT, I/6; Güterloh:
Mohn, 1985), p. 648 n. 13.
23. A. Lemaire, ’House of David Restored in Moabite Inscription’, BARev 20.3
(1994), pp. 30-37.

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likeliest interpretation of the line is not the one proposed by him-that

this passage refers to a Judaean dynasty. Rather, the context of the
preceding lines contains a number of Bits; that is, ’temples’ of various
gods. This suggests that btdwd here is also the name of a temple.
Let us turn for a moment to the Tel Dan inscription and ask whether
such an understanding might also fit here. The expression bytdwd stands
at the beginning of a line, preceded only by a ‘...k’ and a word division.
This ’...k.’ was taken by the publishers of the inscription to represent
the last radical of the word melek, ’king’. Davies and others, however,
have correctly maintained that there are many other possibilities. In
arguing for Biran’s and Naveh’s reconstruction of the two lines 8 and 9
involving this melek, one needs to assert that, in these lines, the two
kings of Israel and of ’The House of David’ stand in parallel. However,
this is far from the case.
The exact wording of the lines is:

~!/~.)~/’7.W~f/[...
k. bytd wd. w ’sm. [ ...
Biran and Naveh translate,
the king of Israel. And [I] slew [...the kin-]
g of the house of David. And I put...

Because do not know either what stood in the lacunae or how

we

large they are, it is necessaryto distinguish in the two lines at least three
or four distinct concepts. The first has something to do with the ’king of

Israel’, and the second starts with ’and I killed’ (what, who?). The
second line starts with then’ followed by bytdwd. At present, we can
not know whether this is part of the second part of the preceding line,
’and I killed’, or whether it belongs with a separate clause. On the other
hand, a new clause evidently begins immediately following bytdwd, with
w’sm, ’and I put/placed’. The unravelling of the Biran-Naveh inter-
pretation has recently been furthered in an article by Ernst Axel Knauf,
Albert de Pury and Thomas R6mer, 14 in which they argue, among other
things, that a compound concept such as ’the king of the House of...’
has never been seen in any Middle Eastern Inscription, nor is it to be
found in the Old Testament with the meaning ’king of the dynasty of
X’. They translate 11. 8-9 as follows: 8a ...le roi d’Israel. 8b J’avais
tui... 9a Je versai de libations surldatis le Bayt Dod. J’jrigai (l ’objet

24. E.A. Knauf, A. de Pury and T. Römer,’*BaytDawîd ou *BaytDôd?’.

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 13

portant cette inscription)...’ That is: ’The king of Israel. I have killed ...I
poured libation offerings on/in the House of Dwd, I erected (the object
that carries this inscription). They suggest that the initial ‘...k’ in 1. 9
could belong to an Aramaic verb such as n.sk, ’verser une libation’, ’to

pour a libation’.
The possibility remains, and has been intensely discussed over the very
last few months, that bytdwd needs to be a place outside Dan-for
example, a city in its vicinity. We would argue that it could also refer to
the name of a holy place at Dan and propose that it can be directly
compared to the bt dwd of Lemaire’s reconstruction of the Mesha
inscription. If this be appropriate, two lines of investigation remain: (1) to
investigate what such a dwd might be, and (2) to consider the possibility
that this dwd is no other than David of the Old Testament, in, however,
a fabulous disguise.25
Whether dwd means something like ’the beloved’, with reference to
the protecting god of whatever community in which a byt dwd was
situated (whether in Dan, Ataroth or elsewhere), will depend on a
number of issues, all of which can not be taken up here. We are
referring to a very old discussion, inaugurated a hundred years ago by
Hugo Winckler and taken up both by Hugo Gressmann and, later, by
Gosta Ahlstr6m in his dissertation. 21 In these discussions, the weight of
the arguments is in favor of the existence of a god called dwd in ancient
Palestine. The hypothesis allows the possibility, supported by the LXX of
Amos 8.14, that the ’the road to Beersheva’-a truly odd occurrence of
Hebrew derek-would better be read ’your dwd of Beersheva’, and be
understood as referring to the protective god of Beersheva.
We may also find evidence of this divine epithet in the name of the
Philistine city of Ashdod (a city known to have contained a temple of
Dagon), and perhaps also in Bethlehem, where the famous hero of David,
Elhanan (if not David himself) is called the son of his dwd: ’Ihnn bn
dwdw (2 Sam 23.24; see also 23.9, where the Ahohite [i.e. Benjaminite]
Eliezer is also called a son of Dwdw or Drvday [the Hebrew here is
uncertain]). Scholars also have referred to the ’my Dwd’ in the vineyard
song of Isa. 5.1 ff. as an invocation of a deity. This interpretative reference
to the Song of Songs (where ’my dwd’ is the dominant metaphor),
especially to 6.2, identifies the garden or vineyard of Yahweh’s ’beloved’
25. On this, see further Lemche, ‘Bemerkungen’.
26. G. Ahlström, Psalm 89: Eine Liturgie aus dem Ritual des leidenden Königs
(Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1959).

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14

as Jerusalem (including byt ysr’l and ’yš yhwdh, Isa. 5.7). This under-
standing, of course, demands that the Song of Songs was understood
very early as a poem of religious and ideological content, as has been
proposed by Marvin Pope. 27 This reading is continued by both later
Rabbinic and Christian interpretations, according to which the dwd in
Song of Songs is seen as a referent to either God himself or to the
Christ.
It is equally true that the element dwd is not commonplace. For
example, it occurs only twice in personal names of the Iron Age.28 Nor
do we have a developed mythology for this divine Dwd-unless we are
to understand the Song of Songs as such. We should not be surprised at
this. First of all, Yahweh theophoric names in Tigay’s investigation are
overwhelmingly dominant-testifying that Yahweh was truly the great
Palestinian god of the Iron Age. Nobody has doubted that (we may only
question who this god really was, how many wives and children he had).
Yet of course Tigay’s study can be criticized on many points. We need
clarification on a number of issues. What is the percentage of names that
come from the Old Testament in contrast to the number of names from
the inscriptions’? We also need to know the respective percentages of
names from distinct regions of Palestine: not only from Israel and Judah,

but from Jerusalem, Samaria, Lachish, as well as from the south, the
north and the Transjordan. These names must be distributed on a
chronological scale as well. Furthermore, we need to know the social
status of the bearers of these names. We need to know not only whether
we have a representative selection-which should be doubted-but also

whether these names come, exclusively or almost exclusively, from the

highest level of society or whether they are also found among its lower
classes.
But be this as it may, Dwd is hardly the personal name of any god. It
is rather an epithet: ’the beloved’. Few gods of the old Palestinian
pantheon carried personal names. They were defined by functions; so
Ba’al, ’Lord’, Asherah, ’Sacred Tree’ or ’Sacred Place’, El, ’god’,
Dagan, ’crop’. Only Yahweh may have had his own name. But even he
did not have this for long. Not only was his personal name substituted
by Adonay, ’Lord’ (a surname that was well known elsewhere in the

27. M. Pope, Song of Songs: A New Translation with Introduction and

Commentary (AB; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977).
28. J. Tigay, You Shall Have no other Gods: Israelite Religion in the Light of
Hebrew Inscriptions (HSS, 31; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986).

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 15

form of the name Adonis) but itself became the of Elohim. name

Analogously, dwd is a referent to Yahweh as ’beloved’, byt dwd is a as

reference to his temple.29 Similarly, in the second-century BCE 7 Enoch

we find-closely associated with the desert dwelling Azazel (a deity that
Lev. 16 links with Yahweh)-a reference to dwd’ ’l which is well
rendered by Cryer as ’the dwd God’,;° or, perhaps also, ’El is the
beloved’ .

Finally, it is difficult to follow Biran and Naveh in their assumption-

common enough in Old Testament studies-that byt dwd (’House of
David’), some of our central Old Testament stories about David, is so
in
obviously to be understood as a reference to a Davidic dynasty. 31
Rather, the metaphor byt-like ’b, bn and others-belongs essentially to
the ideology of patronage. byt dwd of our biblical texts-and especially
the stories of David and Saul in 1 and 2 Samuel-cannot be rendered
by ’dynasty’ (as we remain within the story world of that dynasty’s
founders), but refers to the foundation of the patronage of Yahweh in
Jerusalem represented by his temple (byt), and to the heroic David as the
eponymic founder of Yahweh’s patronage within Israel. This is at the
core of the so-called ’covenant theology’ that centers on an eternal byt

dwd. This tradition of story does not refer to a belief in a destiny or

promise of unending royal rule under kings descended from David, but
rather to the eternal center of the bet ha’elohim in Jerusalem.32 The
misreading that byt means ’dynasty’ in the Bible derives from a
misunderstanding of society and political structures in this part of the
ancient Levant.33

29. Lemche, ’Bemerkungen’.

30. Cryer, ’Dwd’.
31. On this and the following, see Thompson, ’House of David’.
32. Thompson, ’House of David’.
33. See on patronage: M. Liverani, Prestige and Interest: International Relations
in theNear East ca. 1600-1100 BCE (History of the Ancient Near East Studies, 1;
Padua, 1990), esp. pp. 187-202; N.P. Lemche, ’Kings and Clients: On Loyalty
between the Ruler and the Ruled in Ancient "Israel"’, Semeia (forthcoming);
idem, ’The Relevance of Social-Critical Exegesis for Old Testament Theology’
(forthcoming), and idem, Power and Social Organization: Some Misunderstandings
and some Proposals: Or is it All a Question of Patrons and Clients?’ (forthcoming).
On the characteristics of the small-region based agricultural economy of the southern
Levant which fostered political systems of this type, see T.L. Thompson, Early
History of the Israelite People from the Written and Archaeological Sources
(SHANE, 4; Leiden: Brill, 2nd edn, 1994), pp. 316-33.

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16

growing minority of Old Testament scholars today are of the

A
opinion that the narratives about David in the Old Testament have little
to do with history. 34 The stories of Saul’s election and rise to power
over Israel and the story of his fall from grace, the story of mad king
Saul whose depressions were soothed by David, the inspired musician of
the psalms, the story of the great warrior Saul, the scourge of the
Philistines crazed with murderous jealousy of the faithful and constant
young lieutenant who surpasses him in all his exploits, the idyllic story of
Jonathan’s love for David in the midst of court intrigue and violence, the
story of the young shepherd boy, in his pious simplicity and innocence
overcoming in personal combat the warrior giant and heroic champion,
Goliath of the Philistines, the story of David’s succession to the throne
and the greatness of his empire, the story of his sneak attack on
Jerusalem (through what was, after all, the centuries later tunnel of
Hezekiah) as well as the story of the lecherous David, who has his
faithful follower killed out of lust for the man’s wife and the story of the
silly old man, who in his senile dotage needs an innocent young girl to
keep his bed warm, the story of Solomon’s succession-the youngest of
David’s sons-to the throne in a classic rendition of the success of the
unpromising, the story of the Croesus-like Solomon whose wealth rivals
the legends of Assyrian kings plastering their walls with gold, the story
of the great Solomon, great builder and exploiter of international trade,
the consort of the princess of Egypt and the equal in wisdom to the
fabulous Queen of Sheba, the story of Solomon as the Alexander-like
philosopher-king in his wisdom protecting the simple virtues of family
and guiding an empire, the story of the building of the temple dedicated
to the one true God as the crown of Solomon’s piety, a temple whose
desecration served as his undoing, the stories of Solomon lured away
from pristine faith by foreign wives, the syncretistic corruption of empire
and of the great world of government and wealth, this Solomon whose
hubris and apostasy were responsible for the breakup of his kingdom,
again like the struggles that followed the death of Alexander the Great
between the true south and the faithless north, all of these stories mark
this ’United Monarchy’ as the ’golden age’ of the Davidic dynasty’s
40 kings.

34. On issues of method, see E.A. Knauf, ’From History to Interpretation’, in

The Fabric of History: Text, Artifact and Israel’s Past (ed. D. Edelman; JSOTSup,
127; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1991), pp. 26-64; Thompson, ’Text, Context and
Referent in Israelite Historiography’, Early History, pp. 65-92.

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The literary beauty and strength of these stories have always been
recognized. Certainly we are dealing here with some of the Bible’s and
the world’s greatest stories. Until very recently, however, biblical
scholars have insisted that these stories were historical. Their very clarity
and brilliance were claimed to be a hallmark of what scholars liked to
think of as this very golden age’s genius for history writing. However,
this issue of David’s historicity is not merely a question of how we read
our Bibles. We need to refer here not only to recent literary&dquo; and
critical biblical studies36 since the late 1970s but also to a growing
number of revisionist histories of Palestine.&dquo; None of these studies leave
much room for a historical David. Although Jameson-Drake thinks of
him as a bandit chief in the Judaean mountains of the tenth century,
such a figure is hardly the biblical David.
As long as we had no independent history of Palestine to rely on,
there was precious little else on which we could base a ’history’ of Israel
except ignorance. For some, there was also an added incentive to believe
the stories of the United Monarchy as historical. Historical completeness
and coherence, after all, needed them. States of Israel and Judah certainly
existed in ancient Palestine. The Bible’s story was the necessary story of
their origin. This kind of argument concerning biblical characters has
often been used, not only about David, but about Moses and about
Adam and Eve as well. If they had not existed we would have to invent

35. Especially, D. Gunn, The Story of King David (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1976);
idem, The Fate of King Saul (JSOTSup, 14; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1980);
J.P. Fokkelman, Narrative Art and Poetry in the Book of Samuel (Assen: Van Gorcum,
1981); but also departing from traditional lines of interpretation: N.P. Lemche,
’David’s Rise’, JSOT 10 (1978), pp. 2-25.
36. G. Garbini, History and Ideology in Ancient Israel (London: SCM Press,
1988); T.L. Thompson, ’History and Tradition: A Response to James B. Geyer’,
JSOT 15 (1980), pp. 57-61; idem, Early History, pp. 108-11; P.R. Davies and
D. Gunn (eds.), ’A History of Ancient Israel and Judah: A Discussion of Miller-
Hayes’, JSOT 39 (1987), pp. 3-63; P.R. Davies, In Search of Ancient Israel
(JSOTSup, 148; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1992).
37. Here, the well-known, but seemingly ostracized study, by D.W. Jamieson-
Drake must be mentioned: Scribes and Schools in Monarchic Judah: A Socio-
Archaeological Approach (JSOTSup, 109; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1991) as well as
the more traditional work (from a methodological point of view) of H.M. Niemann,
Herrschaft, Königtum und Staat: Skizzen zur soziokulturellen Entwicklung im
monarchischen Israel (Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1993); and also N.P. Lemche,
’Palästina und Syrien in der vorisraelitischen Zeit,’ Biblische Enzyklopädie, I
(forthcoming, 1995).

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18

them. The argument rests not on logic-that Israel’s monarchy, like its
religion, and in fact the human race must have had founders-so much
as on the romantic expectations we have of history: all great institutions
need comparably great origins. If ever there was an example of a story
accepted as history because we needed it, the Saul-David story was it. If
there had been no united monarchy, there could not have been a
historical Israel as the Bible understands it. The very idea of a history of
Israel presupposed the United Monarchy’s existence.
We could critically revise our understanding of what Saul’s reign was
really like, whether David was as great as the stories make him out to
be, or whether we should think of him as a chieftain rather than as a
king or emperor, or perhaps we might question whether Solomon had
really constructed his temple in Jerusalem, or only refurbished it, or even
follow the book of Chronicles and assert that David had built it. But
fundamentally, few entertained the doubt that the Bible was talking
about history. This would have meant to question the entire enterprise.
That is the issue we have today: namely, the question of whether the
Bible in its stories is talking about history and the past at all. Our
argument_is not that the Bible exaggerates the exploits of David, nor is it
that Solomon was never as rich as the Bible makes him out to be. We
are not dealing with issues of skepticism here. Rather, we are trying to

argue that the Bible’s stories of Saul, David and Solomon are not about
history at all. History writing is a very different thing from what the
Bible’s authors were doing.
If one were to write a history of ancient Palestine for the period in
which biblical scholars like to place Saul, David and Solomon, one
would give an entirely different picture from that presented by the
Bible.&dquo; This is not because ’the Bible is wrong’, but because the Bible is
not history, and only very recently has anyone ever wanted it to be. To
compare the Bible’s tales about David with early Iron Age Palestine is
like comparing the story of Gilgamesh with Bronze Age Uruk, Homer
with ancient Mycenae, or, indeed, Arthur with early mediaeval England,
or even Wagner’s Siegfried with a Germany of the early Middle Ages. It
is not only that one lacks evidence for understanding these stories as
accurate accounts of the nation’s past, but that stories and history have
always dealt with quite different kinds of worlds. That is as true of
ancient stories as it is of modem ones.

38. On this and the following, see the preliminary discussion of Thompson, Early
History, esp. pp. 401-14; also Davies, In Search of Ancient Israel.

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 19

Whether we are dealing with Homer, the Bible or mediaeval epic, the
quest for a historical heroic age must fall short. Not only is such a period
always cast in a time before history begins, but the very characteristics
of verisimilitude, authenticity and plausibility mark the tradition more as
fictional than historical. Fiction is the clear creation of its author. It
captures the hearts as well as the minds of its readers. It educates the
emotions, and it creates its own world according to its own rules.
In the history of Palestine that we have presented, there is no room
for a historical United Monarchy, or for such kings as those presented in
the biblical stories of Saul, David or Solomon. The early period in which
the traditions have set their narratives is an imaginary world of long ago
that never existed as such. In the real world of that time, for instance,
only a few dozen villagers lived as farmers in all of the Judaean high-
lands. Timber, grazing lands and steppe were all marginal possibilities.
There could not have been a kingdom for any Saul or David to be king
of, simply because there were not enough people. Not only did a state of
Judah not yet exist, but we have no evidence of there having been any
political force anywhere in Palestine that was large enough or developed
enough to have been even conceivably capable of unifying the many
different economies and regions of this land, given the near political
vacuum of the tenth century BCE. Rather, at this time, Palestine was far

less unified than it had been for more than a thousand years. Jerusalem
at this time can hardly be spoken of as a city. It was yet centuries from
having the capacity of challenging any of the dozens of more powerful
small autonomous towns of Palestine. Jerusalem had to compete
politically and economically for control of the highland forests and
pastures of Judah with far larger and far better located towns, especially
Lachish in the southern foothills.
The only coherent one of the several, largely isolated, hill country
regions was the central hills (which lay between Jerusalem and the
Jezreel Valley). In the early Iron Age, this region had only been able to
organize a pyramiding political structure of small highland patronates.
These did not develop the complexity or the bureaucracy of a small-state
structure, holding and controlling the best part of this region, until
yet at least a century and a half later than the time to which David is
commonly dated. The Central Hills region was only able to achieve such
unity then, because of the support of Egypt’s markets for timber and of
the international trade routes’ renewed interest (during the late tenth and
early ninth centuries) in the growing highland olive industry that had

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20

originally encouraged land clearance and the expansion of settlement

throughout this rugged region during the two centuries after 1050 BCE,
following the Great Mycenaean drought.
Jerusalem, far to the south and in a very different highland region, had
been a small market town dominating the Ayyalon valley throughout
most of the Bronze Age. Its relationship to Judah was marginal. It first
took on the form and acquired the status of a city, capable of being
understood as a state capital, sometime in the middle of the seventh
century.39 Following the fall of Lachish, Jerusalem was able to extend its
financial interests into the southern highlands and was able to dominate
most of Judah imperially as it took on the role of an Assyrian vassal state
on the fringe of empire. In this role, its primary function was as a market
for the Judaean olive growers, funneling this valuable produce to the
Assyrian processing centres especially at Ekron on the Palestinian coast.
However, this hardly provided Jerusalem with a position that might be
described as dominance in Palestine, which always belonged to the
towns of the lowlands and coastal plains: towns such as Gaza, Ashkelon,
Jaffa, Akko, Megiddo, Taanach, Beth Shan, Hazor, Dan, Arad, Beersheba
and Jericho. Jerusalem was unable to maintain even this expanded role-
one in which its population increased to nearly 25,000 persons-for more

than half a century. In 586, the city was sacked by the Babylonians and
its population was deported.
Finally, while it is difficult to estimate the degree of Jerusalem’s
recovery from this disaster during the Persian period, revival seems to
have been slow and at best modest. During the early Hellenistic period it
was Samaria, not Jerusalem, which, among the highland centres, received

settlers from Macedonia. And it was Samaria that seems to have been
the dominant town of the hill country at least until the second quarter of
the second century BCE, when Jerusalem went over to the Maccabaean
rebels and supported their successful revolt against Antiochus IV, who
had been desperately trying to eliminate Egyptian influence in southern
Palestine. It is during this century, prior to Pompey’s conquest of the
region for Rome, that Jerusalem was finally able to establish itself-for
the first time in history-as Dwd’s religious and political center in the
heart of Palestine.

39. On this, see Thompson, Early History, pp. 343ff. and especially pp. 410-12.

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 21

Did Biran kill David? Yes, ive think so.

In the light of the archaeological evidence from the Tel Dan inscription,
our understanding of the biblical David, and the relationship between the
biblical David and the history and society of the ancient world of its
context, has been immensely enriched. Not only do we have no
historical-archaeological context for a king David in history as the ruler
of either a state of Judah or of a United Monarchy centred in Jerusalem
in the period that biblical archaeologists like to refer to as the ’time of
David’, and not only do we have overwhelming literary reasons to under-
stand the David stories as reflecting romantic fictions of the ’Golden
Age’ of Israel, but we now have concrete extra-biblical evidence
supporting the eponymic and metaphorical character of both David
and the House of David, as reflections of an ideology that understood
Yahweh’s relationship to Judaism as eternal, centered in the Byt Dwd or
temple of Jerusalem.
David may have to go, but not his name. That could well derive from
the divine Dwd. David, like Dwd, lived in the ’City of David’, that is,
Zion, or Jerusalem. Surely this was also a name-if not originally the
name-of the temple mount. This was the byt dwd-not of a historical
king with the name of David-but of the divine Dwd, who may be
presumed to have been the god we know as Yahweh.
By bringing to our knowledge the strange name of bytdwd in the Tel
Dan inscription Biran has made a major contribution to the collapse not
so much of the dynasty of David, but rather of the dynasty’s heros

eponymos.

ABSTRACT

Recent articles on the bytdwd inscription from Tel Dan reflect some of the worst
excesses of the biblical archaeology movement, involving circular arguments, the

fabrication of evidence and biblical-archaeological harmonizations. Contrary to such

efforts at historicizing the Bible in the light of archaeology, the bytdwd inscription,
judging from both the epigraphic and archaeological evidence, should be dated to the
eighth century BCE, nearly 150 years later than Biran and Naveh have dated it. The
word itself is a place name, with reference to a ’temple of DWD’, possibly near Tel
Dan itself. The word Dwd is unlikely to be a proper name and seems rather to be a
divine epithet, meaning ’the beloved’, and probably refers to Yahweh. Moreover, byt

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