Over the next while, I’ll be sharing some things I learned on my recent study trip to Israel this past summer. As well as taking a course taught by my program supervisor, the world-famous Dr. Craig Evans, I also had the chance to travel around “the land” with the good professor and another grad student, Greg Monette. The three of us worked on an archaeological dig at Mt. Zion (more on that later), and met with scholars and archaeologists at universities and at other digs, like the impressive project at Magdala.
For starters, I’d like to talk about the Tel Dan inscription, which we saw at the very impressive Israel Museum in Jerusalem. This important archaeological discovery, an inscription referring to King David, was found during the 1993-94 excavations at Tel Dan (in modern-day northern Israel). Some scholars had argued in the past that King David, his son Solomon, and indeed the entire line of Davidic kings chronicled in the Old Testament are nothing more than fictional characters, invented by the writers of the Hebrew Scriptures. These critics alleged that David did not preside over a kingdom that originated circa the 10th century BCE, as the Bible states. They further contended that there would be no possible way people of that time would have been literate enough to record the chronicles of the period. Archaeology, however, has firmly put these critics in their place.
The inscription at Tel Dan seems to have been commissioned by the King of Syria, and dates to the 9th century BCE. Written in Aramaic, it refers to the “House of David”. The Syrian King is essentially boasting about how his army defeated that of the the legendary House of David. Why would he do that if no such person as David, and no such kingdom existed? Clearly, this is good evidence – written in stone, no less – of the existence of a Davidic line of kings.
Skeptics have also denied David’s vast kingdom, contending that David was nothing more than a local, tribal chief. The fact that the Tel Dan inscription is from northern Israel (near today’s disputed Syria-Israel border), far from the Davidic dynasty’s headquarters in Judea and Jerusalem, would seem to mitigate against that assertion. As well, excavations in the oldest part of the city of Jerusalem have uncovered a vast, centralized, government complex. Artefacts within have been dated to the 10th century BCE, the era of David and Solomon.