To read more from Daniel, visit his blog: Sic Et Non.
Serious “biblical archaeology”—to use a term that, although in common use, remains at least slightly controversial—can be said to have begun in the mid-nineteenth century. Not coincidentally, Heinrich Schliemann was beginning to search at somewhat the same time for the Troy depicted in Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey.”
There were parallels between the two efforts. Both sought, for example, to confirm the historicity of their respective texts, biblical and Homeric. And both had, or came to have, political dimensions. In the years prior to the founding of the state of Israel and certainly afterward, illuminating the history of the Israelites following their arrival in Canaan came to be seen as justifying a historical Jewish claim to the land. And at least some of the enthusiasm for Schliemann’s digging at Hissarlik, which did in fact turn out to be the site of ancient Troy, came from a desire to revitalize Greek identity and culture after centuries of Ottoman Turkish domination.
In the early 1990s, the discipline of “biblical archaeology” came under attack by a group of scholars who soon became known as “biblical minimalists.” The title was applied to them because they argued that the amount of actual, literal historical fact contained within the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible was, well, minimal. Essentially, they believed that the history of ancient Israel—especially the history claimed for the eras prior to the Babylonian captivity, in the sixth century before Christ—was largely fabricated. They claimed that it was partially folkloric and partially a fictional creation of scribes and scholars who lived during the Persian period (that is, in the fifth century BC) or even in the Hellenistic period (extending from the third century to the first century BC).
They were also sometimes termed the “Copenhagen School,” since several of them (e.g., Niels Peter Lemche and Thomas Thompson) were on the faculty of the University of Copenhagen, although others (such as Keith Whitelam and Philip Davies) taught at the University of Sheffield, in the United Kingdom. Not surprisingly, at least some of the biblical minimalists also took public positions along the way that were critical of the state of Israel and the legitimacy of its historical claim to the land of Palestine.
Curiously, although the minimalists often drew upon archaeology in order to support their skepticism about the historicity of (especially pre-exilic) Israel, none of the leading minimalists were actually field archaeologists. And the archaeological data sometimes challenged them. Take, for example, the case of the Tel Dan Stele:
The admirably named ancient settlement of Dan, which is located near the headwaters of the River Jordan, appears fully nine times in the Old Testament as marking the northernmost boundary of Israel, which was said to have extended “from Dan to Beersheba” (see Judges 20:1; 1 Samuel 3:20; 2 Samuel 3:10, 17:11, 24:2, 15; 1 Kings 4:25; 1 Chronicles 21:2; 2 Chronicles 30:5). In the negotiations that followed World War One, that formulaic phrase actually played a role in establishing the boundaries for British Mandatory Palestine, so it shouldn’t be surprising that Dan is very near to modern Israel’s border with Lebanon.
Excavators have been working the site of Tel Dan – “tel” is a Hebrew word for “hill,” often referring to the mounds that result in the Near East from successive layers of settlement in a given place, one atop the other; the Arabic equivalent is “tell” – since 1966. Early one afternoon in 1993, Gila Cook, the expedition’s surveyor at the time, walked out to the site and, perhaps because of the particular slant of the light at that time of the day, noticed letters on one of the rocks in a stone wall that had recently been uncovered. Nobody had noticed them before.
It is now thought that the letters were part of an inscription dating to roughly 842 BC. The stone into which it was inscribed was evidently broken into pieces, one of which was eventually used thereafter in the construction of the wall. Two additional fragments were identified during the summer of 1994 and, together with the one identified the previous year, they now constitute what is called the “Tel Dan Stele.” Of course, scholars are always hoping that more fragments will be located.
Why is the Tel Dan Stele important? To answer that question, I’ll first cite Professor Andre Lemaire’s 1998 translation of the inscription’s thirteen fragmentary lines, which were written in Aramaic (a language closely related to Hebrew):
[…..]..[………….] and cut […………..]
[…..] my father went up [……f]ighting at/against Ab[…]
And my father lay down, he went to his [fathers]. And the kings of I[s-]
rael penetrated into my father’s land[. And] Hadad made me – myself – king
And Hadad went in front of me[, and] I departed from …. [….]
of my kings. And I killed two power[ful] kin[gs], who harnessed two thou[sand cha-]
riots and two thousand horsemen. [I killed Jo]ram son of [Ahab]
king of Israel, and I killed [Achaz]yahu son of [Joram king]
of the House of David. And I set [……]
their land […….]
other …[………… and Jehu ru-]
led over Is[rael …………]
siege upon […….]
The partially legible names of the two enemy kings have commonly been reconstructed as Joram, son of Ahab, the King of Israel (2 Kings 3:1-3; 8:16, 25-28; 9:24), and Ahaziah, son of Joram of the House of David (2 Kings 8:26; 9:22-28; 2 Chronicles 21:17; 22:2; 25:23). If these identifications are correct, the king who claims to have killed them in battle (probably Hazael of Aram-Damascus, an important regional figure of the late ninth century before Christ) may be exaggerating, since their deaths are differently described in the biblical accounts. (It wouldn’t be the only example of deceptive royal propaganda from the ancient Near East!) Or, of course, the biblical narratives might be mistaken.
What really caught the attention of scholars, though, was the reference to “the House of David.” At the very time that Gila Cook first noticed that inscribed stone in the wall at Dan, a debate was raging, led by the Copenhagen School and its sympathizers, about whether or not David and Solomon had ever even really existed. Suddenly, the discovery of the Tel Dan Stele seemed to answer the question. It contains the earliest known extrabiblical inscription documenting the idea of a “Beit David” or “House of David”—meaning at a minimum that, by the mid-ninth century, at least one non-Israelite monarch believed that a king named “David” (usually dated to about 1000 BC) had founded a dynasty bearing his name.
In response, Niels Peter Lemche, of the Copenhagen School, suggested that the director of the Tel Dan excavation, Avraham Biran, might have forged the inscription and planted it at the site to be found later by another. However, Biran, a senior Israeli archaeologist who died in 2008, was one of the most trusted and distinguished figures in the field, and Lemche’s suggestion was not well received. Nor were suggestions from other minimalists that “Beit David” might really mean “House of Uncle,” “House of Kettle,” or “House of Beloved.” Today, the overwhelming academic consensus is that “Beit David” means precisely what it seems to mean, and that it is a reference to a royal “House of David.”
In 1996, another important inscription was found at Tel Miqne, a site located about twenty-three miles to the southwest of Jerusalem. Excavations had been going on there since 1981, inspired partly by the suggestion made in 1957, by Professor Joseph Naveh of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, that Tel Miqne was the ancient Ekron, one of the five principal cities of the biblical Philistines—along with Ashkelon, Ashdod, Gath, and Gaza.
The inscription was written in a Phoenician script, and it read as follows: “The temple [which] Achish, son of Padi, son of Ysd, son of ‘Ada,’ son of Ya’ir, ruler of Ekron, built for Ptnyh, his Lady. May she bless him, and keep him, and prolong his days, and bless his land.” Both Achish and his father, Padi, were already known to scholars on the basis of other Neo-Assyrian inscriptions as genuinely historical persons.
So, the newly found inscription seemed to confirm Professor Naveh’s hypothesis that Tel Miqne was the site of biblical Ekron, which was mentioned in accounts (such as Joshua 13:2-3, 13; 15:11; 19:43; 1 Samuel 5:10; 6:1-8, 16) that plainly purport to be giving history from before the Babylonian captivity—accounts that the biblical minimalists sought to dismiss as fictional.
In response to the discovery at Tel Miqne, Niels Peter Lemche suggested that the inscription was a forgery. But his suggestion has been almost universally rejected by the international scholarly community.
The sixth chapter of Eric H. Cline, “Biblical Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction” (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), which tells the story of the discoveries at Tel Dan and Tel Miqne and on which this column is substantially though not exclusively based, bears the title “The 1990s and beyond: from nihilism to the present.” He plainly views the minimalists as, well, nihilistic. “The discovery of the Tel Miqne/Ekron Inscription,” Professor Cline writes, “represents one of the few times that an inscription has been found which definitively identifies an archaeological site with a specific ancient city. It is the type of discovery that most biblical archaeologists can only dream about.”
(This should be noted by critics of the Book of Mormon, by the way, who commonly demand that Latter-day Saints produce inscriptions expressly identifying the ruins of Nephite cities such as Zarahemla and Bountiful. If such explicit identifications are rarely found in the intensively studied world of biblical archaeology, they are even less likely to be available from the pre-Columbian Americas, which have received nowhere near the same level of archaeological scrutiny.)
Latter-day Saints, I think, are not committed to notions of biblical infallibility, and little if anything of central importance to the Restoration rises or falls on the credibility of specific details of pre-Captivity Israelite history. Whether Hazael did or did not kill the kings Joram and Ahaziah, whether Tel Miqne really is ancient Ekron, makes no difference to our confidence in the founding events of this last dispensation or to our trust in God and our hope for eternal life. Still, it should strengthen our faith in the promises of the ancient biblical narrative to know that the Bible cannot simply be dismissed as a product of creative fiction and ancient propaganda.
Translations of the ancient Dan inscription by Avraham Biran and Andre Lemaire are conveniently available in the Wikipedia article entitled “Tel Dan stele.” A classic article whose relevance to this column will be quickly apparent is William J. Hamblin, “Basic Methodological Problems with the Anti-Mormon Approach to the Geography and Archaeology of the Book of Mormon,” in the “Journal of Book of Mormon Studies” 2/1 (1993): 161–97, which is conveniently available online at https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1024&context=jbms.
Finally, it must be said, in fairness to Niels Peter Lemche, that forgeries are far from unknown in biblical archaeological circles. For examples of such frauds, see pages 115-129 in Professor Cline’s book. Nevertheless, his accusations of forgery appear to have been transparently driven by ideology and, particularly in retrospect, seem far too facile.
