The Historical David in Ancient Inscriptions

Dewayne Bryant, Ph.D.

Inspiration of the BibleArchaeolog

David is one of the most significant figures in the Bible. He rose to power from obscurity, surviving repeated attempts on his life and later carving out a prominent kingdom in the Levant. His adventures have prompted television adaptations and inspired movies. His psalms have encouraged and comforted millions of believers for thousands of years. His moral failures have served as cautionary tales warning readers about the disastrous consequences of yielding to temptation.

Christians may hear claims that David is no more real than the legendary King Arthur. As with many other biblical persons, the king has come under assault by those who would consign him to the realm of legend, if not fiction. Critics known as “biblical minimalists” question the historical value of the Bible, generally dismissing all of the claims made by the text unless they can be corroborated by indisputable physical evidence. To them, David and his son Solomon were nothing more than a couple of petty chieftains occupying a tiny piece of hill country. Two famous monuments offer evidence that refutes popular attempts to deny the historicity of David and his kingdom.

The first artifact is the Mesha Stele. This black basalt victory monument commemorates Moab’s successful rebellion against the Northern Kingdom of Israel around 850 B.C. Discovered in Dhiban, Jordan in 1868, the Mesha Stele records the achievements of the Moabite king Mesha. This monarch established his capital city at Dibon, asserted his independence from the northern kingdom of Israel after Ahab’s death, defeated the Israelite army, and captured or reclaimed several cities under Israelite control. The inscription includes several details that align with the biblical account in 2 Kings 3, as well as numerous references to biblical figures, including Omri, the tribe of Gad, and the covenant name of God, Yahweh.1

The Mesha Stele refers to the “house of dwd,” which scholars have interpreted as the “House of David.” The renowned epigrapher André Lemaire (among others) reads the inscription this way.2 The phrase is a reference to the Southern Kingdom of Judah (“house” meaning “dynasty”) and thus identifies David as the founder of the ruling dynasty at the time. Although the reference seems straightforward, biblical minimalists have proposed alternate interpretations. One suggestion is that the term could refer to an as-yet-undiscovered “temple of Dwd,”3 while another posits that the word dwd refers to an otherwise unknown deity named Dod.4 Others claim that the phrase refers to a town5 or city-state.6 These suggestions have no supporting evidence, and most members of the scholarly community have dismissed them.7

Biblical minimalist Philip Davies argued that the term dwd could be translated as “beloved,” “uncle,” or “kettle,” calling these suggestions more “plausible” than translating the term as the name David.8 The vast majority of scholars roundly disagree with Davies’ bizarre suggestion. The late Anson Rainey, a giant in the academic field of ancient epigraphy (the study of ancient inscriptions), stated that Davies was an “amateur” in this area who could “safely be ignored.”9

The second significant mention of the historical David is found in the Tel Dan inscription, which was discovered in 1993 in excavations at the biblical city of Dan. Surveyor Gila Cook, working under the renowned Israeli archaeologist Avraham Biran, discovered the first fragment of the inscription by chance. She noticed it on a stone fragment from a monument smashed in antiquity and reused as building material for a wall outside the city gate. Efforts to locate additional fragments uncovered two more pieces in the summer of 1994.

The Tel Dan inscription is one of the most significant discoveries in the history of biblical archaeology. It appears to have been authored by Hazael of Aram-Damascus (842-796 B.C.), although his name does not appear in the inscription.10 Some of the text is damaged, but the most significant portion may be reconstructed as, “[I killed Jeho]ram son [of Ahab] king of Israel, and [I] killed [Ahaz]yahu son of [Jehoram kin]g of the House of David.” This interpretation fits with the biblical timeline, although the Bible says Jehu was responsible for the demise of the two monarchs (2 Kings 9:14-28). Given that ancient kings tended to exaggerate or even propagandize their accomplishments, Hazael likely attempted to claim credit for Jehoram’s and Ahaziah’s deaths. André Lemaire points out that at least one Assyrian king did something very similar, taking credit for killing someone when another source ascribed the deed to a group of Assyrian nobles.11 This is just one of several such examples known to scholars.12 Hazael was neither the first nor the last politician to take credit for someone else’s work.

At a time when skeptics in academia had made significant attacks on the historicity of biblical figures, the Tel Dan inscription helped establish David’s existence as a fact of history. It is significant enough that even Israeli archaeologist Israel Finkelstein, who often displays considerable skepticism toward the Bible’s reliability, would write, “The mention of the ‘House of David’ in the Tel Dan inscription from the ninth century B.C.E. leaves no doubt that David and Solomon were historical figures.”13 Elsewhere, he says, “the Tel Dan inscription provides an independent witness to the historical existence of a dynasty founded by a ruler named David, from just a few generations after the era in which he presumably lived.”14

The “House of X” (with “X” representing the name of a dynasty’s founder) was a common way of referring to Semitic kingdoms in the early first millennium B.C. In contemporary examples, Assyrian records referred to the Northern Kingdom as the “House of Omri” for well over a century when the Omride dynasty held power in Israel. Additional examples of the same practice appear in ancient Aram and Babylon.15 Still other examples include the North Syrian kingdom of Arpad (the “House of Agusi”) and the kingdom of Damascus (the “House of Hazael”).16 The Mesha Stele and Tel Dan Inscriptions follow standard practice in their references to the Southern Kingdom and the Davidic dynasty.

Attempts to interpret the “House of David” as anything other than the kingdom of the biblical monarch go against the clear meaning of the inscriptions and essentially function as arguments from silence. There is no temple of Dwd, no deity named Dod, and no urban center identified as “Beth-Dwd” known to scholars. These suggestions are flawed attempts to avoid the obvious implications of the name, which is that a real king named David ruled a small but important kingdom in the Levant and that the dynasty he founded continued to rule in Judah for many years after his death.

Ancient people were in a far better position to comment on the existence of the historical David than contemporary scholars. Inscriptions mentioning the “House of David” were carved when the Davidic dynasty still ruled in Judah. Modern authors are two and a half millennia removed from that time and have only limited evidence. Furthermore, the most vocal critics exhibit easily-detected prejudices against the biblical text. Although the references to David’s dynasty do not mention specific events of his life, they do indicate that the ancients saw him as a historical figure.

Scholars make no attempt to discover the birthplaces of Uther or Merlin. They do not search for Avalon or try to determine where Arthur held court at Camelot. Excavators do not entertain any notions of finding the remains of the Round Table or the stone that held the fabled Excalibur. All of these things are the stuff of fantasy. By contrast, archaeologists can identify the town of David’s birth, excavate the city where he ruled, and read his name in ancient inscriptions. Unlike the legendary king of the Britons, scholars have convincingly shown David to be a man of history. To argue otherwise says less about the Israelite king and more about the biases of the modern critic.

Endnotes

1 K.A.D. Smelik, trans. (2000), “The Inscription of King Mesha,” in The Context of Scripture, ed. William W. Hallo and K. Lawson Younger (Leiden: Brill), pp. 137-138.

2 See André Lemaire (1994), “‘House of David’ Restored in Moabite Inscription,” Biblical Archaeology Review, 20:30-37.

3 Thomas L. Thompson (2004), The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel (New York: Basic Books), p. 204. See also Thompson (1995), “‘House of David’: An Eponymic Reference to Yahweh as Godfather,” Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament, 9:74.

4 See Kenneth A. Kitchen (1997), “A Possible Mention of David in the Late Tenth Century BCE, and Deity *Dod as Dead as the Dodo?” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, 76:29-44.

5 Philip R. Davies (1994), “‘House of David’ Built on Sand: The Sins of the Biblical Maximizers,” Biblical Archaeology Review, 20[4]:54-55.

6 F.H. Cryer (1994), “On the Recently Discovered ‘House of David’ Inscription,” Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament,8[1]:3-19.

7 See James K. Hoffmeier (1995), “Current Issues in Archaeology; The Recently Discovered Tell Dan Inscription: Controversy & Confirmation,” Archaeology in the Biblical World, 3:14, Summer.

8 Davies, 20[4]:54-55.

9 Anson F. Rainey (1994), “The ‘House of David’ and the House of the Deconstructionists,” Biblical Archaeology Review, 20[6]:47.

10 Alan Millard, trans. (2000), “The Tel Dan Stele,” in The Context of Scripture, ed. William W. Hallo and K. Lawson Younger (Leiden: Brill), pp. 161-162.

11 André Lemaire (1998), “The Tel Dan Stela as a Piece of Royal Historiography,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, 81:10.

12 Kenneth A. Kitchen (2003), On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans), p. 510, n.77.

13 Israel Finkelstein (2007), “King Solomon’s Golden Age: History or Myth?,” in The Quest for the Historical Israel, ed. Brian B. Schmidt (Leiden: Brill), pp. 114-115.

14 Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman (2006), David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible’s Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition (New York: Free Press), p. 266.

15 Gary A. Rendsburg (1995), “On the Writing bytdwd in the Aramaic Inscription from Tel Dan,” Israel Exploration Journal, 45[1]:22-25.

16 Nadav Na’aman (1995), “Beth-David in the Aramaic Stela from Tel Dan,” Biblische Notizen, 79:17-24.

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