On July 21, 1993, an archaeological team from the Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion in Jerusalem was doing excavations at the site of the ancient city of Dan, located at the foot of Mount Hermon in northern Israel. The team led by Avraham Biran had been toiling since early morning, sifting debris in a stone paved plaza outside what had been the city’s main gate. One of the surveyors discovered a flattened basalt stone protruding from the ground with what seemed to be Aramaic letters engraved into its surface. This stone fragment, known as fragment A, was determined to be part of a larger stele that had been smashed in antiquity. In June of the following year, the members of the team found two more inscribed stone fragments, designated B1 and B2. All the three stone fragments belonged to the same monument. Fragment B2 can be joined to the bottom of B1 and together they seem to be the left side of a portion of the stele, while fragment A is the right side. There is a gap between fragments B1 and B2. There are a few intervening letters or words missing for fragment A. B1 and B2 contain eight partial lines of text while fragment A contains thirteen partial lines. The inscription is written in Aramaic and is clearly legible with almost all words separated by a dot between the words.
The archaeological site where the city of Dan was located was inhabited at least since the fifth millennium BC and sometime during the fourth millennium the site seems to have been abandoned for nearly a thousand years after which it was settled once more during the third millennium BC. One of the most impressive remains from this period uncovered by archaeologists is a triple-arched, mud brick gate. There is also archaeological evidence that points to the destruction of the city during the twelfth century BC – destruction that was possibly related to the conquest of the area by the Israelite tribe of Dan which is mentioned in Joshua 19:40-48 and Judges 18. Around the middle of the eleventh century, the city was destroyed again but was soon rebuilt. During the ninth century, according to 1 Kings 15:16-20, Ben Hadad, King of Aram-Damascus invaded Israel and among the cities he conquered was Dan. The city recovered but it continued to face threats from Ben-Hadad and his successor Hazael until the beginning of the eighth century when the Arameans were defeated by the Assyrians. When Assyria conquered the northern kingdom of Israel in the latter half of the eighth century BC, the city of Dan fell to the Assyrians, as evidenced by a destruction layer caused by fire dated to the second half of the eighth century.
The discovery of fragment A in 1993 created a sensation because of its reference to the “House of David.” Never before had the familiar name of Judah’s ancient warrior king, an important figure of the Hebrew Bible and according to the Christian Scriptures, an ancestor of Jesus, been found in the records of antiquity outside the Bible. For long, skeptical scholars had asserted that David was merely a legend who was invented much like the rest of Israel’s biblical history by Hebrew scribes shortly after Israel’s Babylonian exile. David and other heroes of the Hebrew Bible, according to these skeptics, were about as historical as King Arthur and there was no literary criterion for believing David to be more historical than Joshua, or Joshua to be more historical than Abraham or Abraham to be more historical than Adam.
This was the first time, however, that any reference to the royal name “David” or “House of David” had been found in any inscription or extra-biblical fragments. But a minority of scholars contended that Biran and his colleague Joseph Naveh, a paleographer at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem who had helped decipher the inscription, had mistranslated the fragments. One skeptic asserted that the stele did not refer to David or his dynasty but to the house of Dod – probably a Canaanite god but no one has ever heard one by that name. Some even suggested that it was intended to signify a place rather than a person or a dynasty while others asserted without offering any evidence that the inscriptions were modern forgeries that had been planted at the Dan site. But in spite of these challenges, most scholars and archaeologists have concluded that “house of David” is the most plausible reading of the text. The discovery of two additional fragments (B1 and B2) of the stele added further credibility to Biran’s initial interpretation. Those pieces contained the names of two defeated monarchs: Jehoram, king of Israel, and Ahaziah, king of Judah, both of whom ruled in the middle of the ninth century BC. Some scholars now believe that the battle commemorated on the stele may have been described in 2 Chronicles 22:5 in which Ahaziah “went with Jehoram son of King Ahab of Israel to make war against King Hazael of Aram.”
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