WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: A Jerusalem Post article this week says new imaging techniques reveal faint letters in the famed Mesha Stele, confirming that the formerly only partially visible words say “House of David.” There’s controversy, natch, but it credibly adds confirmation that King David was real.
And On This Rock … New Confirmation of the Mesha Stele’s Mentioning of “House of David”
We didn’t need Indiana Jones, whose movies we loved, to interest us Jews of today in archeology of Bible times. The key biblical figure around whom controversy still swirls strongly today is David. Was he real (one skeptical archeologist had said he suspected that King David had been as real as King Arthur), and, if real, was he tribal chieftain, dynasty founder or King? Does new analysis of the much-analyzed Mesha Stele, subject this week of a Jerusalem Post article, reveal Moabite letters, heretofore too faint to be read, that complete the spelling out of “House of David,” or do they spell out something else? Delve with me this week into this latest chapter in the controversy surrounding the historicity of our Hebrew Bible’s king of kings.
For openers, we don’t need the Mesha Stele to make the case that King David was real. A different ninth century BCE foreign king’s stele found at Tel Dan in northern Israel, that mentions “House of David” in the unequivocal context of his killing of a Judahite king, accomplishes that. And pile on what’s likely King David’s fabled Jerusalem palace and finds at Khirbet Qeiyafa and Tel Zayit, and you have a substantial, literate, militarily strong Jerusalem-based Israelite kingdom in the tenth century BCE, the time and place of King David.
Note that what the Damascus-based enemy King Hazael wrote on the Tel Dan Stele in Aramaic in stone was “House of David,” not “King David.” But that makes it even more meaningful in terms of kingly significance. In Judah, there was a dynasty founded by David. And when you’re out to document your historicity from less-than-endearing sentiments an enemy king has written about you in stone, wouldn’t it be nice to cite two such inscriptions, written just a century after your time by two enemy kings of two enemy countries lying in two different directions that don’t even speak the same tongue? Hence, the pedigree significance of the Mesha Stele, written east of the Dead Sea by a Moabite king, not in Aramaic but in Moabitic or Moabrew or whatever they called it.
And now the fun begins. This week’s Jerusalem Post Post-staff article, Written Records of Biblical King David Discovered by Researchers, 1/12/23, gushes in breathless present tense:
*** “… researchers have only now been able to verify with a considerable degree of certainty that the stele contains explicit reference to King David”;
*** “… However, until today, scholars could not be entirely sure that these references of King David were being correctly deciphered”;
*** “Until now, only the first and fourth letters of the series [btdwd] bet and waw were completely clear.” [emphasis added, but not by much]
But this may not really have been Breaking News. Question first, present tense. The Mesha Stele was discovered in 1868 and has long been in the Louvre. Its Jones-worthy history is recounted in a remarkable 2019 Times of Israel article, High-Tech Study of Ancient Stone Suggests New Proof of King David’s Dynasty. Bedouins found it in what’s today Jordan, and it got smashed and distributed among tribesmen, but before that an archeologist had made a “squeeze” of it, a wet paper impression pressed into “every nook and cranny of carved stone.” Both stone and squeeze ended up in the Louvre. Examiners guessed at the full text of the key five letters in line 31, of which only two were readable, the first and fourth, “b” and “w.” In 1992 French philologist and epigrapher Andre Lamaire, not having to buy a vowel, proposed that “b**w*” was “btdwd,” i.e., “House of David.” TOI noted: “A lucky find came on the heels of Lemaire’s proposal: a second inscription, almost exactly the spelling of his hypothesized House of David, on a stone from the same period found at Tel Dan.”
In 2015 and 2018 scientists used new RTI lighting technology, which made all five of those key line 31 characters readable. From this, Israeli archeologist Finkelstein, who had written in The Bible Unearthed that the Tel Dan inscription furnished “dramatic evidence of the fame of the Davidic dynasty less than a hundred years after the reign of David’s son Solomon” and “clear evidence that the reputation of David was not a literary invention of a much later period,” nevertheless “dismissed” Lamaire’s Mesha Stele House of David reading and instead proposed that it referred to a Moabite king, Balack. But one scoffer of that suggested why not Bilbo or Barack? (Long student that I am of the Tolkien Stele, I’ll go with Bilbo as my second choice.) Lamaire stuck to his House of David interpretation and, per this week’s Jerusalem Post article, continues to do so.
The Times of Israel article interviewed epigrapher and historian Michael Langlois, who “has spent years poring over these lines of text,” using the new technology, and who confirmed to TOI that based upon his character-by-character analysis of the fully revealed characters, “the House of David as the most likely reading of the line being looked at.” He added: “The new imaging technology that we have confirms the reading of Beit David,” and “It’s a good thing when science can confirm a hypothesis.”
By me, it’s a good thing too when archeology, revealing and objectively analyzing what’s written in stone, can confirm the historicity of our Jewish people’s biblical kingdoms, and not least that King David, unlike King Arthur, was real.
Regards,
J**r*
PS: There’s a lot more, really exciting stuff, to all this, of course. For a long time, remains from tenth century BCE Jerusalem, the time and place of King David, were depressingly sparse. And then findings came in a rush, some big ones while I was writing my book, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine. You can pick up a copy (don’t get the Kindle version) on Amazon or Abe. A tip to the price-conscious buyer: The “used” ones that I signed go for less than the ones that I didn’t. J.