For those who don't know, in 1993 an Israeli archaeologist named Avraham Biran found a shattered stele at Tel Dan in northern Israel. A total of 3 fragments were found and on one of them, in ancient Aramaic, was written: Bit Dwd - which Biran translated as "House of David." Fundies across the trailer parks of the south promptly came in their pants declaring that the "bible" had thus been "proven." Well, not so fast.
In 2003 George Athas, who I believe is Australian, wrote his PH. D. dissertation on the stele and subsequently re-worked it into a book. It is exhaustive and painstaking and spends as much time dealing with the physical artifact as with the text. Athas literally goes over the formation of each letter but there is more.
Athas makes the perfectly obvious view (in retrospect....I had never given this any thought) that the scribe's duty was to write the inscription out on the stone in ink. Then the engraver comes along with his hammer and chisel and uses the ink as a template and carves the letters. Scribes did not do the inscribing themselves. There would have been no need for the inscriber to even be literate. What was needed was good dexterity.
With this idea Athas determined the position of the scribe when writing out the inscription was at the lower edge and he was leaning over the stele to write the lines at the top. There is a slight curvature in the writing because of this positioning and the curve decreases as the scribe moves further down the stele, i.e., he is not having to stretch so far.
Here is why this is important. Avraham Biran put the three fragments he found more or less together and read the inscription in that manner. Athas, using his physical re-construction of the lines, disputes this.
In effect there are two major findings from Athas' work. One, the fragments were not side-by-side in the original stele. Rather, fragment "B" was much lower down on the stele than fragment "A". Right there, the original translations are in trouble. The continuity which Biran wanted in his story simply does not exist.
The second point which Athas deals with is bitdwd itself - which he translates as baytdwd but it doesn't matter. What matters is that everyone, even Biran, agreed we were dealing with an Aramaic text and Aramaic uses word dividers, unlike Hebrew. The word divider ( a dot ) appears all over the rest of the inscription but not between those two critical words ( bit or bayt = House and dvd = David). Athas' conclusion is that this makes it a toponym; a place name rather than a confirmation of any sort of "dynasty." So rather than being an actual person Dvd could simply be some sort of mythic figure in much the same way that the city of Rome was named for Romulus and Athens for Athena.
In all good conscience I can't recommend that anyone actually read Athas' book. When I said it was painstaking put the emphasis on the PAIN. You'd have to be a real archaeology geek to wade through it. However, here is a very fair review of the book which spells out the issues and calls Athas' conclusions "largely compelling."
http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/JHS/reviews/review263.htm
I made a scan of the translation of Fragment A. Biran's translation is available all over the web. The differences are obvious when one moves Fragment "B" back to its original location.
[img]![[Image: TelDan_Athas.jpg]](https://images.weserv.nl/?url=i4.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fy108%2Frschilla%2Fresearch%2FTelDan_Athas.jpg)
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The writing inside the brackets [ ] are guesses, there is no legible text to support them.
In 2003 George Athas, who I believe is Australian, wrote his PH. D. dissertation on the stele and subsequently re-worked it into a book. It is exhaustive and painstaking and spends as much time dealing with the physical artifact as with the text. Athas literally goes over the formation of each letter but there is more.
Athas makes the perfectly obvious view (in retrospect....I had never given this any thought) that the scribe's duty was to write the inscription out on the stone in ink. Then the engraver comes along with his hammer and chisel and uses the ink as a template and carves the letters. Scribes did not do the inscribing themselves. There would have been no need for the inscriber to even be literate. What was needed was good dexterity.
With this idea Athas determined the position of the scribe when writing out the inscription was at the lower edge and he was leaning over the stele to write the lines at the top. There is a slight curvature in the writing because of this positioning and the curve decreases as the scribe moves further down the stele, i.e., he is not having to stretch so far.
Here is why this is important. Avraham Biran put the three fragments he found more or less together and read the inscription in that manner. Athas, using his physical re-construction of the lines, disputes this.
In effect there are two major findings from Athas' work. One, the fragments were not side-by-side in the original stele. Rather, fragment "B" was much lower down on the stele than fragment "A". Right there, the original translations are in trouble. The continuity which Biran wanted in his story simply does not exist.
The second point which Athas deals with is bitdwd itself - which he translates as baytdwd but it doesn't matter. What matters is that everyone, even Biran, agreed we were dealing with an Aramaic text and Aramaic uses word dividers, unlike Hebrew. The word divider ( a dot ) appears all over the rest of the inscription but not between those two critical words ( bit or bayt = House and dvd = David). Athas' conclusion is that this makes it a toponym; a place name rather than a confirmation of any sort of "dynasty." So rather than being an actual person Dvd could simply be some sort of mythic figure in much the same way that the city of Rome was named for Romulus and Athens for Athena.
In all good conscience I can't recommend that anyone actually read Athas' book. When I said it was painstaking put the emphasis on the PAIN. You'd have to be a real archaeology geek to wade through it. However, here is a very fair review of the book which spells out the issues and calls Athas' conclusions "largely compelling."
http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/JHS/reviews/review263.htm
Quote:The Tel Dan Inscription is, undeniably, a scholarly tour de force, subverting virtually all previous scholarship on the text. The author’s assertions are wide-ranging and provocative, and even in the rare cases when not entirely convincing they are nevertheless imaginative. At a minimum, it is difficult to argue with Athas’s determination that Fragment B is to be placed well below Fragment A rather than immediately to its left, meaning that most of the previous scholarship on the inscription, based on the current arrangement, is misleading. The amount of data that confronts the reader in this volume can be overwhelming and even exhausting (the sheer volume of information doubtless explains the sporadic typographical errors and problems in phrasing), but navigating through it is a richly rewarding experience. All subsequent work on the Tel Dan inscription will have to contend with this monumental treatment.
Daniel Miller
Bishop’s University
I made a scan of the translation of Fragment A. Biran's translation is available all over the web. The differences are obvious when one moves Fragment "B" back to its original location.
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[/img]The writing inside the brackets [ ] are guesses, there is no legible text to support them.
