The best are the Tel Dan stele and the Assyrian depiction of Lachish.
As proof of what exactly? I was not aware there is any consensus.
The Tel Dan is commemorative plaque of victories over local peoples,including "Israel" and POSSIBLY the "House of David" That certainly suggest the existence of a "House Of David",but NOTHING ELSE, certainly not the existence of a Davidic Kingdom.
More convincing archeaological evidence has shown David was probably nothing more than a local tribal chief.
What exactly is it you believe the Lachish inscriptions prove?
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The entire Wikipedia article is worth reading as a starting point,but the book is better..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bible_Unearthed
As proof of what exactly? I was not aware there is any consensus.
The Tel Dan is commemorative plaque of victories over local peoples,including "Israel" and POSSIBLY the "House of David" That certainly suggest the existence of a "House Of David",but NOTHING ELSE, certainly not the existence of a Davidic Kingdom.
More convincing archeaological evidence has shown David was probably nothing more than a local tribal chief.
What exactly is it you believe the Lachish inscriptions prove?
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
The entire Wikipedia article is worth reading as a starting point,but the book is better..
Quote:The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts[1] is a 2001 book about the archaeology of Israel and its relationship to the origins of the Hebrew Bible. The authors are Israel Finkelstein, Professor of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, and Neil Asher Silberman, a contributing editor to Archaeology Magazine.
Quote:Methodology
The authors describe their approach as one "in which the Bible is one of the most important artifacts and cultural achievements [but] not the unquestioned narrative framework into which every archaeological find must be fit." Their main contention is that
“ ...an archaeological analysis of the patriarchal, conquest, judges, and United Monarchy narratives [shows] that while there is no compelling archaeological evidence for any of them, there is clear archaeological evidence that places the stories themselves in a late 7th-century BCE context. ”
On the basis of this evidence they propose
“ ...an archaeological reconstruction of the distinct histories of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, highlighting the largely neglected history of the Omride Dynasty and attempting to show how the influence of Assyrian imperialism in the region set in motion a chain of events that would eventually make the poorer, more remote, and more religiously conservative kingdom of Judah the belated center of the cultic and national hopes of all Israel. ”
As noted by a reviewer on Salon.com[2] the approach and conclusions of The Bible Unearthed are not particularly new. Ze'ev Herzog, professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University, wrote a cover story for Ha'aretz in 1999 in which he reached similar conclusions following the same methodology; Herzog noted also that some of these findings have been accepted by the majority of biblical scholars and archaeologists for years and even decades, even though they have only recently begun to make a dent in the awareness of the general public.[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bible_Unearthed
