I certainly agree that Avriham Biran got overly excited when he spotted the partial term DWD on the stele and failed to note the missing word divider which is customary in Aramaic and which is demonstrated extensively on the surviving portions of the stele. All one has to do is look at it.
In regards to the alignment I recommend to you George Athas' "The Tel Dan Stele." Athas does a pain staking (emphasis on the 'pain') analysis of the way the inscription was written out and then carved. He even detects the position of the scribe relative to the stone slab by calculating the angle that the lines decline. It's amazingly detailed work and reading it you risk injury because if you fall asleep you might smash your head on a table. But the point is that Athas detects a differential in the angle of decline on the 3 fragments and he disagrees with Biran's reconstruction. The two main fragments do not go side by side. Instead, fragment b should be located well below fragment a. Obviously, this plays havoc with Biran's translation.
As far as the growth of "Jerusalem" ( or Bytdwd, if you prefer ) try this.
http://www.academia.edu/1070653/The_Sett...turies_BCE
In regards to the alignment I recommend to you George Athas' "The Tel Dan Stele." Athas does a pain staking (emphasis on the 'pain') analysis of the way the inscription was written out and then carved. He even detects the position of the scribe relative to the stone slab by calculating the angle that the lines decline. It's amazingly detailed work and reading it you risk injury because if you fall asleep you might smash your head on a table. But the point is that Athas detects a differential in the angle of decline on the 3 fragments and he disagrees with Biran's reconstruction. The two main fragments do not go side by side. Instead, fragment b should be located well below fragment a. Obviously, this plays havoc with Biran's translation.
As far as the growth of "Jerusalem" ( or Bytdwd, if you prefer ) try this.
Quote:CONCLUSION
In the case of Jerusalem and Judah in the 8th and 7th centuries B.C.,archaeology speaks loud and clear: A) The expansion of the city to the southwestern hill and the settlement prosperity in the Judahite country-side did not start before the middle of the 8th century and reached their peak in the last third of that century. B) The population growth in Jerusalem and Judah was so dramatic that it cannot be explained as representing a gradual, natural growth. Remote, mountainous Judah does not offer any economic advantage that could have attracted people from neighboring regions. Therefore, the only way to interpret the demographic transformation of Judah is on the background of the incorporation of the kingdom into the Assyrian world economy and the wave of refugees that came from the Northern Kingdom after the Assyrian takeover. The results of the archaeological surveys and information about about the places where the Assyrians settled deportees from Mesopotamia seem to indicate that the Israelite refugees who settled in Judah originated mainly from southern Samaria.Whoever argues that the population explosion in Jerusalem was theresult of a torrent of refugees who arrived from the Shephelah followingthe Sennacherib devastation in 701 B.C. and that these refugees returnedto their hometowns a while later faces three problems: First, thismeans that the city-wall unearthed in the southwestern hill was built inthe days of Manasseh, with Assyrian consent. Second, such a claim dis-connects the growth in Jerusalem from that in the entire territory of Judah because there can be no doubt that the Shephelah reached its peak prosperity before the Sennacherib campaign. Such a theory, even if pos-sible archaeologically (the pottery of Lachish III continued to dominate the Judahite repertoire in the early 7th century), is untenable historically.Third, if this had been the case, we would have seen a settlement recov-ery in the Shephelah during the 7 th century.
http://www.academia.edu/1070653/The_Sett...turies_BCE
