In his ongoing engagement with Jim West over matters pertaining to historiography and the value, if any, of biblical narratives for historical reconstruction, Joe Cathey has posted two substantial blog entries about the Tel Dan stele: “Item Two in Jim’s Evidence List” and “Tel Dan – A Response.” The “response” is to Jim West’s post “Evidence that Demands a Verdict?” Kevin Edgecomb has also chimed in with a discussion of “‘House of David’ and BYTDWD.” As usual, I find myself somewhere between Jim and Joe on these matters (but if Joe pulls a gun and Jim starts spouting Zwingliisms, I’m outta here).

Let’s begin with Joe’s first post. Joe gives us some nice photos of the stele, highlighting ביתדוד, the phrase that attracts much attention. Joe briefly discusses and rejects the reading of ביתדוד as “house (i.e., temple) of (a deity named) Dod,” and he quotes Larry Mykytiuk as writing that “the name itself as a D[ivine ]N[ame] (italics the author’s) remains a hypothesis brought in to explain these texts, rather than an independently known reality.” I wonder if that is entirely true. I think there may be one tiny scrap of evidence roughly contemporary with the Tel Dan stele that might attest to “Dod” as a divine name or epithet ( דוד can mean “uncle,” and “Uncle” could potentially be a divine title). That scrap of evidence is the line on the Mesha stele where Mesha boats of having brought back the אריאל דודה, “fire-heart of his dod,” from Ataroth. Klaus Smelik (COS 2.23) seems to think that אריאל דודה here is “some cultic device” (though how he knows that I have no clue) and that “Possibly, ‘Uncle’ was a divine name or title.” So the case for reading דוד as a divine name or epithet in the Tel Dan stele is not totally without some little corroboration. I don’t think that reading ביתדוד as “temple of [the god] Dod” is correct, but it is not a hypothesis that lacks data from elsewhere.

For his part, Jim mentions other possibilities:

Or, what if the word intended was actually “pot” or “copper kettle”? And what if the inscription simply describes the “pot house”. After all, the fragmentary nature of the inscription allows a whole range of possibilities which not only are not discussed, but dismissed a priori! In other words, lots of interpretive options are ignored in favor of one singular possibility.

Jim, the reason that ביתדוד as “pot house” is “not discussed” or even “dismissed a prior” is that it’s silly. דוד as “pot” or “copper kettle” in this context simply makes no sense. The “speaking voice” in this inscription—who is not Hadad, as Jim suggests, but some anonymous Aramean king (Hadad is clearly a divine name)—is clearly boasting about having killed someone:

וקתל[ת אית אחז]יהו בר [יורם מל]ך ביתדוד

Just in case any of my readers don’t understand the significance of the punctuation, let me mention that the text within square brackets is not actually readable on the stone. Nevertheless, it’s reasonably clear that the first word in the sequence is a form of the verb “to kill,” that -yahu is the end of a name, that the name of “Whoeveryahu’s” father follows “son of,” and the letter before ביתדוד is a כ. In COS Alan Millard seems to suggest the reconstruction ואהפך “and I overthrew” instead of the suggestion above (which I got from Schniedewind’s Accordance module but I think might be traceable to Lemaire). However, Millard’s “son of [I overthr]ew the house of David” makes no sense, while Schniedewind’s (?) “son of [Joram kin]g of ביתדוד” makes considerably better sense.

Joe goes on to quote Mykytiuk’s opinion that the correct reading of ביתדוד is “House of David” and that this is a reference to the kingdom of Judah. I’m not sure that a hard-and-fast distinction between בית + PN as a dynastic reference (per Larry Mykytiuk) and בית + PN as a geographical reference (as Kevin Edgecomb urges) is really necessary.

Jim thinks that the Tel Dan stele shows that “In my estimation it only proves 2 things. That someone was named דוד and that he had a בית, and that’s all. Oh, and that Hadad kicked his behind when he ‘ruled over Israel’.” Jim, Jim, Jim. You really must read more carefully, my friend! Hadad is not the speaking voice in the Tel Dan stele. Hadad is the god to whom that speaking voice gives credit. Also, the boasting Aramean king does not claim to have defeated דוד. He claims to have defeated “Somebodyahu” son of somebody else; “Somebodyahu’s” relationship to ביתדוד can apparently be described with a word that ends in a כ, and מלך (“king”) is a very good candidate. In my estimation, the Tel Dan stele tells us (among several other interesting things) that a ninth-century Aramean claimed to have inflicted military defeats on ישראל and ביתדוד—Israel and the House of David. In this context, “the House of David” can hardly be a reference to anything other than the kingdom of Judah and/or its ruling dynasty. Nothing else—not a deity named Dod and certainly not a kettle—makes real sense here. This Aramean king seems to have believed that there was a critically important king named דוד who founded a kingdom or dynasty with which that Aramean now found himself in conflict. If the reading “House of David” for ביתדוד is correct, as I accept, then the Tel Dan stele does reveal that there was a ninth-century kingdom (of Judah, as we would call it) that traced itself back to a ruler named David.

Now, I would not want to go too much farther than that on the strength of the Tel Dan stele alone. Jim writes, “we are told over and again that Tel Dan ‘proves’ this historical narrative of the Bible.” That, of course, is going too far. While I do think the Tel Dan stele does tell us that King David of Judah was not purely imaginary, it certainly doesn’t tell us anything else about his biography. It doesn’t “confirm” or “prove” 1-2 Samuel, but I think it does show that at least one of their main characters is based on a real human being.

By the way, it is incumbent upon me to mention that if the reading “House of David” for ביתדוד is correct, this stele claims an Aramean victory over Israel and Judah at around the same time. This is not something we read about in the biblical book of Kings. If the reconstruction “[And I killed Jo]ram son of A[hab] king of Israel and I kill[ed Ahazi]yahu son of [Joram kin]g of the house of David” is correct, then we have a claim here that an Aramean king killed Joram and Ahaziah—not Jehu, as reported in 2 Kings. The Tel Dan stele is, therefore, a “double-edged sword” when wielded in a discussion of the historical value of the Former Prophets.

Note: The following comments were left on this post when it was hosted at Blogger.

Kevin wrote:

Very nice, Chris!

Let me clarify that my objection to the “Bīt-PN” formation being reference to a dynasty in the Assyrian, at least, should be borne out by KUR/mat determinatives in the Akkadian texts themselves, which I’ll have to go dig up. I don’t recall the Ashurnasirpal or Shalmaneser texts being sloppy with determinatives, but we’ll see, as I haven’t looked at those since before the Tel Dan discovery. Unfortunately, we do not have such determinatives for the Aramaic data, scant as it is, but it is much more likely, indeed almost as likely as certain, that the Assyrian usage is a direct reflection of the Aramean practice.

Also, we should remain aware that with Bīt-PN usage, we do not have any explicit evidence that the Assyrians or Arameans actually considered these various PNs to be founders of dynasties. That is an artifact of the secondary literature, apparently primarily in biblical studies and based upon the persistence of Bīt-Humri, as I recall. I’ll try to track that down over the weekend. I think Tadmor mentioned it (my first year of Akkadian was in parallel to a History of Israel class Tadmor taught here at Berkeley while visiting; I had him sign our textbook, his then-new Anchor Bible II Kings! I felt like such a groupie!). If I don’t have copies of the transcriptions and transliterations at home anymore, I’ll make a library trip.

Ach. Rainy library weekend.

Jim wrote:

Just a reminder- it is, in fact, the god who kicks the butt.

Good post though, Melancthon. And what’s with this “spouting Zwinglisms”…. It almost sounds like you think that might be a bad thing!

Have a great weekend.

Kevin wrote:

I’ve made a quick jaunt through Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia: Assyrian Period vols. 2 and 3, covering 112-745 BC, with interesting findings.

The expected construction of KUR.É-PN, which would read mat bīt-PN, literally “land of the house of PN”, is actually quite rare in the two volumes mentioned, though it does start showing up more often toward the end (cf. Rendsburg 25, on ever-increasing Aramaic influence; I concur). Much more common is the phrase [I'll have to use ^...^ to indicate superscript, as the blog comments won't accept the sup tag!] ^m^PN1 DUMU PN2 (^m^PN1 mār PN2), the most common example of which is (and which I am sick of seeing by now!) ^m^a-hu-nu DUMU a-di-ni: Ahunu son of Adin. Because the determinatives are not consistently used, but are used nonetheless, we do know that in this case, Adin is a Mr. Adin, not a name-place. In one case, even, the name is marked as female, that of the Haluppe (see A.0.99.2, line 114) of Bīt-Haluppe, and is not elsewhere otherwise marked as male, indicating this eponymous person was a lady! [For those to whom some of the above is mysterious, the superscript m represents the determinative for a male's name, the uppercase indicates that Sumerian logograms are used, and lowercase italics, indicate Akkadian syllabic signs are used.]

Anyhow, it’s in the wider body of the inscriptions where we learn that each of these “…son of PN” usages occur in cases where the PN is that found in the Bīt-PN construction, and so they’re generally translated (at least in these two volumes by Grayson) “PN1 of Bīt-PN2″ throughout, or something similar, even though that could be misleading.

Of those I noted, the Bīt- names that are explicitly marked as belonging to persons, not just presumed so through usage in a “A/DUMU/mār/son of” construct-phrase, are: Adinu, Shabaia, Iahiru, Haluppe, Zamanu, Agusu, Dakkuru, Iakinu, Amukannu, Humri (=Omri of the Hebrew Bible), Habān.

Unfortunately, in no case was the first appearance of the eponymous person of the Bīt-PN preserved, it seems. That is, there’s no way to tell for what reason these various individuals were considered so important as to name a territory after them and for all future rulers of that territory to be considered their direct descendants (whether this was true or not!). Were they so designated simply because they were the first ruler in contact with the Assyrians? Or were they the founder of the local dynasty when contact was first made with the Assyrians? At least in this sampling, there’s no answer. Assyrian scribal convention depicts them as dynastic founders, whatever the real case may have been.

What does this imply for the Tel Dan stele’s mention of Bīt-Dawid? Taking the Aramean usage as equivalent with or as the origin of the Assyrian usage (see Rendsburg, 24-5, and notes), we should expect the same usage: this Dawid/David would have been conventionally considered a dynastic founder, and “PN bar-Dawid” will have been the standard way to refer to a ruler of the territory of Bīt-Dawid. From the Hebrew Bible, we do know of David as a dynastic founder, and various kings are called “son of David,” though as I noted elsewhere, “house of David” there is typically used to refer to the dynasty internally in the Hebrew Bible, not to the territory of Judah, as it is used in the Tel Dan stele.

Interesting stuff!

Larry Mykytiuk wrote:

Fascinating discussion, Chris and Kevin. I would like to offer two clarifications.

First, in paragraph 2 of your post, Chris, you observe that Joe Cathey “quotes Larry Mykytiuk as writing that ‘the name itself as a D[ivine ]N[ame] (italics the author’s) remains a hypothesis brought in to explain these texts, rather than an independently known reality.’” Clarification #1: by “an independently known reality,” I mean it is something we know—know!—because it has been ascertained as a fact from another source(s). Of course, there are possibilities, and ironically you expound one of them which I happened to mention specifically more than once in my book, _Identifying Biblical Persons in Northwest Semitic Inscriptions of 1200-539 B.C.E._ (abbreviated _IBP_), top of p. 123. But that is not something we know. I could cite several other possibilities for Dod which are not things we know (and in fact I did in _IBP_, 121-27, 129-31). For my book I painstakingly examined every available instance in which Dod might have been a DN, e.g., Ahlstrom, _Royal Administration_, p. 14, n. 27; idem, _Psalm 89_, 164-65; Stamm, “Der Name des Konigs David” in _Congress Volume Oxford 1959_, 172-73; a textual emendation in Amos 8:14, etc. (see _IBP_, pp. 122-24, nn. 70-76, and p. 129, n. 89). None of these attempts clearly establish Dod as a DN. Also, I doubt that you would want to take issue with Barstad, “Dod,” in _DDD_ or Sanmartin-Ascaso, “Dod,” in _TDOT_, who both reached a similar conclusion. Unless clear evidence to the contrary is discovered, the statement actually does stand that “the name itself as a DN remains a hypothesis brought in to explain these texts, rather than an independently known reality.” Perhaps I should have put the word _known_ in italics, too.

Second, I have long been in agreement with your final statement in the sixth paragraph of your post, Chris: “Joe goes on to quote Mykytiuk’s opinion that the correct reading of ביתדוד is “House of David” and that this is a reference to the kingdom of Judah. I’m not sure that a hard-and-fast distinction between בית [sic] + P[ersonal] N[ame] as a dynastic reference (per Larry Mykytiuk) and בית [sic] + PN as a geographical reference (as Kevin Edgecomb urges) is really necessary.” Clarification #2: I don’t exclude a geographic reference to the realm ruled by the dynasty referred to. In _IBP_, p. 125, I said, “In the Aramaic and Assyrian pattern _bit hu-um-ri-a_, the PN designated the founder of the dynasty and the phrase BYT plus PN was the term for that dynasty, which by extension became the term for the realm over which that dynasty ruled. Therefore, these are geopolitical terms, not simply GNs. Following this inscriptional pattern, DWD could hardly be anything but a PN, and BYTDWD is the term used for that person’s dynasty and realm.” I hope you can see that I read BYTDWD without making a “hard-and-fast distinction” between the two definitions that you set forth above as Mykytiuk’s view as distinguished from Edgecomb’s.

Note: in response to Kevin Edgecomb’s well-considered discussion on his blog and among the comments above, I would incorporate more nuance into the discussion of _bit_ + PN in _IBP_ if I were to write it today.

Larry Mykytiuk
History Bibliographer