Some points about this inscription less well known publicly, from a passage in N.P. Lemche’s Back to Reason…..
All bolded highlighting is my own.
The inscription was linguistically without serious problems, a phenomenon Cryer noted as exceptional since no other inscription of the time and of a similar size and complexity has ever presented itself in a similarly unproblematic way; somehow they all have at least one phenomenon which has to be discussed among specialists for years. The Tel Dan inscription knows of no such problems; it is totally translatable.
The reception in those days [from 1993-94, when it was discovered] was almost universally positive, if not simply overwhelmingly positive. The only exception was the Italian specialist in Northwest Semitic languages Giovanni Garbini (1931-2017), who simply rejected the inscription as a rude falsification. Apart from a few linguistic arguments, Garbini based his rejection of the inscription on its similarity in content to, especially, the Mesha stele; it is as if you lifted the text of Tel Dan Fragment A and placed it over a similarly sized section of the Mesha inscription, an astonishing amount of identical phrases and issues appear.
The main battle over the inscription’s authenticity was, however, not fought over linguistic details; it was quite different and had to do with physical peculiarities. It is often maintained that the minimalists had to reject this inscription as genuine simply because it represented a blow to their very minimalism which rejected the historicity of King David. Those waving such opinions are unaware of two things: First of all, the Tel Dan inscription is not a proof of the existence of King David, only at best of a house of David. This is hardly a distressing surprise to the minimalists, because it is exactly what is to be expected, because there is no dearth in the Old Testament as far as references to this “house of David” go. The title “the House of David” makes David as historical as “the House of Windsor” makes Windsor a historical person, as it has been put. The second thing is that the minimalists – or not all of them – did not consider the inscription a fake from the very day of its publication. . . .
The change in attitude came late, in 1995, when Frederick Cryer returned to Copenhagen from a visit to Jerusalem where he had been at the Israel Museum with Russell Gmirkin. Gmirkin had taken a couple of perhaps not quite legal photos of the inscription. Cryer brought them back to Copenhagen for a seminar and just handed them over to me with the question: Can you see it? And it was easy to see: in the almost non-existent first line the vertical line in the “m” did, at the edge of the inscription fragment, suddenly turn to the right (it was supposed to continue in an angle to the left) – down the broken side. This means that if this is really so, the text on the slab has been engraved on it after the slab had been “produced”, which again means that it must logically be a fake inscription and not an ancient one. . . . George Athas discusses Gmirkin’s evidence but dismisses it as “scratches”, which they of course definitely are (Athas 2003, 35-9): Nobody ever said that the slippage was intentional. Finally – and it is really an ironic coincidence (?) – the problems are very clearly exposed in an unusually clear photo of the inscription by Zev Radogan printed on the cover of a book by Megan Bishop Moore and Brad E. Kelle, Biblical History and Israel’s Past (Moore and Kelle 2011).
Such problems are never discussed. It is obvious that the inscription has been accepted in modern Israel as a kind of magna carta for the relations between the modern state and ancient Israel, a holy text, even more holy than the Hebrew Bible and as such beyond discussion – including any discussion about the meaning of the “house of David” part of the inscription. (Lemche, 106-108)
What of the actual words translated “house of David” [bytdwd]?
It is noted that the writing: bytdwd is unusual. Otherwise, words in this inscription are separated with a marker, a dot. Accordingly, we should expect bytdwd written as byt . dwd, in two words. No such marker is found here. If it is an ancient inscription we have no way of knowing the reason for this omission; perhaps a slip from the side of the engraver, but then we should ask: Why exactly here? Was it intended to catch the eye of the reader? It is simply too much of a coincidence? In the early part of the discussion this led to a series of alternative proposals to understand the meaning of the bytdwd, including proposals that it was the name of some locality in the vicinity of Dan, a sanctuary or the like. As the interpretation of the inscription assumed canonical importance, such divergent opinions were simply dismissed without further discussion. The peculiar writing bytdwd received, after Cryers intervention, no more attention, although it is exceptional to find the word bayit “house, temple, family, dynasty” written in early Aramaic as byt. Normally the -y- is left out. We should have expected in normal writing bt . dwd or maybe simply bt . dd, and the discussion should have started from this point. (Lemche, 108)
Just one more thing….
In a doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of Sydney, which was recently published by Sheffield Academic Press, the Australian scholar George Athas presents a new, innovative and well-argued theory about the Tel Dan Fragments (Athas 2003). According to Athas, fragments A and B1/B2 belong to one and the same inscription, though the extant portions were some distance apart in the unbroken original. Performing a hands-on experiment in which he reconstructed the conditions under which the inscription would have been created—Athas proposes that an ancient scribe would have chalked his words on the stone surface before a skilled mason carved them—Athas was able to demonstrate that the variations in line orientation are quite in keeping with an inscription made on a large piece of stone:
If Athas is correct—and in my view his approach is quite brilliant—all earlier reconstructions of this text and its interpretation are rendered obsolete, since most of them are based on theories involving the non-existent joins. (53f)One more issue has to be addressed before we can leave this inscription behind: the combination of the two (three) fragments into one text. It is no more seen as problematic, but it was when the combination was first made. The fragments (A and B1-2) do no[t] align. This is obvious if we try to do so as I did in my Amman-lecture (Lemche 2003c, 53 — see side box). But do we have a join where they meet? The authorities of the Israel Museum definitely think so. I only have the opinion of a leading Israeli archaeologist of my own generation who was able to inspect the fragments before they were joined, and his response was: There are no joins. George Athas made an ingenious reconstruction of the inscription based on the angle of the chisel used to cut out the inscription on the slab, and it turned out that the angle is different on fragment A and fragments B1-2 (Athas 2003, 191). Comparing the angles of the letters of the inscription he placed fragment B1-2 further down than fragment A, bursting, in this way, the usual interpretation of the inscription as a victory stele of Hazael of Damascus. Of course in the light of the ongoing canonization of the inscription his challenge was never taken up and the usual but most likely impossible interpretation remains in force.93
93 A question not taken up here is the one of the circumstances of the finding of the fragments. There was some confusion about the exact place where it was found, but definitely not as part of a wall of fortification. Fragment A was extracted from below a wall somehow sticking out in the open where it was discovered by the Israeli archaeologist Gila Cook. Ihe first photos of the inscription in Israel Exploration Journal 43 (p. 82) did not show it in situ but moved from its original placed out to the plaza in front of it and standing up. The confusion became total when The Biblical Archaeology Review (March/April 1994, p. 38) published a photo of the inscription in situ (sic!) but inverted. The conditions surrounding the discovery of the two other fragments are not much different. As to the joining of the fragments, Hagelia presents an overview of the interpretations of the stele (until c. 2005) (Hagelia 2006, 13-50). A recent view separating fragments A and B can be found in Knauf and Guillaume 2016, 94, repeated in Knauf and Niemann 2021, 208, where Knauf admits to be the originator of this separation in his “histories”.
(Lemche, 108f)
For other related posts see https://vridar.org/tag/tel-dan-inscription/
Lemche, Niels Peter. Back to Reason: Minimalism in Biblical Studies. Sheffield, South Yorkshire ; Bristol, CT: Equinox, 2022.
Here I look at the argument that the inscription (bytdwd) apparently referring to David (dwd) or the “house of David” in the 