The writing on the Tel Dan Stele is only a leftover piece of a much longer boast. The top and bottom are gone, and the left side of most lines is broken off. Scholars have to treat it like a puzzle. They look at the letters that are still there, compare them with other old Aramaic inscriptions, and carefully guess the missing parts. Anything in brackets is a reconstruction not letters we can still see on the stone.
Here is the story the remaining lines seem to tell, in simple order.
The writer first talks about his father. His father went up to fight somewhere (the place name is broken; one reconstruction starts with “Ab-”). Then the father “lay down and went to his ancestors,” which is the old way of saying he died. After that, the king of Israel marched into “my father’s land.” That land is Aram, the kingdom around Damascus in what is now Syria.
Next the writer says the god Hadad made him king. Hadad was the storm-and-war god of the Arameans. The new king claims Hadad marched in front of him like a helper in battle. Then he boasts that he killed seventy kings who had thousands of chariots and thousands of horsemen. Ancient kings loved to use big numbers to sound powerful.The most famous part comes next. He says he killed “[Jeho]ram son of [Ahab], king of Israel” and “[Ahaz]iahu son of [Jehoram], king of the House of David.” Those names are only partly on the stone. The endings “-ram” and “-iahu” match the only kings who fit that time: Jehoram (also called Joram), son of Ahab, who ruled the northern kingdom of Israel, and Ahaziah, son of Jehoram, who ruled the southern kingdom of Judah. Judah is called the “House of David” instead of “Judah.” That is the phrase that made the discovery famous.
After the two kings, the writer says he turned their towns into ruins and their land into desolation. Later damaged lines may mention someone ruling over Israel and a siege, but those parts are too broken to be sure. Some scholars have suggested the name Jehu might appear in one of those broken spots, but that is only a guess. So the names we can connect with good confidence are:
- Hadad (the Aramean god)
- the unnamed father of the writer (probably King Ben-Hadad)
- the king of Israel
- Jehoram / Joram, son of Ahab
- Ahaziah, son of Jehoram
- the House of David (meaning the royal family of Judah)
The places mentioned are:
- “my father’s land” (Aram)
- Israel
- the towns and land of the two defeated kingdoms
- a possible battle site whose name is mostly lost
- a siege whose location is also lost
The city of Dan itself is not named in the surviving lines. The stone was simply set up there as a victory monument after the battle. The writer never signs his own name on the pieces we have. Almost everyone thinks he was Hazael of Damascus, because the time, the enemies, and the style all fit him. In short, the inscription is one king bragging that his god helped him become ruler, that he crushed many enemies with chariots and horses, and that he personally killed the king of Israel and the king from David’s family. Even though the stone is smashed and incomplete, those names and places are what make it such an important puzzle piece from the ninth century BC.
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