Talk:Tel Dan Stele

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Interesting. Just some suggestions for improving (as I come away from this with questions and a wish to know more):

1. A date "between 7th and 9th centuries" seems pretty wide - what's it based on, and hasn't it been narrowed down?

Why narrow down the age when you don't have proof of how old it "really" is?

I narrowed down the range of centuries about a month ago. --Lawrencemykytiuk 23:33, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

2. Some text is reconstructed between square brackets - how sure is the reconstruction? what's it based on?

3. If there really is no word divider, then what would the phrase "house of David" signify?

There is indeed no word divider but this simply means the scribe thought of it as a single (compound) word and not as two words. The weaselling in the article that a lack of a word divider somehow makes it mean something totally different doesn't make sense. Kuratowski's Ghost 13:49, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

4. If the stele were reconstructed according to Athas' idea, what would the resulting translation look like?

5. Finally, the Further Reading" section has nothing later than 2001 - surely more has been published?

Actually, when I looked, it went beyond 2001 to 2004. --Lawrencemykytiuk 23:33, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

But a good article. PiCo 03:59, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

Another comment: Might be worth saying that Hadad was a god (the inscription says "Hadad made me king").

And a question, not related to this: When I David believed to have lived/reigned? It's just that the dates used on the Wiki article seem based on counting off the reigns given in the Bible, but I'm suspicious of kings who reign a neat 40 years.

PiCo 01:30, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

A common example of fallacious reasoning in Biblical criticism, "40 can be obtained by rounding, it says 40, therefore it must be a rounded number" ;) Kuratowski's Ghost 14:05, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

Maybe so, but 40 days/years etc. occurs very often in the Bible, which suggests that in many cases it is a rounded number. PatGallacher 11:25, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

It's a biblical convention that 40 years means one generation. When the actual length of time in calendar years was 40, the text doesn't use terms like "actually," so from our standpoint, the text is ambiguous. Still, it's the only record we've got for the length of David's reign. --Lawrencemykytiuk 23:33, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

I have come round to the view that we should delete the reference to Ahmed Osman, since whatever the merits or otherwise of his unconventional views, they relate to general issues of the historicity of David, not this stele specifically. PatGallacher 11:25, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Recent additions

I made a couple of additions to the article, including commentary by Kenneth Kitchen on Thomas L. Thompson's assessment of the Stela, and Dever's comments also. I also corrected the quote from Davies - he is Philip R Davies, not Paul Davies. --Taiwan boi 08:03, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Philip R Davies

I've been struggling to understand why Philip R Davies' opinions are mentioned in this article, since he is neither an archaeologist nor an epigrapher. He is a professor in Biblical studies and a historian, without qualifications in either of the aforementioned fields, yet he is given place here alongside professional archaeologists and epigraphers. Actually the same goes for Thompson and Athas. --Taiwan boi (talk) 00:55, 25 January 2008 (UTC)