The Message of the Tel Dan Stele

On September 22, the Armstrong Institute of Biblical Archaeology celebrated the arrival of the Tel Dan Stele in America. The stele was on loan from the Israel Museum and the Israel Antiquities Authority and was featured in the “Kingdom of David and Solomon Discovered” archaeological exhibit in Edmond, Oklahoma. The stele was available for public viewing through December 1. (For more details, see “Kingdom of David and Solomon Discovered”)

This sensational object, perhaps Israel’s most important archaeological find ever, is the key that unlocks the archaeology of King David and his royal dynasty.

The keynote address at the “house of David” inscription opening was delivered by the award-winning documentarian, bestselling author and esteemed political commentator, Dinesh D’Souza. This is a slightly edited version of Mr. D’Souza’s outstanding speech.

I feel utterly unqualified to be giving this keynote address. My own work on Israeli archaeology is woefully incomplete, to put it mildly. But I want to approach this marvelous artifact, this stele, from a somewhat different point of view.

Dr. Eilat Mazar often said, “Let the stones speak.” But what is this particular stone saying? What is the message of the stone? Well, to me, to put it in almost crude terms, it is kind of God’s “Leroy was here.”

The figure of David has been considered over many centuries, even by skeptics, a kind of marvelous literary creation. David is the ultimate story of the underdog. There’s the account of David against Goliath, and then the astounding story of David and Bathsheba, which I think establishes David, not just as an adulterer, but a horrific criminal who sends an innocent man to his death and for no other reason other than the fact that he has designs on the man’s wife. How can a figure so dubious, so suspect, be one of the great heroes of the Bible and of Western civilization?

It’s important to note here that we’re not talking merely about the history of ancient Israel or the Jewish people. We’re talking about our history. When America’s founders crossed the pond, when they came here to America, they brought with them Athens and they brought with them Jerusalem. They brought with them the legacy of David and the teachings of the Hebrew Bible.

In the story of David, you have this climatic scene where the Prophet Nathan approaches the king on his throne and tells him a story about a rich man who had many lambs and was planning a great banquet, but instead of using one of his lambs, or several of his lambs, he goes to the poor man and takes his lamb. The Bible tells us that David’s anger burned, and David says, This man deserves to be severely punished—if not killed!

Then the Prophet Nathan points to David and says, You are that man! The remarkable thing about this incident—and this explains David in a nutshell—is David’s reaction. The normal reaction would be, Execute that man! But that’s not David’s reaction. Instead, David says, I have sinned before God. And so, it is the repentance of David, the humility of David, that in a sense is morally etched on the Western soul through the centuries.

Yet it appeared until relatively recently that David was kind of a story. These people can’t be real! Could these figures in the Hebrew scriptures actually be real? And even if they were real, how would we know? What possible record could be left that would attest to the historicity of these figures? David and the other biblical figures seemed to be lost in the mist of time.

Speaking to a Skeptical Age

In a sense, you may say that the entire system of beliefs of the West, the idea of Jerusalem—which of course is an idea that is embraced not just by the Jews, but also by Christianity—appears to be entirely in the province of faith or revelation. Meanwhile, the tradition of Athens appears to be squarely in the province of reason.

Athens reflects the critical mind; it’s the place of Socrates, the birthplace of philosophy. Athens taught us how to use our brains. Jerusalem is essentially the antithesis of that. Jerusalem is, “God says so” and “Take it on faith.” Jerusalem is “Faith is somehow better than reason.” And this has created in some sense the bifurcation of the Western mind. Much of the attack on Jerusalem today comes in the name of Athens. You could almost say that the enlightenment in a nutshell is mobilizing the spirit of Athens against the spirit of Jerusalem. Reason reigns supreme; you can’t believe the Bible!

Yet it seems that this secular age—this age of skepticism, of disbelief—is also the age of the utter flouting and rejection of the moral code that comes out of Jerusalem.

I’m sure if you lived in America 50 years ago, you walked around the country, you talked to people, and you said, “Do you agree that the Ten Commandments are a really good way to live? If everybody lived by the Ten Commandments, would America be a better society? Yes or no?” I think you’d find that 99 percent of Americans—whether Christian or Jewish or nothing at all—would respond, Of course, obviously! While Western civilization was built, the belief of God and the belief in an external, moral code was obvious.

We are living at a time when it is not only not obvious, but we are living in a time when there is a multidimensional attack on not just the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob but also the moral code that was in a sense given by that God through Moses and, in other forms, through the commandments. This is all under siege today! And it’s under siege from people who make remarks like, I don’t know, Dinesh. You’ve got a sacred book; the Hindus have a sacred book; the ancient Greeks believed in all kinds of Greek mythology. If you have a holy book and they have a holy book, how do you know your holy book is real?

Enter Biblical Archaeology

I believe this is the context in which we should think about biblical archaeology. When we think about biblical archaeology, it is almost as if God has decided in this most secular time to start speaking back. And He is doing it through the stones—the artifacts. Of course, the stones actually aren’t speaking—stones can’t speak. God is speaking through the stones. And what is He saying? God is saying, I’m going to take some of the most iconic moments in the astounding Hebrew scriptures, and I’m going to show you that they are real!

The Bible makes some astounding claims that, on the face, appear not only unverifiable but somewhat ridiculous. Think about David, king over a huge, powerful dynasty in Israel that dominated the region. Wait, what? What about the Egyptians? What about the Babylonians? What about the Assyrians? What about the Hittites? We know that these were massive, powerful, empires, and you’re telling me that little Israel sort of whipped them all and became the greatest of all?

Well, as it turns out, and as we learn now and only now, those dynasties had almost mysteriously subsided around the period of Solomon and David. During this period, all of these people, oddly enough, seemed to be kind of flat on their back and you have a period of Israelite ascendancy. And then that period of ascendancy was over, and those dynasties experienced a revival. This is not a matter of faith; this is actually now a matter of fact.

The Bible tells us all these things from the first lines of the Old Testament: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”—and the insinuation is that God did this out of nothing. Now, right there you have something that contradicts what the ancient Greeks believed. The Greeks believed that out of nothing can only come nothing, and therefore, God has to be some sort of a divine Craftsman who takes existing materials that must have been there forever, and then, carpenter-style, remakes them into the world we have now. But the idea that you could make something out of nothing—well, that’s crazy. Yet that is asserted as a fact in the Bible and by a group of Hebrew writers who have not conducted any experiments and not done really any philosophical speculations, but essentially have said, God told me.

And yet, if we fast-forward to today, to the most recent discoveries of modern physics and cosmology, we learn in fact—and you learn this in a physics classroom in any decent university in the first three weeks—that first there was nothing, and then there was a universe. We now know that the biblical account is supported by the latest knowledge of modern physics and cosmology.

The Bible also talks about this remarkable group of people: the Jews. And it says categorically that these are the people of God. God chose them. Now, it’s why God chose them that I think is just as big a mystery in Israel as it is to us. The writer Hilair Belloff many years ago composed a poem that went like this: “How odd of God to choose the Jews.” That’s the poem. And it’s not because of the supreme virtues of Abraham or the spotless moral life of David.

It appears that God chose the Jews to represent something in the world. To represent, if you will, God’s laws, God’s preferred way of life for man.

And very interestingly, the Bible says that this people, scattered, will return to their ancestral homeland. Now you have to really just look at history to see what an implausible prophecy that is!

Prophecies, by the way, are valid in direct proportion to their implausibility. What I mean by that is that if I say, Hey, I’m going to toss a coin and guess what? It’s going to come out heads. I’ve got a 1 in 2 chance of that happening. But if I say I’m going to spin a roulette wheel that has numbers 1 to 100 and you’re going to get number 89, that’s a somewhat more impressive prophecy because the chances of that happening are pretty low.

When you consider that the Jews dispersed around 70 c.e.—that they scattered to the far winds of the Earth—the idea that they would not just return and reunite but reunite exactly in the place where they started—what’s the chance of that? This is a people that have very much, in the spirit of biblical prophecy, persisted.

My wife and I visited Israel for the first time not too long ago. We have been to lots of places, but Israel had a very peculiar and dramatic impact on us for a number of reasons. Right away upon arriving in Israel you know that you are in a modern society but one that remains anchored in the old world. The world of the Bible is visible in Israel even today!

But the thing that struck us even more than that was meeting archaeologists in Israel who, in the spirit of Dr. Eilat Mazar, told us, We approach archaeology with the Bible in the left hand and our tools in the right hand. What does this mean exactly? Let’s say if we’re looking for Sodom and Gomorrah, we don’t just go start digging. We read the Bible, and it gives you clues about what Abraham saw, where the mountain was, and where the smoke came from. And we apply those clues and we go look there and we see what we find. I want to emphasize here that this is not some kind of theological or religious hocus-pocus. This is actually very sound archaeology. In fact, it’s a very sound way to go about finding things out in general.

Let’s say you were trying to figure out whether the Trojan War really happened. How would you do that? Let’s say you were trying to find not only whether it happened but where it happened. Well, you’d obviously pick up Homer’s Iliad in one hand and Homer’s Odyssey in the other, and you would look for clues. You might see that there are two whirlpools—Askilla and Coribnis—and then you would study the ocean to see where that kind of current can be found, where ships can be lost if they go left or if they go right. In other words, you would use the ancient text to make predictions, and then you would go search to see if those predictions proved to be corroborated.

That’s exactly what Dr. Mazar did. Again, that is not biblical speculation. This is, in fact, using an ancient text as a clue, a marker, to then go and look and dig for artifacts!

This concept of biblical archaeology is astounding. It’s not something that I knew a lot about. And I feel silly admitting this, because I spent several years (between 2008 and 2012) debating a lot of the world’s leading atheists in universities around America and sometimes abroad. I debated people like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchins and the philosopher Daniel Bennett, and we would debate cosmology and physics and history. But when it came to the field of biblical archaeology, I knew nothing. And yet I think this is the field that is going to make the difference in the years ahead! This is because people all over the world with a secular mindset are going to be able to see artifacts like the Tel Dan Stele, either firsthand or through media.

Past, Present, Future

In the future, I hope to make a film that encompasses these themes. I want people who aren’t lucky enough to see the Tel Dan Stele in person, who aren’t lucky enough to go to Israel, to see for themselves the way in which God is speaking back through the stones.

For me, this is a story that is not just about the past, and it’s not even just about the present. It is about the deep linkage between the past—the ancient past—and the present and the future. Why? Because if one looks around the world, it doesn’t take a great deal of strategic genius to recognize that the conflicts of 3,000 years ago are, in only a slightly modified form, back with us today. How can that be possible?

Here’s Israel, circa 1000 b.c.e. and it’s surrounded by hostile enemies. And if the Israelites are the people of God, then the Canaanites and the Hittites and the Moabites and the Philistines are the enemies of God, at least in this context. So there is an actual battle that reverberates with, you may say, cosmic significance because it involves good and evil in the widest scale.

Then we fast-forward to now, and what do we see? The same people, the Israelites, the Jews, in the same place surrounded by hostile enemies, enemies dedicated to “wiping Israel off the map.” Who are the Palestinians? Where did we get that name? Well, the name Palestine is derived from the word Philistine, an ancient enemy of Israel. I’m not saying it’s in the identical form, because obviously we’ve had the intervention of Islam. But the enemies of ancient Israel were pagans, worshipers of idols. Now we have an enemy, radical Islam, that oddly enough is within the Abrahamite tradition; radical Islam claims to be the final revelation of the God of Israel, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. And we have a new conflict going on now. You have the remote past connected to the present.

From the beginning, the Bible draws us in with mystery, and yet as I said, you have the remote past connected to the biblical present. The role of the prophets, the Israelite prophets, is to make critiques of the present as a way of pointing to the future. There is a beautiful completeness to the Hebrew Bible.

The only question that we have is, will that completeness be somehow reflected in the actual history of the world as it plays out? Because the history of the world is still going on. We don’t know the end—that’s a story that hasn’t achieved completion. But there are hints about it in the Hebrew scriptures.

So for me, all of this is a way of illuminating more than just the ancient past. There was this great King David. He’s a moral exemplar, and we can learn a lot from him. But also, how does this cosmic drama play out in our own lives? And how does it play out in the actual history that is unfolding before our eyes?

Finally, I want to commend and congratulate the Armstrong Institute of Biblical Archaeology for convincing the Israelis to part with this priceless artifact and to bring it here. I don’t know how you did it, but you did it, and I commend you. Debbie and I are delighted to be here, and thank you for having me be part of this marvelous exhibit and this wonderful exhibition.

https://youtu.be/VKIXODw9gcM?t=3026