Ancient Israel Site Confirms Scriptures

Recently recovered FarShores file - Jan 2007

   No nation has been as painstakingly explored by archaeologists as modern-day Israel, mainly because it's the land of the Bible. The longest continuing archaeological dig, and one of the most fruitful, is located at Dan, the fabled shrine city where the ancient Israelites worshiped a golden calf nearly 3,000 years ago.

   The site of Dan was identified in 1838 and confirmed during the present excavation project begun in 1966 by Avraham Biran, now the director of the Hebrew Union College's school of biblical archaeology in Jerusalem. Biran recently described the findings at Dan in Biblical Archaeology Review, a magazine for non-specialists that is both readable and scholarly.

   

Some brief biblical history:

   After King Solomon died in 922 B.C., his realm split in two. The southern kingdom was called Judah, while the northern kingdom of Israel was set up by the rebel monarch Jeroboam.

   According to 1 Kings 12, Jeroboam feared the northerners would revolt and shift their loyalty to the southern king if they continued to offer sacrifices at the temple in Jerusalem, the southern capital. So he established shrines for his kingdom at Bethel and at Dan, located in the far north near the foothills of Mount Hermon.

   At each of the shrines, Jeroboam set up a golden calf for worship and then declared fateful words of idolatry: "Behold your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt."

   Worship was still practiced there in the eighth century B.C., when the prophet Amos denounced idolatry and predicted the permanent downfall of those who were swearing by the false god of Dan (Amos 8:14).

   Dan's diggers have yet to unearth the golden calf, but Biran says they have located the place where the sacrifices to the idol were made. The ruins feature a platform, about 60 feet wide, constructed of large blocks of stone. Biran believes this was an open-air shrine of the type often referred to in the Bible as a "bamah" or "high place." The entire complex was probably what 1 Kings 12 and other passages call a "beit-bamat," meaning "house of high places."

   Identification of the site was confirmed in part through the discovery of cult objects associated with shrines: oil lamps with seven wicks, a stand for burning sacred incense, a bowl containing animal bones, figurines and large containers decorated with snakes, a symbol associated with pagan worship of the nature god Baal.

   The archaeological team also discovered several smaller worship sites at Dan that featured sacred pillars called "massebot." Because these are clustered around the gates to the city, Biran speculates that they served merchants and other visitors to Dan, not its residents, who frequented the "high place."

   Why did Jeroboam build the main shrine on the northern side of town? Biran thinks that a nearby spring, a source of the Jordan River, might also have been a handy source of water for ceremonial washings. But it's equally possible Jeroboam simply replaced an existing holy site, since archaeologists also found objects used by Egyptians.

   One startling find at Dan overshadows all the others. An inscription includes the phrase "house of David." Though there's debate, most experts consider this the first ancient writing outside the Bible that refers to King David or the Davidic line of kings, corroborating the basic history of Hebrew Scriptures.