Raymond L. Cox
[Raymond L. Cox is pastor of the Salem, Oregon Foursquare Church. He has traveled extensively in Bible lands and has written over 1650 articles on Biblical and archaeological subjects. In addition, he is the author of four books.]
“From Dan to Beer-sheba” no longer demarcates the extent of Israelite occupation in the Holy Land, as it did in Bible days. Since the Six Day War modern Israelis have coined the expression “From Quneitra to Sharm-el-Sheikh.” Nevertheless, the site of ancient Dan exerts a possibly greater lure today than in ancient times when the area was first a magnet for part of the Israelite tribe of Dan who won it by war as one sector of their inheritance in Canaan (Judges 18). Later it became a Mecca for the northern Israelites who came there instead of to Jerusalem after secessionist king Jeroboam installed his golden calf, probably in the sanctuary archaeologists just recently unearthed.
As many as two hundred thousand visitors have hied to Tel Dan in a single year, though most have been drawn to the Nature Reserve which sprawls in peaceful beauty near the foot of the mound. Trails lace the wooded acres, as also do streamlets fed by one of the sources of the river Jordan. Picnic tables punctuate the rustic grounds. Here is one of upper Galilee’s most exquisite pearls of nature.
But it is the 50 acre tel itself, on Israel’s northern frontier facing Lebanon and Syria, which excites archaeological interest. On my first visit a few workers were puttering in preparation for the seven-week dig about to commence there, headed by Dr. Avraham Biran, director of Israel’s Department of Antiquities. Fourteen months later I came again, this time during the excavations, and Dr. Biran conducted me about the tel. “It’s yours,” he exclaimed with a welcoming gesture after I explained the purpose of the visit.
“The archaeological evidence tallies with the historical evidence,” Dr. Biran explains in reporting results of annual
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expeditions to Tel Dan which commenced in 1966. By “historical evidence” he means the Bible.
According to Judges 18:29 a Canaanite city preceded Israelite conquest and settlement here. Danites smote Laish with the edge of the sword and with fire (Judges 18:27), then built a new town on its ruins, naming if after Dan, the progenitor of their tribe. From the beginning this town continued as a hotbed of deviation from the purer religion of Israel. Dan became a byword of idolatry, its delinquency fostered by the cult over which a renegade priest named Mical first presided using stolen images, ephod, and teraphim.
Dr. Biran’s investigations have uncovered ruins of the Canaanite city, strongly fortified with ramparts and earthworks dating from the second half of the 18th century B.C. But the most noteworthy finds at Tel Dan time-machined the archaeologists into a rendezvous with King Jeroboam I who led the northern tribes in secession from David’s dynasty after the death of Solomon. This is the period when Dan really became a prominent city. Jeroboam made it an administrative center. Excavators have discovered the place where they believe his throne sat when he came on occasional visits to his northern outpost.1 Jeroboam fortified the city as a bulwark against Aramaean attacks. The archaeologists have faced the same dangers from Damascus some forty miles away as threatened ancient Danites! And Jeroboam put Dan on the map of his kingdom especially as a religious shrine which he constituted as a counterweight to Jerusalem, directing his people to the golden calf he installed there with his proclamation, “Behold thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt” (1 Kings 12:28).
Near the foot of the tel looms an ancient gate of Jeroboam’s city. Dr. Biran pointed out to me a depression in the stone on one side of the threshold just recently uncovered. “This gate with the socket for the door,” he said, “and the threshold, is from the days of King Jeroboam.” A portion of the gate “may have housed,” Biran continued, “a throne of a king. And this is a bench in front of the city gate where people sat. You have stories in the Bible of people sitting at the gate, like Boaz and Jehoshaphat. This may be one such a place.”2
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The processional route and city gate at Tel Dan.
The gate complex consists of inner and outer portals, the threshold of the latter stretching 12 feet wide in two large blocks of basalt with a door-stop between them.
A paved road leads through the inner gate past the pedestal where the king may have sat in judgment and on to the sanctuary at the top of Tel Dan. As Dr. Biran and I tramped the ancient stones he exclaimed enthusiastically, “We are walking on what I like to call ‘the Royal Processional Route of the days of King Jeroboam.’”
Noticing some excavations to the east of the pavement I asked, “What’s over there?” “Results of previous seasons,” Dr. Biran explained. “That’s where we found the Mycenaean tomb with the charioteer vase,” referring to a find the press had dubbed an “accidental discovery.” The bowl, of a type rarely found in the country, dated from Canaanite Laish, a product of the 14th or 13th century B.C. Dr. Biran is not sure whether the abundance of Mycenaean imported ware indicates the presence of a foreign colony in the Canaanite city or simply represents the wealth of one particular family.
The director of the dig declared that other treasures likely lurk further underground, but too deep for economical excavation. “We
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would need too much special equipment to get down there,” he said longingly.
I expressed polite impatience to see the tel’s most prominent excavations — “where you believe,” I told Biran, “Jeroboam’s golden calf stood.”
“Now, now, wait,” he cautioned excitedly. “Be very careful as to what we believe.” I confronted him with clippings from the Jerusalem Post and American newspapers describing the find. In a few minutes, as we meandered about the open sanctuary, he declared, “This has to be associated with Jeroboam, because, what else?”
“Then you can be almost positive?” I challenged, to which he replied, “I can but I have no proof. I assume it.” Earlier he had told the press, “This conclusion was reached by negative evidence. We simply cannot think of anything else it could possibly be.” The date is right, attested by pottery sherds attributed to the tenth century B.C. when Jeroboam reigned.
I started to stumble as I climbed about the ruins with Dr. Biran. “Careful, careful, careful,” he exclaimed. “When you walk on the excavations you have to be careful.” A few minutes later he almost
Excavations at the Tel Dan High Place.
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stumbled! At the 61-foot-square highplace platform Dr. Biran pointed out “stage-one” masonry, attributed to Jeroboam’s time, and “stage-two” masonry, including monumental steps leading to the refurbished shrine, dating to Ahab’s reign. A still-intact wall of well-dressed stones supports the platform on all four sides.
If these ancient rocks could cry out, what tales of orgies they could expose! As I walked on the pavement I tried to visualize ancient Israelites cavorting in their dizzy dance around Jeroboam’s golden calf in defiance of the legitimate shrine of Jerusalem’s Temple. The first king of the northern confederacy sought to end his subjects’ allegiance with David’s city lest they feel attracted back to submission to David’s dynasty. So at Bethel and Dan he reared his substitutes, and in so doing initiated the iniquity which was denounced more than any other in Biblical history. Time and time again the accusation thunders against Jeroboam “who did sin and who made Israel to sin” (1 Kings 14:16).
Dr. Biran displayed the drawing the expedition’s architect had diagrammed of the various stages of construction at the highplace. Reluctantly he permitted me to photograph it, apologizing for its condition. He then suggested I tramp out to the north end of the tel and take pictures of Lebanon straight ahead and Mount Hermon and Syria’s “Fatahland” to the right.
Tel Dan still comes under enemy fire. More than once since the Six Day War archaeologists have had to take shelter in trenches where Jewish soldiers squatted before June 1967 when the Syrian positions “were about a hundred yards to the north of the High Place,” Dr. Biran told me. This area was again the scene of fierce fighting during the 1973 Seventeen-Day War. “Uncanny” is the word he used to describe how Tel Dan maintains a strategic military position today similar to what it held in Jeroboam’s time. Later Dan fell to Ben-hadad of Damascus, as archaeology has confirmed.
Dr. Biran was thirsty. “I want to show you a source of the Jordan River,” he invited, and we trudged toward nearby trees where a small stream emerged. “Here is the source of the Dan,” Biran announced, stooping to have a drink of the ice cold water. Earlier I had seen the other sources, the Banias and Hasbani or Sehir.
Tel Dan looms as a treasure trove for archaeologists for years to come. This layer cake of Canaanite, Israelite, Syrian, Assyrian, and
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Roman history “would take two hundred years to exhaust,” if excavated annually for several weeks as is being done now, Dr. Biran told me. “I will continue as long as my strength and the money holds out.”
It looks like an archaeological rendezvous with Jeroboam isn’t the end of Tel Dan’s story.
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