Tel Dan Stele

Ahaziah of Judah dies three different ways depending on who tells the story. In 2 Kings, Jehu’s archers shoot him and he flees to Megiddo to die; in Chronicles, Jehu’s men drag him out of hiding in Samaria and execute him; and on the Tel Dan Stele, the Aramean king Hazael claims the kill for himself. Apologists sometimes make Jehu an agent of Hazael to reconcile the accounts, but the stele is the only one of the three written within a lifetime of the events.

The inscription’s six most famous letters, Beit David, carry most of its weight in debates over whether David existed. The stele names Israel as a kingdom with a king but gives Judah no kingdom name at all, only a dynastic house, which fits the scholarly picture of a powerful northern Israel and a smaller southern polity whose later scribes wrote the surviving histories. Together with the Mesha Inscription, it also marks roughly where historical narrative prose begins in the region: older traditions, like the Song of Deborah in Judges 5, probably survived as poetry first.