TEL-DAN STELE A Roman Boundary Marker of Humiliation on the Via Dolorosa of Mattathias Antigonus II (Summer 37 BCE)

I. NOTE TO THE READER

This document is a working preprint submitted for critical review. It makes no claim to
exhaustiveness or definitive certainty. It proposes a reasoned re-dating of the Tel Dan Stele and
explicitly invites remarks, objections, and contributions from any specialist — epigraphist,
archaeologist, historian of Hellenistic Judaism, or Roman studies scholar.
The central hypothesis is that the stele, traditionally dated to the 9th century BCE, is in fact a
Roman-Herodian monument erected in −36 BCE to commemorate the humiliation and passage of
Mattathias Antigonus II — the last Hasmonean king and last living "son of David" — on the road to
his forced exile toward Antioch.
II. ABSTRACT

English
The Tel Dan Stele (discovered in 1993) is here re-dated as a Roman-Herodian boundary marker of
humiliation, carved in −36 BCE by Herod and Sosius to commemorate the exact spot where
Mattathias Antigonus II and his column of prisoners crossed the northern border of Judea on their
way to execution in Antioch. The expression bytdwd ("House of David") refers to the living
Hasmonean dynasty of the 1st century BCE. Deliberate archaism of the script, the morphology of a
Roman terminus, the geography of the King's Highway, the psalmic semantics (Psalm 89) and the
Galilean memory sixty years later in the Gospels all converge on this re-dating. Palaeography, taken
as a criterion of last resort, can no longer serve as the sole dating argument.