Biblical Dan.

Jacobs, Paul F.

Biblical Dan is a translation of the Hebrew original, Dan: 25 Years of Excavation of Tel Dan. Biblical Dan, which has been "edited, revised and augmented," and includes an additional chapter on the Aramaic stele found in 1993, consists essentially of Avraham Biran's personal reminiscences of work at Tel Dan. Since Biblical Dan was not intended for professionals, archaeologists will find little of use in the book; that fact, however, is more of a disappointment than a surprise. The surprise is that Biblical Dan fails also to satisfy the casual reader.

Biran alludes to the great wealth of information from the excavations of twenty-five years, but most of it remains undisclosed to the reader. In fact, at several points the book dedicates more attention to extraneous matters than to material dubbed important; for example, more lines (plus a photograph, p. 60) are used to present a nest of burrowing owls than an object "of special interest" (p. 57) to the story of Middle Bronze IIA. Where Biblical Dan turns to broader conclusions, the reader finds archaeological truisms or romanticisms: "a sort of technical revolution in pottery manufacture occurred in the Middle Bronze period" (p. 48); "consequently, the people buried in the tomb lived at a time when the stony slope already existed. Could they have belonged to one of the leading families of the city responsible for the construction of the earthen ramparts?" (p. 66); "music and dance have been part of human culture from time immemorial" (p. 120). I include here the frequent forced connections to the biblical narrative, such as that of Early Bronze "Laish" to Genesis 11, Deuteronomy 33, Jeremiah 49, and Song of Songs 4. Or, where there is no archaeological evidence, Biran retells a portion of biblical narrative, presumably as if that is a report about Dan/Laish. "Lite" fare, even for the coffee-table crowd.

Whereas Iron Age Dan receives some one hundred thirty pages in three chapters, other major strata are passed over lightly. A major town is posited on the basis of a few square meters of excavated materials (Early Bronze); an important archaeological era is relegated to a single sentence (transitional Middle Bronze IIA-B); an entire population (Late Bronze II) is subsumed under a couple of tombs, a "furnace" (probably an oven), a cobbled floor, and a plaque called the "Dancer from Dan." Additionally, the presentation of Dan as an Israelite site in chapter six begs the question, and at the same time ignores refutations of such passe arguments for identifying Israelites in Iron Age I as collared-rim jars functioning as type-indicators.

A single volume cannot do justice to twenty-five years of excavation at one of the richest sites in the Levant, even in a popular presentation. However, the selection of what to publish, as well as a lack of careful editing, produced in this instance a book which greatly under-represents Dan's archaeological wealth. Technical and editorial problems mar the book: few illustrations are mentioned in the text; likewise, illustrations and plates generally fail to refer to the text; almost universally lacking are scales in photographs and plans; some references to illustrations (e.g., p. 91) are incorrect; sometimes pottery plates are associated with a stratum, sometimes only with an age, and (with the exception of tomb and pit materials) scarcely ever with specific loci; a "300 liter" pithos reported on p. 168 is almost certainly in error. Add to this that several photographs are of poor illustrative quality (figs. 1, 3, 25, 61, 173, 196) or include modern implements in them (figs. 5, 48, 74, 90, 94, 208; pls. 5, 6, 35).

Most seriously, errors in logic in determining the dates of stratigraphically problematic architecture appear too frequently: Biran states that pottery found beneath a floor "provides the latest possible dating" (p. 189) for the floor and its associated architecture (an argument reappearing on pp. 215, 246, and 277). Even the casual reader will understand that the youngest pottery in a sub-surface makeup indicates only the date after which the floor was constructed; at best it can indicate the earliest possible date. Potentially such faulty reasoning grossly misdates entire strata at Tel Dan. Elsewhere Biran argues (p. 132) that the stratum VI population was "not indigenous to the area" because collared-rim jars were found in pits dug into Late Bronze Age levels, a logic which does not stand scrutiny.

Biblical Dan is not a fair representation of the archaeological wealth Dan has yielded. It surveys no new territory and provides few data, settling frequently for old (often refuted) arguments. Most unfortunately, it does not even elucidate to the non-professional reader either the current state of Near Eastern archaeology or the significance of the discoveries at Dan.

PAUL F. JACOBS MISSISSIPPI STATE UNIVERSITY