Ten Biblical Places and People Archaeology Has Confirmed

In July 1993, a member of Avraham Biran's team at Tel Dan spotted lettering on a stone fragment reused in a later wall near the ancient city gate. Two more fragments surfaced in 1994. Together they preserve about 13 lines of Old Aramaic from a victory monument set up in the 9th century BC.

The king who wrote it is not named in what survives, but most scholars attribute it to Hazael of Damascus, a ruler who also appears in the Bible as an enemy of Israel. He boasts of defeating a king of Israel and a king of a house or dynasty written BYTDWD, which most specialists read as the House of David.

That reading made the stele famous. Before 1993, some scholars doubted that David was a historical figure at all, since no ancient text outside the Bible named him. A minority still argue that the letters could mean something else, such as a place name, because there is no word divider between the two halves. The majority view, though, is that this is a reference to a dynasty founded by a ruler named David, written by an enemy well over a century after the time the Bible gives for his reign.

In 1896 the British Egyptologist Flinders Petrie uncovered a black granite slab more than 10 feet tall in the ruins of Merneptah's mortuary temple at Thebes. It celebrates the military victories of Pharaoh Merneptah and dates to about 1208 BC, the fifth year of his reign. It now belongs to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

Most of the text deals with Merneptah's war against Libyan invaders. Near the end, a short poetic passage lists conquered enemies in Canaan, including the cities of Ashkelon and Gezer, and then a group called Israel, which the pharaoh claims to have wiped out so thoroughly that its seed is gone. Petrie reportedly considered it his most famous find.

The stele is the earliest known mention of Israel anywhere, and the only one from ancient Egypt. A small detail matters to scholars: the hieroglyphs for the cities carry a sign marking a town or land, while Israel carries the sign for a people. Many read this as evidence that Israel was then a people not yet tied to a city or state. It confirms that a people called Israel existed in Canaan by the late 13th century BC, while saying nothing about the events of Exodus.

In August 1868 a missionary named Frederick Klein came across an inscribed black basalt stone at Dhiban, east of the Dead Sea, the site of biblical Dibon. Before it could be removed, an agent of the French scholar Charles Clermont-Ganneau took a paper impression of the text. That was lucky. In 1869 members of a local tribe heated the stone in a fire, doused it with water and broke it apart.

Clermont-Ganneau later gathered many of the fragments, and with the impression the 34-line text was reconstructed. The stele has been in the Louvre since 1873. In it, Mesha, king of Moab, says that Omri, king of Israel, had oppressed Moab for many years, and that Mesha threw off Israelite rule with the help of his god Chemosh.

The Bible's Second Book of Kings describes the same Mesha and his revolt against Israel, though from the opposite side and with a different outcome. The stele also contains what is generally considered the earliest known reference to Yahweh as Israel's god. In 1994 the French scholar Andre Lemaire proposed that a damaged line also mentions the House of David, but that reading depends on a restored letter and others have not been able to confirm it.

In 701 BC the Assyrian king Sennacherib invaded Judah, an event described in the books of Kings, Chronicles and Isaiah. He was proud enough of capturing the fortress city of Lachish to cover a room of his palace at Nineveh with carved stone panels showing the attack: archers and slingers, battering rams grinding up ramps, defenders hurling torches, and families led away into exile. A caption shows Sennacherib on his throne receiving the spoils of Lachish.

Austen Henry Layard dug up the reliefs in the 1840s, and they are now displayed in the British Museum. Excavations at Lachish itself by David Ussishkin, starting in 1973, found the other side of the story: a destruction layer dated to 701 BC and a massive siege ramp piled against the city wall, the only Assyrian siege ramp yet found in the ancient Near East.

Lachish fell again a century later. Excavators in the mid-1930s found 18 letters written in ink on pottery shards in the gate area, with three more found in 1938. They date to the final days before Babylon conquered Judah in 586 BC. In one, an officer says he is watching for the signal fires of Lachish because he can no longer see Azekah. The Book of Jeremiah names those two towns as the last holdouts besides Jerusalem.

The Bible credits King Hezekiah of Judah with bringing water into Jerusalem by a conduit, apparently to protect the city's supply against an Assyrian siege. A winding tunnel cut through solid rock still carries water from the Gihon Spring to the southern end of the old city, roughly a third of a mile (about half a kilometer) away. Visitors wade through it today.

In 1880 a teenage student of the architect Conrad Schick found an inscription carved into the tunnel wall near its exit. Written in ancient Hebrew script, it describes two teams of diggers working toward each other from opposite ends, hearing each other's voices through the rock, and breaking through to meet. It gives the length as 1,200 cubits. The inscription was cut out in 1890 and taken to Istanbul, where it remains in the Istanbul Archaeology Museums.

The inscription names no king, so the link to Hezekiah rested at first on the style of the lettering and on the biblical text. In 2003 a team led by geologist Amos Frumkin of the Hebrew University published results in Nature from radiocarbon dating of organic material in the tunnel's plaster and uranium-thorium dating of stalactites that grew inside it. Both pointed to construction around 700 BC, during Hezekiah's reign.

Ancient documents were often rolled up, tied with string and sealed with a lump of soft clay pressed with the owner's signet. When the papyrus burned or rotted, the hardened clay seal, called a bulla, could survive. In 2009, workers wet-sifting soil from the Ophel excavations at the foot of the Temple Mount's southern wall found one only about half an inch across.

When it was cleaned and read, the tiny impression carried a line of ancient Hebrew: belonging to Hezekiah, son of Ahaz, king of Judah. It also shows a winged sun flanked by two ankh-like life symbols, a royal emblem that may reflect Assyrian or Egyptian influence. The find was announced in December 2015 by archaeologist Eilat Mazar of the Hebrew University, who said it came from a refuse dump dated to Hezekiah's time, beside what appears to have been a royal building.

Its importance lies in where it was found. Other bullae bearing Hezekiah's name had surfaced on the antiquities market since the 1990s, and market finds without a known findspot always carry some risk of forgery; two bullae naming the biblical scribe Baruch, for example, were argued in 2014 to be modern forgeries, a claim still debated. This was the first seal impression of an Israelite or Judean king ever recovered in a scientific excavation.

The Gospel of John tells of Jesus sending a man born blind to wash in the Pool of Siloam. For centuries, pilgrims were shown a small pool beside a church built in the 5th century by the Byzantine empress Eudocia. That turned out to be the wrong spot.

In June 2004, crews repairing a large water pipe at the southern tip of the City of David ridge exposed two ancient stone steps. Archaeologists Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron, working for the Israel Antiquities Authority, recognized them and expanded the dig. They uncovered tiers of steps descending into a large pool, some 225 feet long, fed by water from the Gihon Spring through Hezekiah's Tunnel.

Coins of the Hasmonean king Alexander Jannaeus were found embedded in the plaster, which gives an earliest date for that phase of construction, and coins from the Jewish revolt against Rome show it was in use until about AD 70. Scholars suggest it served as a public reservoir and perhaps a ritual bath. Much of the pool lay under an orchard, and fuller excavation of the site began in 2023.

In November 1990, construction workers building a park in Jerusalem's Peace Forest broke into a burial cave. Zvi Greenhut of the Israel Antiquities Authority investigated and found twelve ossuaries, limestone boxes used in the 1st century to hold bones after the body had decayed.

One richly decorated ossuary carries the name Yehosef bar Qayafa, Joseph son of Caiaphas, scratched on its side, with a shorter spelling on its end. The Jewish historian Josephus records that the high priest Caiaphas, who appears in the Gospels at the trial of Jesus, was named Joseph and held office from about AD 18 to 36. The box held the bones of several people, including a man of about 60. It is now in the Israel Museum, and the bones were reburied on the Mount of Olives.

Most scholars accept the identification, but not all. Skeptics point to the unusual spelling, to the absence of any title such as high priest, and to the modest tomb. A separate ossuary recovered from looters in 2011 and authenticated by the Israel Antiquities Authority names a woman from the family of Caiaphas, adding weight to the existence of a prominent priestly family by that name.

Pontius Pilate is one of the best-known names in history, yet for most of that history he was known only from texts: the Gospels, the Jewish writers Josephus and Philo, and a line in the Roman historian Tacitus. No object from his own time bore his name.

That changed in June 1961, when an Italian expedition led by Antonio Frova was excavating the Roman theater at Caesarea Maritima, the port city that served as the seat of Roman government in Judea. A limestone block about 32 inches (82 centimeters) tall had been reused as a step in a later staircase. Its damaged Latin inscription records a building dedicated to the emperor Tiberius, and it names Pontius Pilate as prefect of Judea.

That title was a useful correction. Tacitus, writing decades later, calls Pilate a procurator, a term that came into use for the job after his time. The stone shows that in Pilate's own day the governor of Judea was styled prefect. It remains the only known stone inscription from Pilate's lifetime to name him. The original is in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and a replica stands at Caesarea.