THE 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 toexhaustiveness or definitive certainty. It proposes a reasoned re-dating of the Tel Dan Stele andexplicitly 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 aRoman-Herodian monument erected in −36 BCE to commemorate the humiliation and passage ofMattathias Antigonus II — the last Hasmonean king and last living "son of David" — on the road tohis forced exile toward Antioch.II. ABSTRACT EnglishThe Tel Dan Stele (discovered in 1993) is here re-dated as a Roman-Herodian boundary marker ofhumiliation, carved in −36 BCE by Herod and Sosius to commemorate the exact spot whereMattathias Antigonus II and his column of prisoners crossed the northern border of Judea on theirway to execution in Antioch. The expression bytdwd ("House of David") refers to the livingHasmonean dynasty of the 1st century BCE. Deliberate archaism of the script, the morphology of aRoman terminus, the geography of the King's Highway, the psalmic semantics (Psalm 89) and theGalilean memory sixty years later in the Gospels all converge on this re-dating. Palaeography, takenas a criterion of last resort, can no longer serve as the sole dating argument.