Courtesy Avraham Biran

The god who is in Dan. Discovered in 1976 at the royal bamah, this stone bearing an inscription incised in Greek and Aramaic confirms the identity of Tel Dan. The inscription, which dates to the first half of the second century B.C.E., contains three lines of Greek and one line of Aramaic. The Greek text proclaims that a man named Zoilos offered a vow “to the god who is in Dan.” The one line of Aramaic text is more puzzling, since a few letters are missing from the beginning and end of the line. Most probably, the line reads: “In Dan Zilas [the Aramaic version of Zoilos] made a vow to the god.” The inscription confirms that the royal bamah of Jeroboam’s time served as a sanctuary well into the Hellenistic period.