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Samson the Greek? 3,000-year-old archaeological finds at Tel Dan suggest that the Danites were Aegean soldiers hired by Canaan's Egyptian overlords to keep order. The Tribe of Dan, one of the 12 "Israelite tribes," may have started as no such thing. New archaeological evidence suggests that the Danites originated with mercenaries hired from the Aegean and Syria by the Egyptian overlords of Canaan to keep order. According to the Bible, after the Israelites conquered Canaan, the land was split between the tribes – with the exception of the tribe of Dan. Bitter at their lot, the tribe went northward, conquered...

Hardly had the minimalist argument been developed than it was profoundly undermined by an archaeological discovery. In 1993 and 1994, several fragments of an Aramaic stela were found at the long-running excavation of Tel Dan led by Avraham Biran of Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. The historical references in the inscription and the paleography of the writing make it clear that it dates to the ninth century B.C.E. Moreover, the text specifically mentions a king of Israel and a king of the "House of David" (Hebrew, bytdwd ), that is, a king of the dynasty of David. This discovery led...