Tel Dan Nature Reserve

The Jordan is assembled just south of here from three headwaters: the Hasbani, the Banias and the Dan. The Parks Authority's own page calls the Dan the largest and most important of them, and the most plentiful karstic spring in the Middle East, fed by Hermon snowmelt percolating down through limestone rather than by surface runoff. That is why the flow is close to constant. The Authority notes that the other three streams rise and fall with the season and the Dan effectively does not.

The published figures do not quite agree, and the difference is worth stating rather than smoothing over. The Parks Authority puts the output of the springs in the reserve at an estimated 250 million cubic metres a year, and the Madain Project repeats that figure for the Dan spring. Wikipedia's account of the river itself gives up to 238 million cubic metres a year, over a course of only about 20 kilometres. Nothing turns on which is right for a visitor, but neither number should be quoted here as if it were settled.

What the constancy produces is the part people remember. At the Paradise Springs the water spreads into slow braided channels under a closed canopy, and the Authority describes this as the only wetland forest in Israel made of northern trees: the narrow-leafed ash (Fraxinus angustifolia) and the bay laurel (Laurus nobilis), with rare salamanders and invertebrates in the rivulets underneath. The Pooh Bear Tree, a hollow old narrow-leafed ash on the trail, is a specimen of the same northern species at the southern limit of its range. Older trees on the slopes of the tel, Palestine oak and Mount Atlas mastic, were destroyed by fire caused, on the Authority's own account, by hikers' negligence.

One rule follows from all of this and is easy to get wrong on a hot day. Wading is permitted in the wading pool and nowhere else in the reserve, because feet in the channels stir sediment off the bed and wreck the habitat that makes the place worth protecting.

• Karstic spring fed by snowmelt from Mount Hermon
• Estimated 250 million m³ a year on the Parks Authority's figure
• Cold and near constant temperature through the year
• Narrow-leafed ash and bay laurel, the only wetland forest of its kind in Israel
• Wading allowed only in the designated wading pool

The mound is one of the largest ancient tels in the country, about 200 dunams on the Hebrew account, and it sat on the trade route running from the Galilee up to Damascus. Before the Israelites it was Laish, spelled Leshem in Joshua 19:47 and Laishah in some translations of Isaiah 10:30. The Parks Authority's summary is that the tribe of Dan migrated here from the Judean plain, took the city and renamed it after the tribe's forefather.

That position at the top of the map is what put Dan into the language. The phrase "from Dan to Beersheba" is the biblical shorthand for the whole country, and Dan is the northern end of it. After the kingdom divided, Jeroboam son of Nebat made Dan one of the two centres of worship in the Kingdom of Israel, with a golden calf at each, the other being Bethel. The cult compound and its paved platform are on the trail today, and the Parks Authority is careful to say only that the structure recalls the biblical accounts.

The archaeology of the Iron Age city runs to a city wall with buttresses and a complex gate in the ninth century BCE, enlarged in the eighth under Jeroboam II, and then destruction in the Assyrian campaign of Tiglath-Pileser III in 733 or 732 BCE. Settlement did not stop there. The Assyrians moved populations around and the site carried on, and cultic activity around the podium continued through the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman periods.

The tel also proved its own name, which is rare. A bilingual dedication in Greek and Aramaic, dated to the late third or early second century BCE, reads "To the god who is in Dan, Zoilos made a vow". Most identifications of a biblical city with a mound of earth are arguments; this one is a signature.

• Canaanite Laish, called Leshem in Joshua 19:47
• Renamed Dan after the tribe that took it, on the Parks Authority's account
• Jeroboam's northern golden calf sanctuary, the counterpart of Bethel
• Assyrian destruction in 733 or 732 BCE, under Tiglath-Pileser III
• A Greek and Aramaic dedication naming Dan, late third to early second century BCE

The gate was uncovered in 1979 and it is the reason many people come. It was built of mudbrick set on megalithic basalt blocks, or orthostats, around 1750 BCE, in the Middle Bronze Age, and it carries three true arches. English Wikipedia's account states that as of 2009 these were the oldest complete, free-standing, monumental mudbrick arches known anywhere in the world; the Parks Authority describes the arches as considered the earliest of their kind. The Authority gives the preserved height as a full seven metres.

Mudbrick does not last outdoors. It slumps in rain, blows away in wind and is gone within a few generations of neglect, which is why the standing remains at almost every Bronze Age site in the region are stone. The Hebrew account of the tel explains the exception: the gate was sealed up, for reasons that have not been established, covered over with earth, and effectively became the core of the rampart raised on top of it. It went out of use very early and was protected by the same act that put it out of use.

The popular name, Abraham's Gate, comes from the biblical report at Genesis 14:14 that Abraham travelled to Dan to rescue his nephew Lot. It is a tradition attached to the structure, not a finding of the excavation, and nothing recovered from the gate dates or identifies anyone who walked through it.

What a visitor sees is original brick that has been worked on. The gate was restored in the late 2000s, and the Parks Authority states that it has since taken measures to protect it from weather damage. That is the honest description: conserved and sheltered Middle Bronze Age fabric rather than a reconstruction, but not a structure left exactly as the excavators found it either.

In July 1993 Gila Cook, a member of Avraham Biran's excavation team, spotted an inscribed basalt fragment reused in a wall near the outer gate. Two more pieces followed in June 1994. Together they make up part of a triumphal inscription in Aramaic, generally dated to the ninth century BCE and most often attributed to Hazael of Aram-Damascus, recording the defeat of a king of Israel and a king of the House of David.

The contested word is bytdwd. Most scholars read it as "House of David", which makes the stele the earliest mention of David outside the Bible and the reason the find is famous well beyond archaeology. The Biblical Archaeology Society's account presents it as evidence that David was a historical figure recognised even by Israel's enemies. The objection is specific rather than vague: word dividers are used elsewhere in the inscription and there is none between byt and dwd, which is what a reader would expect if they were two words, and dissenters have proposed a place name or other readings instead. The majority view has held for three decades, and the minority objection has not gone away.

Biran directed the excavations at Tel Dan from 1966 to 1999, working through the Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology at Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem, which he headed from 1974. He died in 2008 at the age of 98, having spent more than thirty seasons on this one mound.

The stele itself is not here. It is on display at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Anyone coming to Tel Dan expecting to see it will instead be standing at the outer gate where it was found, which is worth knowing before the drive north.

The two gates, the fortification walls and the cult compound are excavated remains, conserved in place. At the Israelite gate the Parks Authority points to the remains of a palanquin on which the ruler of the city would have been enthroned, with benches for the elders alongside; the published archaeological description is more cautious, calling it a raised square platform reached by two steps with decorated stone sockets at the corners that may have held canopy poles. Both descriptions are of the same stones. The difference is how much interpretation is built on top of them.

The flour mill on the stream is the latest of several found at the tel and was working until the 1960s. It has been conserved and its walls stabilised because they were in danger of collapse, and it does not turn. The aqueduct that fed it was conserved too, and the Authority says it now carries water into a part of the reserve where water had not run for many years. Water in that channel is therefore a restoration decision, not a survival.

Several things on the trail are recent by design. The wading pool has been enlarged and given a wooden deck and benches, and a new accessible observation point looks out from a wooden terrace over the flowing Dan. These are good additions and they are not antiquities.

The last layer is twentieth century. After 1948 a military post was built on the tel to cover Kibbutz Dan and the springs, and it stayed active until 1967; communication trenches and bunkers are still visible on the mound. A Syrian tractor also stands there, used in the works to divert the sources of the Jordan in the 1960s. It was brought to the tel rather than found on it. The context is the Arab League diversion scheme: Syria began cutting a canal from the Banias to the Yarmouk in 1965 with Egyptian and Saudi money, Israel attacked the earth-moving equipment repeatedly, and the work had stopped before the war of June 1967.

• Original and conserved: the Canaanite gate, the Israelite gate, the walls, the cult compound
• Conserved but not working: the flour mill, in use until the 1960s
• A restoration choice: water returned to the mill aqueduct
• Modern: the enlarged wading pool, its wooden deck, the accessible observation terrace
• Moved here: the Syrian tractor from the Jordan diversion works of the 1960s