Hi there,

First of all, I'd like to say that as a member of Atheist Republic, I'm very thankful to all the members here for helping me. I always try my best to help others like me and here I am going to touch a topic about a question that was asked by myself but which led me to a discovery of several hidden truths. Basically, I opened a very fascinating topic in the Debate Room yesterday and it received a huge amount of replies especially from respected atheist Nyarlathotep. The topic started with a baffling confusion which was haunting me and since I'm a very new atheist, I have to clear my mind of all the wrong beliefs that have been embedded and brainwashed inside of me and the only way to do the mind cleaning is to replace the wrong beliefs with the correct beliefs. So, when I discovered more about King David, I decided to make a separate topic for him since my previous topic's title was completely different and people might not read it for finding about David.

Everything that I've written below is what I've found by researching.

======Absence of Historical Evidence=======
King David is one of the most baffling characters in Christianity. He is a majestic king with a supposedly large kingdom and dominance over the land. A man with such a popularity should have left numerous amounts of evidence for his existence and his kingdom. However, what do we have of him today? Some inscriptions of whom the most popular one is Tel Dan Stele today. I'll come back to that.

======Islamic Claim: Iron Softened in David's Hand (Miracle)=======
Islam says that David used to make armor out of iron for his army. The iron was softened in his hands.

It was We Who taught him the making of coats of mail for your benefit, to guard you from each other’s violence: will ye then be grateful? (Koran 21:80 Yusuf Ali)

Too bad, I'm going to ruin your belief now. The chainmail was not invented until the 5th century BC.. Some scholars consider that it was the cults who invented the chainmail in 3rd century BC, which is even worse for the Islamic claims. Besides, David was a shepherd for fuck sake, he was not a blacksmith who made armor!

==================Tel Dan Stele====================
The Tel Dan Stele has been attributed to Hazael of Damascus. It was he who wrote this inscription. However, that's false because the Tel Dan inscription contains some serious errors.

1) Contradiction with Bible: the Bible tells us that it was Jehu who killed Ahaziah (2 Kings 9:14) however the inscription tells us that it was an Armanean king who killed Ahaziah. Why would someone write an inscription about David who was supposedly a holy man and then write a falsehood in it? Now I'm not trying to defend Bible here but rather discarding both, the Bible and fictitious character King David because of this very contradiction in the inscription

2) Linguistic error: the inscription where the "House of David" has been assumed is literally the phrase "bytdwd". Now the issue is that the inscription does not seperate byt and dwd. This means that it's a single word. So there's no way in the entire universe by which anyone can extract "House of David" as a meaning of that single word. In literal translation, it'd mean Bethdavid. So why is this an error? It is an error because Bethdavid means nothing logical. It's just like saying "housedavid".

Beth = house
For example: Bethlehem = House of Meat

=========Deep Critical Analysis of Tel Dan Stele===========
I'd highly suggest anyone who is interested to find more about this forgery should take a look at this book:
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=bWavAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA61#v=onepage&q&f=f...

It discusses Jerusalem in ancient traditions but also covers the topic of Tel Dan. The link I've given is going to directly open that page.

=========Mesha Inscription and its Deep Critical Analysis=====
I highly suggest everyone to read this article. It is everything that you will ever need to know about past and future forged inscriptions including who are responsible, how it was done and the forgery of the Mesha inscription.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1452562?seq=5&refreqid=excelsior%3A766d1186...

========Considering "House of David"===================
Even if we do consider that the inscription meant "House of David", even then it proves nothing. The words "House of David" refer to the lineage of David and hence only show that there was a family of David which existed. Who actually existed in it? We have no idea. It also does not prove that the man we know today, the mythical figure, is the same David as the one we're talking about in the inscription. So, once again, there's not enough evidence to prove the existence of David. The inscription cannot be used as a source of evidence because it has too many absurd errors which can only be made by someone of a confused mind today. Contradicting the Biblical history and then forgetting to correctly put the word separators is not something which the people of the old time did. It's not a mistake on the paper we're talking about, it's a damn stone-carved inscription which is about a Biblical character himself.

Think about this: a man carves an inscription about a Biblical character but gets the Biblical story completely wrong.

In addition, "House of David" does not prove that his kingdom existed.

==========A Notorious Man by the name of Oded Golan===========
I'm going to end this topic by talking about a man called Oded Golan who has been accused of forging around 40+ archaeological evidences of Biblical stories and characters. You can check out his page here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oded_Golan

He has tried to create many archaeological inscriptions in the past but the scientists, every time, broke the code of the forgery. That man is someone to be conscious of when we talk about inscriptions like the Mesha and the Tel Dan.

=====================Conclusion=========================
According to me and according to many rationalists and logical thinkers here, it'll be extremely fair to conclude that there never was a man by the name of David in the history. All proofs and so-called archaeological evidence of him are unreliable and cannot be used to deduct anything in the favor of this David.