The Bible's 37 Real Characters: The Archaeological Evidence Matt Baker Didn't Fully Explain

An ancient monument credits a Syrian king with killing two biblical monarchs. The Bible credits somebody else. Matt Baker calls this a confirmation.

That is the most revealing problem in UsefulCharts' 37 Bible Characters Found Through Archaeology, a presentation that sets out to establish that the Bible contains real historical people.

Baker is right about that central point. Archaeology has independently established the existence of numerous rulers named in the Hebrew Bible. Their inscriptions, military records, monuments, and administrative documents are among our most valuable sources for understanding the ancient Near East.

But Baker's argument becomes considerably less convincing when identifying a historical person turns into confirming a biblical account.

The distinction matters because some of the same archaeological discoveries that establish the existence of biblical kings also challenge the stories told about them.

The Tel Dan Stele provides the clearest example. Its significance extends far beyond its famous reference to the House of David. The inscription describes a violent political upheaval involving two murdered kings, and its apparent account conflicts with the Bible's description of their deaths. Scholars have been debating that contradiction for decades. JSTOR

Baker presents the inscription as historical confirmation without explaining the dispute.

That omission deserves more attention than another archaeological check mark.

The Two Kings Who Apparently Died Twice

Around 841 BCE, two kings died during a struggle for control of Israel and Judah.

One was Joram, also called Jehoram, king of Israel and son of Ahab. The other was Ahaziah, king of Judah and a member of the House of David.

The Bible identifies their killer.

According to Second Kings, Joram had been wounded fighting Hazael, king of Aram-Damascus, and returned to Jezreel to recover. Ahaziah came to visit him. Meanwhile, an Israelite military commander named Jehu organized a rebellion.

Jehu confronted the two kings, shot Joram through the heart with an arrow, and ordered his men to pursue Ahaziah. The Judahite king was wounded and later died at Megiddo.

Second Kings 9:24 explicitly identifies Jehu as the man who shot Joram. The following verses place Ahaziah's fatal injuries at the hands of Jehu's forces. USCCB

Now consider the archaeological account.

Discovered in fragments at Tel Dan in northern Israel in 1993 and 1994, a ninth-century BCE monument records the achievements of an Aramean ruler, widely identified as Hazael.

The reconstructed inscription claims responsibility for killing both Joram of Israel and Ahaziah of Judah.

The biblical account attributes their deaths to Jehu's rebellion. The Aramean inscription attributes them to the ruler generally identified as Hazael.

Archaeologist Assaf Kleiman discusses this conflict in his 2022 study of Hazael's military campaigns. The inscription and biblical narrative describe the same political upheaval from strikingly different perspectives. TheTorah.com

Yet Baker tells viewers that the Bible describes the exact same event, presenting this as a reason the inscription is important.

He explains the House of David connection. He explains why the inscription does not directly prove David's existence.

He does not explain the competing claims about the deaths.

That is an extraordinary omission in a presentation devoted to the relationship between archaeology and biblical history.

The contradiction was already well known

This is not an obscure objection invented to challenge a YouTube video.

In 1996, biblical scholar William Schniedewind examined the Tel Dan fragments in the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research.

His research identified Hazael as the probable author and proposed that Jehu's rebellion might have occurred in cooperation with the Aramean king.

That possibility matters enormously.

If Jehu was operating with Hazael's support, the two accounts might describe different aspects of the same political operation. Hazael could claim responsibility for victories achieved through an ally.

But cooperation is a hypothesis, not an established fact. The inscription does not prove that Jehu was acting on Hazael's orders. JSTOR

Scholars have also considered a more radical interpretation.

In a 1999 study, J. W. Wesselius argued that Jehu himself might have commissioned the Tel Dan inscription. That interpretation would bring its claims about the kings' deaths closer to the biblical account.

Bob Becking subsequently examined the proposal and found it improbable. His published assessment acknowledged the continuing scholarly disagreement while treating Hazael's authorship as the more widely accepted explanation. Taylor & Francis Online

There are therefore several possibilities.

Hazael may have exaggerated his responsibility. Jehu may have acted in cooperation with him. The biblical narrative may preserve a modified account of the killings. The fragmented inscription may also leave important details unresolved.

The available evidence does not establish which explanation is correct.

What it establishes is that Baker's straightforward claim of confirmation conceals a genuine historical dispute.

And that dispute is considerably more interesting than the check mark he places beside another royal name.

The Bible Itself Gives Two Different Accounts

The problem becomes more revealing when we compare the biblical texts with each other.

Second Kings describes Ahaziah fleeing Jehu's forces, suffering fatal injuries near Ibleam, and dying at Megiddo.

Second Chronicles tells a different story.

In Second Chronicles 22:9, Ahaziah is discovered hiding in Samaria, captured, brought before Jehu, and executed.

These are not identical descriptions of the king's final moments.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops explicitly acknowledges the discrepancy in its accompanying biblical commentary. USCCB

Now there are three accounts to consider: the death during Jehu's pursuit in Second Kings, the capture and execution in Second Chronicles, and the Aramean monarch's claim of responsibility on the Tel Dan Stele.

All place the deaths within the same wider political crisis. They disagree about important particulars.

For a historian, these differences are valuable.

They may preserve competing traditions, political interests, or later attempts to explain a violent transfer of power.

For Baker's presentation, however, they complicate the simple distinction between a documented event and an invented one.

Nobody needs to deny that Joram, Ahaziah, Jehu, and Hazael were historical figures to recognize that their surviving narratives contain conflicting information.

Indeed, acknowledging those conflicts is precisely how archaeology becomes useful.

A historical document should not lose its inconvenient details merely because its names match those in another historical document.

The Signet Ring That Wasn't Found Where Baker Suggests

Baker's treatment of Hilkiah, the high priest associated with King Josiah, raises a different problem.

He tells viewers that archaeologists found a signet ring in 1980 bearing an inscription identifying Hanan as the son of Hilkiah the priest.

Because the ring belongs to the appropriate historical period, Baker regards it as almost certain evidence for the biblical Hilkiah.

The artifact deserves closer examination.

The ring was not recovered from a documented archaeological excavation in 1980.

According to the account published by scholar Tsvi Schneider in Biblical Archaeology Review, it entered a private collection after being purchased somewhere in the Near East that year.

Its original archaeological context is unknown.

Nor does the Bible identify Hanan as a son of the high priest Hilkiah.

The inscription establishes the name of a priest called Hilkiah, assuming the artifact is authentic. Identifying him specifically with Josiah's high priest requires an additional argument. Another priest named Hilkiah also appears in the Bible as Jeremiah's father.

The original scholarly discussion treated the connection as a possibility, not a certainty. The BAS Library

This distinction is not academic nitpicking.

An artifact recovered during a controlled excavation comes with information about where it was found, the surrounding material, and the historical layer to which it belongs.

An artifact purchased through the antiquities trade lacks that context.

Researchers can still study its script, materials, craftsmanship, and authenticity. Some unprovenanced artifacts are undoubtedly ancient.

But their historical identification demands greater care.

Baker's account turns an uncertain identification based on an unprovenanced artifact into something approaching archaeological certainty.

The ring may be genuine. Its inscription may refer to the biblical Hilkiah. Neither possibility warrants claiming that an archaeological excavation established the identification.

One poorly explained artifact does not invalidate the dozens of stronger examples in the presentation.

It does undermine the impression that every individual on the chart has been verified to the same standard.

Ancient Kings Were Not Independent Fact-Checkers

There is another problem with treating inscriptions as straightforward historical confirmation.

Many were written to glorify the rulers who commissioned them.

The Mesha Stele provides an instructive example.

Baker introduces this ninth-century BCE Moabite monument as evidence that Omri conquered Moab and that King Mesha subsequently recovered his kingdom's independence.

The inscription is unquestionably important.

But it is also a royal account written from Mesha's perspective.

Mesha attributes his successes to the god Chemosh, describes military victories, and boasts of Israel's destruction.

One of its claims is that Israel had been destroyed forever.

Israel, of course, continued to exist.

The statement reflects the language and ambitions of royal propaganda rather than a reliable prediction of Israel's future.

Scholars Israel Finkelstein and Thomas Römer emphasize the importance of reading the inscription alongside biblical geography and archaeological discoveries rather than treating it as an uncomplicated record. TheTorah.com

Even the chronology creates questions.

In his 2025 archaeological study Against Moab, Benjamin W. Porter examines the difficulty of reconciling Mesha's account of his rebellion with the dates supplied in Second Kings.

The inscription appears to place Mesha's revolt during the reign of Omri's son Ahab, whereas the biblical account places the rebellion after Ahab's death.

The precise chronology remains difficult to reconstruct, partly because royal terminology can refer to dynastic successors rather than sons in the narrow biological sense. Cambridge University Press

This does not make the Mesha Stele worthless.

It makes it necessary to distinguish what the inscription establishes from what its author wanted readers to believe.

The same principle applies to Assyrian monuments.

Sennacherib's famous account of his campaign against Judah describes the conquest of 46 fortified cities and Hezekiah's confinement inside Jerusalem.

Baker correctly observes that the inscription does not claim Jerusalem was captured.

That is an important historical distinction.

It is also a reminder that royal inscriptions can emphasize impressive achievements while leaving readers to discover the limitations of those achievements.

The Assyrian king described his victories. He was not writing a neutral report for future historians.

The same caution should govern every archaeological check mark in Baker's presentation.

Cyrus's Cylinder Does Not Contain the Biblical Decree

Toward the end of the video, Baker introduces Cyrus the Great, whose conquest of Babylon transformed the political circumstances of the Jewish exiles.

The Book of Ezra attributes to Cyrus a decree permitting Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their Temple.

Baker then turns to the Cyrus Cylinder, discovered at Babylon in 1879.

The artifact describes Cyrus's restoration of religious sanctuaries and his return of displaced populations to their homes.

The connection is historically meaningful.

But the cylinder does not mention the Jews, Jerusalem, or the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art makes precisely this distinction in its explanation of the artifact.

The cylinder establishes a broader imperial policy that fits the historical circumstances described in Ezra. It does not independently reproduce Ezra's specific decree. The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Baker presents the two accounts together as another example of the Bible preserving a genuine historical event.

That conclusion is reasonable at the level of general Persian policy.

It becomes less secure if the comparison is understood as independent confirmation of the particular proclamation recorded in Ezra.

Again, the distinction is between historical context and exact corroboration.

Cyrus conquered Babylon. His administration restored religious institutions. Jewish traditions identify him as the ruler who authorized their return.

Those propositions are related, but they are not interchangeable.

A good archaeological explanation should tell readers exactly where the independent evidence ends.

Thirty-Seven Names Are Not Thirty-Seven Confirmed Stories

The fundamental weakness in Baker's presentation is the way different kinds of evidence can acquire the same visual significance.

A royal inscription naming Ahab is powerful evidence that Ahab existed.

A contemporary administrative record identifying Jehoiachin as a captive king is strong evidence for his presence in Babylon.

A seal recovered from a secure archaeological context can establish that a person bearing a particular name and title lived during the relevant period.

But evidence for a name is not necessarily evidence for a specific action, relationship, religious experience, or narrative.

Consider the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III.

Its depiction of Jehu submitting to the Assyrian ruler is exceptionally valuable. It offers independent evidence connecting the Israelite king to Assyrian imperial power.

It does not establish that Jehu received divine authorization to overthrow Ahab's dynasty.

Similarly, identifying Hezekiah in Assyrian records does not establish that every episode in the biblical account of his reign happened as described.

The problem is not that Baker explicitly claims to have proven every biblical miracle or narrative. He does not.

He repeatedly distinguishes historical individuals from more literary accounts. He also openly withholds definitive confirmation from David and Isaiah.

Those qualifications make the presentation more responsible than a simple attempt to prove the entire Bible through archaeology.

But they also make his treatment of the Tel Dan conflict and Hilkiah's ring harder to defend.

Baker understands that archaeological evidence has limits.

He does not apply those limits consistently.

That inconsistency is especially important because the presentation's format encourages readers to see each confirmed individual as part of an accumulating case for historical reliability.

Yet the evidence varies substantially in what it can establish.

Some artifacts securely identify rulers. Others preserve contested identifications. Some confirm military events. Others introduce contradictions that require further historical investigation.

Treating these different findings as equivalent produces a cleaner chart, but a less precise understanding of the past.

The More Interesting History Is the One Baker Leaves Behind

There is a deeper story within these discoveries.

The Tel Dan Stele was not written to help modern readers verify the Bible. It was commissioned to commemorate political and military achievements.

The Mesha Stele was not an impartial history of Israelite-Moabite relations. It celebrated a Moabite king's victories and attributed them to his god.

Assyrian monuments presented imperial conquest through the language of royal supremacy.

These documents were instruments of political memory.

So were many of the narratives preserved in ancient religious literature.

That does not mean every account was invented. It means historians must ask who produced a record, what its author knew, what the author wanted to communicate, and how its claims compare with other surviving evidence.

The possibility that Hazael and Jehu were connected during the overthrow of Israel's ruling dynasty is an especially revealing example.

It introduces a political explanation for events that the biblical narrative presents primarily through prophetic authority and divine judgment.

The hypothesis remains disputed. It cannot responsibly be presented as a discovered conspiracy.

But investigating it opens questions about military alliances, shifting loyalties, the collapse of royal dynasties, and the way later societies remembered political violence.

Those questions are more historically productive than deciding whether a name deserves a check mark.

Archaeology becomes most valuable when it complicates inherited stories, not merely when it appears to validate them.

Elle's Verdict: The Names Are Real. The History Is More Complicated.

Matt Baker successfully demonstrates that the Bible contains numerous historical people.

That was never the difficult part of the investigation.

The more demanding question is whether the surviving evidence confirms what the Bible says those people actually did.

On that question, the presentation is substantially weaker.

Its treatment of the Tel Dan Stele omits an established scholarly disagreement about the deaths of two kings. Its identification of Hilkiah relies on an artifact without documented excavation provenance. Its comparison of Ezra's decree with the Cyrus Cylinder needs a sharper distinction between general historical policy and a specific recorded proclamation.

These are not reasons to dismiss biblical archaeology.

They are reasons to demand more from anyone explaining it.

The most consequential example remains the deaths of Joram and Ahaziah.

The Bible attributes their killing to Jehu. The Tel Dan inscription, under its prevailing interpretation, credits Hazael. Scholars have proposed explanations, but none has settled the historical question.

Baker calls the accounts confirmation of the same event.

That is precisely where his audience deserved an investigation instead.

The real achievement of archaeology is not that it can turn every biblical character into a verified historical figure.

It is that it allows us to compare ancient claims, uncover disagreements, challenge assumptions, and reconstruct a past that no surviving source describes perfectly.

Baker's chart makes the Bible look more historically grounded.

The evidence behind the chart tells a more complicated—and much more worthwhile—story.

References

1. UsefulCharts — 37 Bible Characters Found Through Archaeology. Matt Baker, original video; publication date not independently verified.
Watch the original video

The work under examination, including Baker's descriptions of the Tel Dan Stele, Hilkiah's signet ring, and the Cyrus Cylinder.

2. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops — Second Kings, Chapter 9. Biblical text, undated online edition.
Read Second Kings 9

Records Jehu's rebellion, his killing of Joram, and the pursuit that caused Ahaziah's death.

3. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops — Second Chronicles, Chapter 22. Biblical text, undated online edition.
Read Second Chronicles 22

Provides an alternative account of Ahaziah's death and explicitly identifies its disagreement with Second Kings.

4. The Jewish Museum — Tel Dan Stele. Exhibition, December 5, 2024–January 5, 2025.
Read the museum's description

Identifies the monument, its discovery, the House of David reference, and the prevailing attribution to Hazael.

5. William M. Schniedewind — Tel Dan Stela: New Light on Aramaic and Jehu's Revolt. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, May 1996.
Read the scholarly abstract

Examines the reconstructed inscription and proposes possible cooperation between Hazael and Jehu; this relationship remains hypothetical.

6. J. W. Wesselius — The First Royal Inscription from Ancient Israel: The Tel Dan Inscription Reconsidered. Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament, 1999.
Read the research abstract

Presents the minority interpretation that Jehu, rather than Hazael, commissioned the inscription.

7. Bob Becking — Did Jehu Write the Tel Dan Inscription? Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament, 1999.
Read the scholarly abstract

Challenges the proposed attribution to Jehu and documents the scholarly disagreement.

8. Assaf Kleiman — King Hazael of Aram-Damascus Subjugates Israel, 9th Century B.C.E. TheTorah.com, 2022.
Read the archaeological analysis

Provides a reconstructed translation of the Tel Dan inscription and explicitly discusses its different account of the two kings' deaths.

9. Tsvi Schneider — Six Biblical Signatures. Biblical Archaeology Review; publication date not verified.
Read the research discussion

Documents the uncertain provenance of Hanan's signet ring and the limits of identifying its inscription with the biblical high priest Hilkiah.

10. Israel Finkelstein and Thomas Römer — North Israelite Memories of the Transjordan and the Mesha Inscription. TheTorah.com, 2018.
Read the historical analysis

Compares the Moabite royal inscription with biblical narratives and archaeological evidence to reconstruct the relationship between Israel and Moab.

11. Benjamin W. Porter — Against Moab: Interrogating the Archaeology of Iron Age Jordan. Cambridge University Press, March 2025.
Read the open-access study

Examines the chronological and archaeological limitations of reconstructing Moabite history, including tensions between Mesha's account and Second Kings.

12. Metropolitan Museum of Art — The Cyrus Cylinder and Ancient Persia: Charting a New Empire. Exhibition, June–August 2013.
Read the museum's explanation

Confirms the cylinder's description of Persian restoration policies while noting that it does not specifically mention the Jewish return to Jerusalem.