Joshua's
Jericho?
| A new culture springs up abruptly at Jericho in the first part of the second millennium BC. This is the time when the horse is domesticated, allowing for widespread trade and warfare. Accordingly, the many finds from Jericho's graves show an Egyptian connection.
Since we are deep in the Syro-African rift, the area is subject to earthquake. At some stage, around the 17th century BC, a gas arose and destroyed decay-causing bacteria in one of the family graves. Some organic materials survived, including wooden furniture and boxes. (The contents of the grave have been moved to the Rockefeller Museum, where they are displayed as found.) The style seems very similar to that of Egypt, though simpler.
It was a time when people from this part of the Levant were settling in the Nile delta. They eventually took it over -- and were dubbed by the Egyptians "Hyksos," foreign rulers. Hundreds of "Hyksos scarabs" were also found in the Jericho graves.
The city of this time included between ten and twelve acres, though a large part consisted of ramparts. Its wall extended eastward (beyond the modern road) to include the spring. (A section of the tell was removed to construct the reservoir and the road.) Because of the new technology of war (horses and chariots), this wall was also more massive than earlier ones. Thanks to a recent excavation, we can view it today on the south side of the tell, as well as the north. Its outermost section is a retaining wall of large stones rising about fifteen feet. Then comes a glacis, sloping up at 35 degrees, to a line about 30 feet above the top of the outer wall. Upon this bulwark stood yet another wall, 16 feet thick and of undetermined height (for only the stone foundations remain). The whole complex was 68 feet thick. It must have made an impression.
According to Kenyon, this city was destroyed (along with many others in the country) when the Egyptians established control in Canaan after driving out the Hyksos -- an event usually dated to 1550 BC, long before the time of Joshua. She finds no city at Jericho again until the 11th century, well after the time of Joshua.
In the early eighties, a few years after Kenyon's death, her detailed reports were published. Bryant G. Wood took a new look at her findings and re-evaluated them in the Biblical Archaeology Review (March-April 1990). The city with the impressive ramparts, he holds, endured all through the Middle Bronze Age (2100-1550 BC) and was destroyed in a period called Late Bronze IIA: about 1400 BC.
Wood's revision caused a stir, because it appeared to bring the city of massive walls two centuries closer to Joshua and the Israelites -- indeed, to the date that a chronology based purely on the Bible would suggest. Yet most archaeologists do not accept Wood's re-dating. (Why not?) Apart from that, they discern no trace of Israel in the land as early as 1400 BC.
In the 1980's, Israeli archaeologists carried out surface surveys in the hill country between the Jezreel Valley and Beersheba. They found 248 sites in the Middle Bronze Age (2100-1550 BC), then a sudden drop to a mere 29 in the Late Bronze (1550-1200 BC) followed by an upsurge to 254 in Iron Age I (1200-1000 BC). These iron-age settlements were mostly small. They "possessed an overall material culture that led directly on into the true, full-blown Iron Age culture of the Israelite Monarchy" (Dever).
Using the pottery and architectural styles of the Late Bronze period, it is impossible to distinguish the Israelites from other ethnic groups. One thing, however, does seem to work: the study of animal bones. At Ashkelon, Ekron and Timna (of the Shephelah), three Philistine sites, between 8% and 18% of the animal bones belonged to pigs. These were popular at other lowlands sites as well. At Heshbon in the highlands of Transjordan, an Ammonite site, 5% of the bones belonged to pigs. At Ebal and Raddana, two Israelite sites, the percentage of pig bones was zero, and at Shilo, 0.1 (someone noshing on the sly). "(Pigs) disappear from the faunal assemblages of the hill country... The faunal assemblages of Iron II [1000-586 BC -- SL] reflect the same traits." (Finkelstein, p. 206.) citing B. Hesse, pp. 217-218. Conclusion: the Israelites first settled in the central highlands in Iron Age I, the start of which is usually dated to 1200 BC.
Thus, even if Middle Bronze Jericho lasted till 1400 BC, as Wood maintains, we would still have a problem of two centuries. To eliminate them would require a major revision of archaeological analysis at several sites. The motive for such a revision would have to be a new chronology. Future work in radiocarbon dating and the counting of tree rings may supply such a motive, but so far it has not.
We cannot yet assert, then, that a city existed here when the Israelites arrived. On the other hand, where would the Biblical story have come from? Scholars often claim that it was an "etiological" saga: some Israelite, seeing the impressive remains of walls, made the story up to explain them. But this doesn't work. No Israelite saw ruins here. He or she saw a living Iron Age town on a hill of mud.
© 2003 Near East Tourist Agency (NET) Text © 2003 Stephen Langfur
Scripture taken from the NEW A
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