Summary: Different potential solutions to the Jericho puzzle are explored in this conclusion to the series. Which has a pattern that best fits the Bible?
And they burnt the city with fire, and all that was therein: only the silver, and the gold, and the vessels of brass and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the LORD. – Joshua 6:24 (KJV)
When did Jericho Fall?
In Part 2, we saw that despite skepticism about the Bible’s account of the fall of Jericho in mainstream archaeology, a very strong pattern of evidence from Jericho’s City IV matches the Bible in an uncanny way – even down to the details. The question has always been, when did City IV fall, and can that line up with the Bible’s timeline for Joshua’s Conquest?
In this week’s conclusion to the series we look at different ideas for matching this evidence to the Bible, including a new idea from Bryan Windle, who proposes that new reports out of Jericho show that City V could be the actual setting for the Conquest events. Is the evidence for any of these options strong enough to end the debate?
Chronological Revisionism
Part 2 of this series covered John Bimson’s idea to down-date the end of the Middle Bronze Age, which in the standard view normally ends around 1550 BC. Bimson would lower that by more than a century so that the destruction of Jericho City IV with its fallen walls would align with the Biblical “Early Date” for the Conquest in the late 1400s BC. As seen in the film Patterns of Evidence: The Exodus, David Rohl incorporated this idea into his New Chronology for the ancient world. His first book on the topic was A Test of Time (1995), published as Pharaohs and Kings in the USA. Rohl and other scholars saw evidence from multiple areas showing that the dates assigned to the archaeological levels – and the histories of the kingdoms they are associated with – have major problems and need to be adjusted by centuries.
Rohl specializes in the history of Egypt, where he outlines several indicators that its Third Intermediate Period (which followed the New Kingdom) had been overstretched by more than three centuries. This was Egyptian evidence having nothing to do with the Bible. But if the Third Intermediate Period (before 664 BC) was compressed to the degree Rohl proposes it should be, everything before it, including Egypt’s New Kingdom – and the end of the Middle Bronze – would also be pulled forward by that same three (plus) centuries.
Shifting the dates for the Kingdom periods would not only affect Egypt, but also all the civilizations surrounding Egypt, because they all get their dates from connections to Egypt. However, it would not affect the dates assigned to the Bible’s timeline, because it has its own internal and independent chronology from information within the text.
This would change how Biblical events line up with the history of the ancient world. It would create new alignments and contexts that could support the Bible and explain why there had been so much skepticism about Israel’s early history among mainstream scholars in the past. Another group of revisionists favored a less radical shift of about two centuries, rather than three. This group includes John Bimson and Peter van der Veen, who have both been featured in our films.
This produces a strong pattern of evidence in Egypt for the biggest hardest-to-hide aspects of the Exodus account. These factors include evidence for massive populations of Semites (western Asiatics) in Egypt during the Middle Bronze (MB), an absence of these high numbers in the Late Bronze (LB), and a collapse of Egyptian Power at the point of exodus, leading to the arrival of the foreign Hyksos rulers that dominated Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period between its Middle and New Kingdoms.
Of course this idea met with strong opposition from the majority of scholars whose work was based on conventional chronology and who accepted that the standard timeline was accurate to within a decade or two. Even open-minded scholars have questioned whether the standard view could really be off by centuries. One reason the conventional date for the end of the MBA and Jericho’s destruction was put in the mid 16th century BC was its assumed link to the Egyptians under Pharaoh Ahmose pursuing the Hyksos as they fled from Avaris. But there is no direct evidence of the Hyksos or the Egyptians in the area of Jericho at that time – or that the Egyptians were then strong enough to overthrow dozens of fortified cities across Canaan.
Critics who have a high regard for the Bible, but also a high regard for standard chronology, have claimed that while the revisionist ideas might look good for Egypt, once you get to Canaan they don’t work. But this claim just doesn’t hold true when looking at the Conquest.
The Bible names 14 cities that are said to have been conquered by Israel, but 31 defeated kings are listed in Joshua 12. Bimson listed Canaanite cities mentioned in the Bible’s Conquest account, comparing them to the archaeological evidence for when the cities were destroyed. The location of some of these cities is unknown or uncertain, but there is a good fit with a wave of nearly 40 Middle Bronze city destructions in Canaan, while many of the sites were not even active in the LB. Rohl adopted this list into his own proposal that the wave of city destructions near the end of the Middle Bronze Age occurred a little earlier – at the end of MB II B, rather than at the very end of the age at the end of MB II C. He also included evidence for when the cities had major activity, since the Bible mentions high walls in several places. Here is David Rohl’s list of cities:
The site of Hazor did experience a destruction at the end of Late Bronze IIB (around 1200 BC by standard dating), but it is given a question mark because after this destruction it lay abandoned for centuries. Yet the Bible has Hazor quickly rising again to become a major threat in the book of Judges, so the LB IIB destruction doesn’t really fit the Bible.
But the match between Joshua’s Conquest and the end of the Middle Bronze Age is even stronger, since Judges 1:27-33 contains a list of cities that the Israelites did not defeat. In every case where these have been excavated (Megiddo, Taanach, Beth-shan, and Gezer) no break in occupation is seen at the transition from MBA to LB I.
Revisionists emphasize how well the city-destructions near the end of the Middle Bronze Age fit the Bible, while the same sites at the Late Date do not. Additionally, they say this chart is also a problem for those who propose an Early Date of around 1400 BC, using standard dates for Egypt and the Bronze ages. A majority of cities mentioned in the Conquest account were abandoned after their destruction in the Middle Bronze Age and were either empty burned-out ruins or only scantily occupied throughout the LBA. No fortified cities were there to be overcome by Joshua if he attacked at the end of LB I.
So it’s not just Jericho (and Ai) where there are disputes about whether the final destruction happened in the MBA vs. LBA. Those who want a LBA I destruction at the standard date around 1400 BC need to argue for a whole set of city destructions to be redated from MBA to LBA, a shift of about 150 years (at a minimum) from the standard thinking today.
The final Biblical challenge to chronological revisionism as a viable option is whether it fits well with the early kings of Israel. We hope to explore that question in future films, podcasts, and articles.
An Earlier Biblical Exodus Date
Some have proposed that the standard (Biblical) Early Date for the Exodus/Conquest may be off by more than a century, and that explains the apparent mismatch of evidence at City IV and the Conquest. If the Biblical Conquest was sometime around the mid 16th century BC, that would put it at the time of the fall of Middle Bronze Jericho, without a need for a major adjustment to the histories of Egypt and Canaan. They accept that there may need to be some revision for the end of the MBA – after all, archaeology is imprecise in its dating when relying on pottery typology. These are just estimates that may be off by decades. But the main issue is the perceived Biblical date.
Roger Liebi, the Swiss theologian who has appeared in our Israel Dilemma film has proposed a 1606 BC Exodus date. He believes that the times of foreign oppression in the book of Judges were left out of the 480-year total between the Exodus and Solomon’s 4th year as reported in 1 Kings 6:1. There are examples of other chronologies from the ancient world that leave off the years of foreign control.
Other scholars propose that the Exodus occurred just before 1550 BC and is to be associated with the expulsion of the Hyksos from Egypt, as Manetho (an early Egyptian historian) did. As with all of these proposals, there are many more arguments both for and against this view. A couple arguments against it are that it would require the reader of the Bible to know the system being employed to understand 1 Kings 6:1 rightly. The spans reported in the book of Judges seem to have a lot of overlap employed between different regions and 1 Kings 6:1 seems to be an accurate summary of that period. Also, proponents of both chronological revisionism and a standard 1400 BC Conquest argue that the archaeological evidence for the period of the Exodus (before the Conquest) and the Kings (after the Conquest) fits better when using the standard Biblical time spans.
A Standard Early Date in the Late Bronze
In Patterns of Evidence: The Exodus, Bryant Wood represented the position of a standard Early Date for the Conquest (starting around 1406 with the fall of Jericho’s City IV), without any major revision to Egypt’s timeline. As a pottery expert, Wood has asserted since 1990 that a closer look at Kathleen Kenyon’s excavation reports show that she was wrong. He argued that the pottery she dated to the end of the MBA for the destruction of City IV should in fact be dated to the end of LBA I – the first subdivision of the Late Bronze Age ending around 1400 BC in the standard scheme.
Wood was also instrumental in identifying the second city of the Conquest, Ai at a site (Khirbet el-Maqatir) that fit the Biblical geography better than the previously designated Ai site. However, here too the pottery dating the destruction of the small fortified site has been disputed as to whether it should be classified as MBA II or LBA I. Complicating the matter is the fact that several varieties of pottery bridge the span between the two periods, so their presence could be used to argue for either view.
Mainstream archaeologists continue to reject Wood’s designation of the pottery at Jericho’s City IV, but there is a bias against supporting the Bible in many circles – just as there is a bias against questioning the standard timeline. Several good scholars, such as Titus Kennedy, continue to argue for a LB I destruction of Jericho. But as mentioned above, several other conquest sites will also need to be revised from MBA to LB I destructions, in order to have a pattern that fits the Bible. In recent years, more LB activity has been noted at some of these sites, so this is a trend that will have to be monitored.
Tombs near Jericho have produced Late Bronze material, but there are tombs from many eras found near the city. Some may be related to the settlement on the plain below. The question is, which tomb remains fit with the major city destruction layer on the mound, which is where the pottery-style argument again comes into play.
Bryan Windle’s Jericho City V
Archaeologist Bryan Windle has taken the latest reports from Jericho to propose yet another option. His idea is that City IV was not Joshua’s Jericho, rather City V in the Late Bronze should be considered the true setting, which has supporting evidence that has been underappreciated, but is now coming to light.
Windle did an in-depth investigation of LB pottery and the history of excavations at Jericho, including those of Lorenzo Nigro and his joint Italian-Palestinian team who have been excavating the site since 1997, including an eight-year pause in the 2000s. This all came together in his master’s thesis titled “Tell es-Sultan/Jericho City V: The City the Israelites Conquered?” His conclusion was that Jericho’s City V likely fell to Joshua in the LB II period around 1350 BC.
To establish his chronological search window, Windle began by accepting the Early Date for the Exodus/Conquest, most commonly held to be 1446/1406 BC. This is primarily based on 1 Kings 6:1 and the nearly 480-year span it gives for the time between the exodus from Egypt and the 4th year of Solomon’s reign. However, he acknowledges that scholars disagree about exactly when to date Solomon. Significantly, he also notes that the Greek Septuagint translation of the Old Testament has “440th year” in 1 Kings 6:1, rather than the 480th year. This variant would make those events 40 years more recent. This leads him to focus on a range of possible dates rather than one specific date.
At the same time there is imprecision involved with archaeological dating methods. Opinions among mainstream Egyptologists today on the dates of some pharaoh’s reigns can vary by 25 years, even in the New Kingdom’s 18th Dynasty. Ceramic styles (the primary means of dating archaeological layers) only indicate a range of time when they were commonly used, and not an exact date, even on the end points of their usage. Carbon 14 has been an area of particular dispute. But even if one accepts its reliability for testing ancient organic matter, its results are also expressed as a range (usually over several decades) and a percent chance of the sample falling within that range.
Windle took the most common Early date of 1406 BC for the Conquest, included the Septuagint date 40 years earlier (or 1366 BC) and then went 20 years either side of those dates to factor in the archaeological imprecision. This gave a window between 1426-1346 BC to look for potential Conquest evidence. In standard archaeological terms, this would be from the end of LB 1 to the early part of LB II. City V would correspond to the end of that range.
Late Bronze II pottery at Jericho has long been known to come from a building built above the spring. Garstang called it the Middle Building, Nigro called it “the residence.” This site was integral to David Rohl’s theory because he dated the Middle Building (and LB II) to the time of King David when he told his emissaries to stay in Jericho to let their beards grow back (see #11 in the Biblical list in Part 2 of the series). In Bryant Wood’s system, this building could fit Eglon’s palace during the early Judges period (see #10 on the Biblical list). In either of these views the scanty LB II remains found in Jericho fit the account of limited development, but not a fortified city, since that would not happen until #12 on the list, which the archaeology supported – a fortified city rebuilt at Jericho later in the Iron Age.
However, Windle, after studying Nigro’s most recent writings on Jericho, takes a completely different approach. Nigro’s conclusions have validated that City IV and its great destruction was a MBA event, not a LBA one. However, instead of considering the possibility of redating the MBA, Windle focused only on LBA contexts (for example, he only mentions a deep investigation of LB pottery, not MB pottery). He believes Nigro describes several instances of LBA evidence that make City V a prime suspect for Joshua’s destruction.
Windle reports that Garstang believed a cuneiform tablet he found near the Middle Building was similar to the Tell el-Amarna tablets. Nigro believes this to be an administrative text, indicative of a city that still had a political role, a palace, a ruler, and even an archive into the 14th century BC. However, the tablet was so damaged that nothing meaningful could be translated with certainty.
More importantly, Windle relays Nigro’s conclusion that after City IV’s destruction, the site lay abandoned for close to a century. Then a new City V mudbrick wall (which Nigro dated to LB II) was constructed on top of the surviving large Cyclopean wall. The dimensions for this mudbrick wall (at 2m wide) seem to be about a third smaller than what had previously been reported for the mudbrick wall constructed at the top of the slope in City IV. Nigro claimed the stub of this wall had been discovered by previous excavators, but they didn’t recognize it as Late Bronze.
Significantly, Windle writes that according to Nigro, the fallen bricks from the LB wall were discovered by Kenyon piled up at the base of the revetment wall. If true, it would mean that the fallen walls the Israelites used to climb up into Jericho might have been from City V in the same way City IV’s wall was thought to have fallen.
Joshua 6:24 states, “they burned the city with fire and everything in it.” City V has some evidence of destruction by fire, but according to Windle it is more modest than that seen in City IV. This can be explained by much of City V’s remains eroding away, a process that is known to be extensive for the LBA layers.
To his credit, Windle is not overly declarative about his proposal. But major questions remain concerning his new theory. Nigro has not yet published a final excavation report, so many details remain to be clarified and defended. This would also help determine if Windle is misinterpreting any of Nigro’s claims. For example, in his interim report on Jericho excavations from 2019-2023, Nigro writes that only, “Scanty Sultan V (Late Bronze) remains were identified along the head of the Cyclopean Wall in a layer of in situ and fallen down orange mudbricks.” Of course Nigro will also have to defend his own conclusions more fully with sound evidence. There is no guarantee that all of his conclusions are correct.
Nigro’s timing for the end of City V also puts it well past the dates in Windles’s window, (1426-1346 BC), but here Windle is counting on the imprecision of archaeological dating, and some differing conclusions on the timing by past scholars. The proposal for City V being Joshua’s Jericho would also leave behind much of the key evidence that matches the Bible in City IV. This includes the remarkable pattern of evidence for the intentional burning of the city after the walls fell, the large population of the city, the widespread full storage jars confirming a very short siege in springtime, and the section of the wall with houses built against it that didn’t fall, matching the saving of Rahab. Of course it would also decouple Jericho from the broader pattern of Canaanite city occupations and destructions in the earlier period that apparently does not exist later in the LB.
John Bimson’s assessments of Nigro’s reports differ quite markedly from Windle’s. In “An Alternative Paradigm for Israel’s Origins in Canaan” (a chapter in the book, Assyria and the West), Bimson writes that Nigro assigns only “sections” of mudbrick wall atop the revetment wall to a LB city. Bimson also claims that Nigro fails to answer the case for the brick sections being part of the MB defences and that no evidence is presented to support his view that the LB settlement lasted until the end of LBIIB (c. 1200 BC), or that it was destroyed. Time will tell how strong Nigro’s case is and what claims he is actually making.
Conclusion
In the debate over the destruction of Joshua’s Jericho, skeptics have claimed that no fortified city existed at the time claimed by the Bible, so the story is only a myth. However, the pattern of details in Jericho City IV’s destruction seem to fit the Biblical narrative too well to merely be a coincidence.
At least three approaches have been offered to link the fiery end of City IV to the Early Date of the Biblical Conquest. Revisionists claim that significantly redating the archaeological levels (like the end of the MBA) is the answer, but that this idea has been largely dismissed by scholars with an unquestioning acceptance of conventional views about the timeline that prevents many from seeing a powerful alternative. Others claim a fair assessment of the evidence reveals that Jericho’s City IV actually fell at the expected Early Date within standard archaeological dating (LB I). Still others maintain that the Early Biblical Date should be seen as much earlier than the standard view, and this would align the evidence with the Biblical account.
Bryan Windle’s new argument for City V deserves continued attention. Final excavation reports need to be published and new evidence may solidify this idea. As with other Biblical questions, it is possible that as we gain more information and insight, aspects of more than one view might provide the needed pieces to solve the Jericho and Conquest puzzle. The smoking gun is just too pronounced to be ignored. Keep thinking!
TOP PHOTO: The Battle of Jericho. (Julius Schnoor von Carolsfeld 1794-1872, Library of Congress, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
