Joshua 6 – the fall of Jericho
The historical accuracy of account of the conquest of Jericho as recorded in Joshua 6 is doubted by most scholars today.
According to that account, the walls of Jericho suddenly collapsed, and the Israelites were able to enter the city unhindered.
Maura Sala roundly states:
‘No archaeological evidence corroborates the biblical account of what happened in Jericho.’
According to the present scholarly consensus, Jericho was not a walled city at that time (around 1400 BC, if a later date for the exodus is assumed).
The biblical account is discussed as a ‘test case’ in the book Five Views on Biblical Inerrancy. Peter Enns says that the ‘overwhelmingly dominant’ scholarly position is that Jericho was a small, unwalled settlement at that time. He says that although in the 1930s, John Garstang claimed to have found remains of a well-populated walled city on the site, Kathleen Kenyon’s excavations in the 1950s led her to argue that these walls dated to about 1550 BC. According to Enns, only biblical inerrantists such as Bryant Wood contest the generally-held view that Jericho was without walls in the time of Joshua.
Conservative scholars such as Kenneth Kitchen and Richard Hess take the view that the ‘essential historicity’ of the biblical account can be maintained, suggesting that the notion of a walled city in the Late Bronze Age is ‘not impossible’, given the possibility that erosion may have obliterated the remains of the walls. But for Enns, this is merely a ‘rhetorical strategy’, according to which:-
‘If the archaeological evidence does not make the biblical view absolutely impossible, the biblical account remains historically possible and therefore should be given the benefit of the doubt, and external evidence should be interpreted generously to support that conclusion.’
The rejection of a position as a mere ‘rhetorical strategy’ could be more fairly levelled against J. McDowell (The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict, p95, repeated verbatim on p382) who mentions the earlier work of Garstang but fails to mention that of Kenyon.
Enns’ own view is that:
‘the biblical story of the fall of Jericho is perhaps a significant elaboration on a historical kernel, not a reliable record of a historical event.’
It is not difficult to find scholarly sources, not committed to the historical accuracy of the Old Testament, that are more sympathetic to the biblical account.
According to The Archaeological Encyclopedia of the Holy Land:-
‘It is possible…that the Late Bronze Age II city of Jericho was conquered by Joshua, and that during the long period that elapsed before its resettlement in the time of Hiel the Bethelite all remains were washed away by the [winter] rains.’
Presumably, the author of this article is not offering this as merely a ‘rhetorical strategy’ to shore up doctrinal conservatism. The same article adds that no remains have been found of the later city (early 9th century BC) built by Hiel the Bethelite (1 King 16:34).
The relevant article in Harper’s Bible Dictionary (not exactly a bastion of conservative evangelicalism) also notes that Kenyon found little evidence of occupation of the site, and no evidence of walls, from the Late Bronze Age, adding that ‘the forces of erosion had removed all the vital evidence’.
Again, Enns’ confident scepticism seems challenged by the agnosticism found in Harper’s Bible Commentary (again, not a conservative evangelical publication):-
‘Whether the conquest of this city is to be taken largely as a later liturgical creation or whether this town actually fell to Israel will remain a debated problem for a long time to come. Here is a case where archaeology cannot seem to resolve the problem. The excavator of Jericho, Kathleen Kenyon, held that the archaeological evidence is unclear about whether a city existed on the site at the time of Joshua’s conquest.’
‘The ruins of Tell es-Sultan include massive collapsed and burnt mud-brick structures. These ruins were once a flourishing Canaanite city, built in the Early and Middle Bronze Ages (third to mid-second millennium B.C.E.) upon the remains of a major fortified Neolithic settlement. The ruins are far older than the date of Joshua’s conquest (that is, the end of the Late Bronze Age, around the thirteenth century B.C.E.). In fact, there is no evidence connecting the remains of this impressive city with the Jericho described in Joshua.’
…and surmises:-
‘We have to imagine that, when the biblical author included Jericho in the conquest story, the site was already a heap of burnt and ruinously collapsed bricks. These ruins must have seemed to prove the story and were thus exploited by the biblical author: everybody could see that the city of Jericho had been violently destroyed by fire. The author thus ascribed this event to the arrival of the Israelites in the promised land.’
According to Kitchen (NBD), the possibility that the remains of Jericho from Joshua’s day have been entirely washed away ‘is not just a “harmonistic” or heuristic view, but one suggested by the evidence of considerable erosion of the older settlements at Jericho.’ Kitchen adds:-
‘It seems highly likely that the washed-out remains of the last Late Bronze Age city are now lost under the modern road and cultivated land along the E side of the town mound, as the main slope of the mound is from W down to E. It remains highly doubtful whether excavation here (even if allowed) would yield much now.’
Given Jericho’s long and varied history, it is not surprising that J.G. McConville (Dictionary of Old Testament: Historical Books) says that its archaeological record is ‘not easy to read’. He cites Kenyon and Mazar in support of the possibility that ‘the Early and Middle Bronze walls were simply used again by occupants in the Late Bronze.
McConville concludes that
‘it would be mistaken either to prejudge the nature of the biblical account on the basis of the archaeology or to force the ambiguous archaeology to fit the biblical picture.’
In The Bible Unfiltered (ch. 20) Michael Heiser notes that a literal reading of biblical chronology (esp. 1 Kings 6:1) would date the fall of Jericho to around 1400 BC.
As noted above, the predominant archaeological view since the middle of the last century has been that a Jericho without walls was destroyed in 1250 BC, that the city had no walls (and was unoccupied) in 1400 BC when, according to the biblical accounts, its walls fell.
Heiser responds that there is, in fact evidence of
- occupation of Jericho in 1400 BC. This evidence is in the form of pottery, and Egyptian scarabs found in Jericho cemeteries that record the names of pharaohs known to have reigned between 1700 and 1300 BC.
- collapsed walls dating to that time
- sudden siege around 1400 BC
- storage jars – still full of harvested food – at the same archaeological level. (Note that Joshua’s siege took place in early spring, after the harvest (Josh 2:6; 3:15; 4:9; 5:10)
(For these points, Heiser references: Bryant G. Wood, 1990. Did the Israelites Conquer Jericho? A New Look at the Archaeological Evidence. Biblical Archaeology Review, 16(2), pp.44–59. Wood’s case does not appear to have been well received by other archaeologists, but I am not competent to adjudicate in this matter.)
Heiser suggests another line of enquiry. It is possible, he writes, that the date favoured by most archaeologists for the fall of Jericho (1250 BC) may be consistent with the biblical evidence after all. There are, he says, indications that the biblical chronology is to be understood figuratively, rather than literally.