Historicity of Fall of Jericho
(See my articles, "Bible Abounds With Truths: Archeology Offers Proof," Part 1 and Part 2)
Dear Mr. Hughes!
After reading your web-site, I found that you give exclusively support for the historical and archaeological inerrancy of the Bible. You do neglect, however, any (in fact many) studies and excavations which point towards the
conclusion that the Bible is not entirely historically accurate. From a site which lays any claim to academic and scholarly integrity, I would expect the representation of at least two approaches to a topic, as well as a bibliography showing the sources of the quoted material. If this is to laborious a task, citations inside the text would be helpful, too.
Even though I do admit that many parts of the Old Testament are historically accurate, excavations during the past four decades indicate that several biblical accounts do not seem credible. As an example, let me cite Joshua 10 and Judges 1: Jericho, the legendary city which Joshua supposedly subdued using trumpets or similar musical instruments, did not exist during the time of the conquest of Joshua. (Kenyon, Kathleen M.: Archaeology in the Holy Land.) In fact, the area of present-day Jericho was uninhabited until several centuries later. The question is, of course - how could Joshua conquer something that did not exist? I do indeed believe that this is impossible, and that the entire account of the capture of Jericho is a myth. - To the question of the walls, I have to notice that the burnt rubble found stems from an earlier period. Till Farrell quotes the Biblical Archaeological Review on this topic: "Despite extensive excavation, no evidence of a Late Bronze Age (1500-1200 B. C.) Canaanite city was found. In short, there was no Canaanite city here for Joshua to conquer (Biblical Archaeology Review, "Joseph A. Callaway: 1920-1988," November/December 1988, p. 24, emphasis added)."
In addition, let me send you an excerpt of an article by James Still, treating the topic of the excavation of Jericho in a serious and more elaborate manner:
Tell es-Sultan (Jericho)
The German excavators Ernst Sellin and Carl Watzinger excavated Tell es-Sultan from 1907-09 and concluded that Late Bronze Age Jericho -- about 1500 BCE when Joshua was said to have led the Conquest of Canaan (Joshua 1-11) -- was destroyed much earlier, in 1600 BCE, and therefore the pan-Israelite invasion hypothesis was historically questionable. This was disturbing to some and so a well-funded John Garstung (sic.) returned to the site in 1930 with the goal of reconciling these two dates in order to support the truth of the Conquest. Working under the presupposition that the biblical account was true, Garstung excavated Jericho from 1930-36 and allegedly uncovered the remains of a wall that was burned and had appeared to be blown outward from the inside. Garstung dated this destruction to the Late Bronze Age period of 1500 BCE in perfect agreement with Joshua's Conquest of Canaan. Garstung's amazing confirmation of the biblical account that the walls did indeed collapse at the sound of trumpets was quickly published in the popular press and seen by many as a triumph in "proving" the Biblical account.28 However, William Albright contested Garstung's findings quietly and knew that the evidence did not support his conclusions.
The controversy raged on until Kathleen Kenyon returned yet again to the
site in 1955 to apply a more exacting type of systematic archaeology (called the "Wheeler-Kenyon method") that is now used regularly throughout the field. Kenyon argued that Garstung had excavated the wrong wall and mistakenly thought that the Early Bronze Age foundations were instead the Late Bronze Age walls of the time of Joshua's Conquest. Jericho was destroyed, not in the Late Bronze Age, but rather nine hundred years earlier in the Early Bronze Age sometime around 2400 BCE. The site was a small village during the Late Bronze Age when Joshua was said to have crossed the Jordan River, making Tell es-Sultan's conquest unnecessary. French archaeologist Judith Marquet-Krause excavated at nearby et-Tell (the biblical Ai in Joshua 7-8) and found, similarly, that it too was destroyed around 2400 BCE. By the time of Joshua's conquest, the city had been completely abandoned. J. A. Callaway, of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, attempted to "circumvent the negative evidence" of Marquet-Krause during his revisit of the site in 1966 but ultimately his findings were rejected by other scholars as "shoddy" and purely apologetic in purpose. Given that Kenyon's work at Tell es-Sultan and that the Wheeler-Kenyon method has become the standard for excavations, it seems incredible that McDowell would advance only Garstung's flawed excavation as the "truth" while ignoring Kenyon's pioneering work entirely."
Another dillemma in the Bible pertains to the city of Lachish. Lachish, not mentioned at all in the Bible, was an important kingdom established by the Assyrian king Sennacherib in the South of Israel in 701 B.C.E., several kilometres north of present-day Beer-Sheva. The importance of the battle for Lachish was so immense that the Assyrian King had sculptures made of the Battle scene, which stretched over the entire front of his palace. In his own accounts, he numbers the people deported after he had conquered Lachish to 200,150. (Reade, Julian: Assyrian Sculpture) Of this event of central importance, not the last trace has been found in the Bible, rendering its use as a historical source more than questionable.
I wonder, too, which version of the Bible you are using: The Bible, as we know it today, was only canonized around 400 C.E. This was done in a voting process conducted by men who had not only religious, but also political and personal interests at their time, thus determining by majority decision what is commonly called the "Word of God". Additionally, no such thing as THE original Bible exists, neither in Greek nor in Latin nor in Aramaeic (sic.) nor in Hebrew; only several thousand documents, of which most are NOT identical to each other, serve as a source of the Inspired Scriptures.
Finally, let me ask you about gratuitous evil in the world. How can an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient God permit such glory in his kingdom as Auschwitz, famines, floods, infant mortality, the Gulags, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Is it truly all for some greater good which I (and six million Jews slaughtered during the Holocaust) have not yet been able to see? Please let me know.
By the way - it's "Schweinehund", and it's capitalized, as all nouns in the beautiful German language are. Additionally, the connotation of that word in German is slightly fascist, as it was commonly used as an abusive description for Jews in Nazi Germany.
Your
Sex-Obsessed Womanizer / Atheist / German / Infidel / Humanist /
Anti-Christ / Skeptic / Leftist / High-School Student / Liberal
David Korn
David,
I will read your letter more thoroughly later, when I am not in a hurry. In regard to Jericho, however, the mainstream archaeologists actually date
habitation on the tel site to at least 10,000 years. In regard to Kathleen
Kenyon, she dug just five trenches in Jericho over a limited time, as if that were enough to base broad conclusions as she did. As reported in a BAR article a few years ago, archaeologist Bryant Wood went back and studied Kenyon's own data, and concluded just the opposite as she -- that indeed there was evidence of walls which fell outward. So at the very least, you see how subjective archaeological "proof" can be.
To me, the Bible is a glass half full, and I am confident that archaeology will eventually "fill" the rest of the glass, i.e., prove the Bible, as certainly tends to be the case in my observation. To the liberal/secular humanist, however, no proof is good enough. They will always see a glass half empty. But their intransigence is based on their choice of worldview, on their biases rather than objective evidence. If there is a "maximal conservatism," as James Barr claims, there is certainly also a "maximal liberalism," which will always seek the most liberal answer to every question.
As for me, I am an apologist, and am hardly responsible to make my "opponents'" case for them.
Blessings,
Paul Hughes
Dear David:
I have had a chance to read your letter more closely, and can deal the remainder of your issues.
On the subject of Lachish, the fact that its destruction is not mentioned in Scripture is literally an "argument from silence," and might have simply not been relevant to the writers' purposes.
Second, the Bible I use depends on the purpose. My 1967 edition Scofield King James reference Bible serves for basic Bible study and devotional reading, while the NIV Study Bible is an excellent reference. Of course, for exegesis I always refer to the original language. I must admit I am no great expert in the Hebrew, having had only 3 courses, which I took as electives, but still find the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia and a good lexicon quite useful, along with the Septuagint. I had a full 3-year course in Koine Greek grammar and exegesis, and consult either the Nestle-Aland or UBS critical texts, with the Bauer/Arndt/Gingrich/Danker lexicon. So I am not unaware of manuscript differences, "witnesses," and early versions.
Third, if you really want to understand the "gratuitous evil in the world," that is another very broad subject -- but reading Romans chapter 1 would be a good start. And I'm afraid I don't understand your reference to Schweinehund.
Finally, I offer these excerpts from my notes, referring to Kathleen Kenyon's archaeological method:
- "Kathleen Kenyon deserves some of the archaeological sainthood conferred on her by fellow archaeologists for improvements in methodology, but she was better at 'collecting infinite amounts of useless detail' than she was at analysis . . . . I have long thought that Ms. Kenyon drew mountains of conclusions from the tiny unrepresentative area she actually dug at Jericho" (Dr. Erich A. von Fange in BAR [July/Aug 1990]:11).
- "When we compare the archaeological evidence at Jericho with the Biblical narrative describing the Israelite destruction of Jericho, we find a quite remarkable agreement" (Bryant Wood, "Did the Israelites Conquer Jericho?" BAR [Mar/Apr 1990]:53).
- "[Kenyon's] thoroughgoing excavation methods and detailed reporting of her findings, however, did not carry over into her analytical work. When the evidence is critically examined there is no basis for her contention that City IV was destroyed by the Hyksos or Egyptians in the mid-16th century B.C.E." (Ibid, 57).
- "History has not been kind to Kathleen Kenyon. Many of the conclusions she reached concerning Jerusalem . . . have been proven wrong by later excavations. And her vaunted archaeological method has also been criticized, sometimes severely. The principal criticism . . . has been that it requires such detail and care that the amount of excavated exposure is inevitably too limited. In the words of William Dever . . . Kenyon's methods 'are so tedious and demanding in application that scarcely ever is a single building completely cleared, let alone a building complex large enough to give us an adequate exposure on which to base our understanding of the material culture of the period'.
"In the words of . . . Yigal Shiloh, . . . 'Kenyon thought once she took an area and, like a checkerboard, put down four small squares, perforating the area, that she had finished her work'" (Review of H. J. Franken and M. L. Steiner, Excavations in Jerusalem 1961-67, Vol. II, by Hershel Shanks, BAR [July/Aug 1991]:4, 6).