This is the ancient site of Jericho! Jericho is where the Bible says the walls came tumbling down. In the 1930s, archaeologist John Garstang dug here, followed by the work of his colleague Kathleen Kenyon in the 1950s.
Garstang concluded that the archaeological evidence he found here matched the biblical account. But Kenyon said no. She said that at the time the Bible says the Israelites attacked Jericho, there was neither a city nor even walls here at the time.
There's no archaeological evidence in Jericho. The wall is middle Bronze Age and has nothing to do with the late Bronze Age, has nothing to do with the coming of the Israelites. If you go to Jericho, Joshua fit the battle of Jericho and the walls came tumbling down.
Problem, there's no wall. Who established that dating? For Jericho, was it? Kathleen Kenyon, who excavated there.
Okay. What you have to do is look at the evidence, analyze the evidence, and come to your conclusion based on the evidence. Not what an authority figure says. Not what the majority opinion is. You have to just put that out of your mind and just look at the evidence and come to your conclusion based on what the evidence tells you.
So is the story of the walls falling down at Jericho history or myth? See for yourselves here on Expedition Bible. We are here at the Tel Aviv airport and we are here to pick up Dr. Peter Parr. That's the sign.
Professor Peter Parr agreed to help us better understand Jericho by returning to the site he helped excavate over 50 years earlier. My name is Peter Parr. Fifty years ago, I worked with Kathleen Kenyon on the Jericho excavations. She was someone I admired, and she was my boss. But we got on well.
So we're here at the... We're at the airport in Tel Aviv. We're picking up Dr. Bryant Wood. Also joining us is Dr. Bryant Wood, who is in the process of publishing his analysis of the pottery from both Garstang and Kenyon's digs at Jericho. I completed my doctoral studies and the subject of my dissertation was Canaanite pottery of the Late Bronze Age.
Well, you might say, hmm, that sounds pretty boring. What would Canaanite pottery of the Late Bronze Age have to do with the Bible? Well, it turns out that we have to use pottery for dating.
And dating is crucial for correlating what you're finding in an archaeological excavation with history. These two archaeologists, Dr. Parr and Dr. Wood, come from radically different viewpoints. I'm religiously of the belief, of the faith. I don't happen to be very religious. Yes, I would believe what the Bible says, take it literally.
Despite their differences, let's begin with what these archaeologists do agree about regarding Jericho. So, really amongst scholars, there isn't any debate on that this actually is the site of Jericho. of Jericho. No. Well there's no question but what this is Jericho.
Nobody disputes that at all. So this is the site that the Bible is telling us about. I don't think there's anything, no one as far as I know has ever argued this is not biblical Jericho.
The thing to understand about Jericho is that it is a tell. Behind me here is what archaeologists today call a tell. Today through excavation they know this is where people live, this is where ancient cities were. So, I mean, to help us understand a tell, I mean, could you kind of look at it as a cake?
A layer cake. A layered cake. Yes, many, many layers. I think of a nice jam sponge cake that my wife makes. Very nice.
So we are making a cake to better understand a tell. And just like a tell, a cake is made up of different layers. And a city would be abandoned or destroyed, and then they would come onto the ruins and they would build another.
another city over the top and then another one Over a long period of time, different cities would be built on top of each other until you have these unnatural looking hills like this. Today called a tell, this is an example of one that has never been excavated. And when you begin to dig into this tell...
You go down through it layer by layer as you get down to the earlier and earlier and earlier cultures. Just as we can now cut open our cake to expose the inner structure of our cake, so archaeologists dig into a tell to expose the inner structure of the layer system within a tell. That's a very good description, except archaeology is not a piece of cake.
It's a lot of hard work. As we excavate the material from the tell, however, it is silent. Very rarely will you find a written document that's going to tell you who lived here, when they lived here, why they abandoned their city, why...
Either city was destroyed. Archaeologists can't answer that sort of question. We see what's happened, but the why happened is sometimes very difficult.
So you have to depend on written text, historical records, to interpret what you're digging up in that tell. Dr. Randall Price excavates at Qumran, across from cave number four, where many ancient fragments of Old Testament scrolls were found. These 2,200 year old texts that were discovered here in cave number four were hand copied from even earlier manuscripts, and they are our best source for what happened at Jericho in the ancient past.
So this is cave number four. This is cave number four. Yeah, right out of this very section came sections of the book of Joshua, the sections we have from Qumran. And so how important do you think it is to use the biblical text and the archaeology that's been done at Jericho to interpret what's been found there? Well, it's extremely important because, one, it's a historical document.
Really, the only ancient text that you have to work with for here is the biblical text, right? The biblical text, yes, yes. We have no other references to Jericho outside the Bible.
And no other Old Testament book has more history. historical information about Jericho than the book of Joshua. In regards to Jericho, it is important for us to understand that the book of Joshua is our only voice from the ancient past that speaks of what happened there over 3,000 years ago. The Bible's an ancient text, and the book of Joshua is an ancient text, and so we know the story in the book of Joshua is an ancient account.
So when the archaeologists... excavated at Jericho. Did they find evidence that matched that text or not? In 1907 a German team began the first major excavation work at Jericho. They were able to trace around the outside perimeter of the tell, the lower retaining wall that holds in place the earthen embankment around the tell.
This short section of stone wall can still be seen at Tell Jericho today. But what was the purpose of a retaining wall like this one? When I pour this bucket of dirt out, it spreads out across a flat ground.
However, if I make a circle of stones and I pour the bucket of dirt into it, then the dirt is retained by the stone wall surrounding it. This is the stone retaining wall which held in place the earthen embankment that surrounded the city. And on top of the stone retaining wall was the mud brick wall.
On top of this stone foundational retaining wall, there was another wall, the city wall, which was made out of mud bricks. The three teams that dug Jericho were the German team from 1907 to 1909, John Garstang in the 1930s, and Kathleen Kenyon in the 1950s. Using the excavation reports from these three digs, we were able to reconstruct what the city of Jericho would have looked like in the time of Joshua. Both the stone wall and the mud brick wall on top of it made up the outer wall that surrounded the city.
Further up the embankment was another mud brick wall. This wall is what the Israelites were looking at as they marched around the city. This stone facing wall, on top of it a high mud brick wall. As they were marching around the city they must have been thinking, how are we going to capture this city because it is so well fortified? Referring to our ancient text, Joshua 6.20 says that on the seventh day at the sound of the trumpets, the wall collapsed.
And the Bible is very specific in how it describes that event. The Hebrew wording there is the walls, Takathah, fell beneath themselves. And, And on the seventh trip around, we're told in the Bible, the mud brick wall collapsed and it fell outward and down to the base of the stone retaining wall. And when the archaeologists dug in this area, they found this pile of mud brick.
bricks all the way along the retaining wall. So where I am right now is where the pile of red bricks were found. That's correct. The Germans, Garstang, and Kenyon all found these piles of collapsed mud bricks while excavating at the base of the stone retaining wall.
Then she shows that she dug down the side of that, the outside of that revetment wall, and then there were red bricks. Reddish collapsed bricks that she said came from the top of that stone wall. Yes, yes, yes.
Which is another reason to suppose that these weren't, you know, there were walls on top. They're not in situ, but the collapsed brick has come down, yes. If you have a brick wall sitting on top of a stone revetment and it falls over, where else can the bricks go? They've got to go to the bottom.
And so with that pile of bricks, what does that tell us? Does that tell us that there was a destruction of the wall? Certainly.
It certainly is evidence of that destruction. These fallen bricks from the city wall can be seen in this diagram from Kenyon's excavation report. In her write-up, she makes it clear that it was not the stone retaining wall that fell, but rather the mud brick wall that once stood on top of it.
And so she writes that up in her report, that here we have a collapsed city wall, and here's the evidence for it. The archaeological understanding of how the walls of Jericho fell matches well with the ancient description of the wall falling beneath itself. This find of a collapsed city wall found here at Jericho is unique in archaeology.
At no other site have we found evidence for a city wall that has fallen down. Yes, there were remains of the mud brick that had fallen down. I mean, that wall came tumbling down. So the Bible says that the wall came tumbling down. The archaeologists then came and dug Jericho.
And what did they find? They found a collapsed city wall. This fits perfectly with the description from the ancient text.
And when you have that text, and you have the archaeology, and you can fit them together, then you have the evidence from both sides, the literary evidence and the actual physical evidence from what the Bible is talking about. Another interesting detail regarding the walls of Jericho is found in Joshua 6.20. It says that after the walls collapsed, the Israelites went up into the city. Kenyon's excavation report shows that the pile of fallen mud bricks could have been used as a ramp by the charging Israelites. Because that would be a problem wouldn't it?
I mean if the soldiers were charging, there was a mud brick wall up there. Even with that mud brick wall gone, I mean they still, this is a, what are they supposed to do? I mean, you know, climb up the wall.
up the wall to attack. So what Kenyon's report says is that that mud brick wall collapsed off of this foundation and it went all the way up to the top of the rim there and it formed a ramp. this so that when the charging army would come they could have run up into the city to attack it. Yeah, that's right.
That's exactly what the Bible says. Each man went before him straight up into the city and they could do that by just climbing up over that pile of collapsed mud bricks, up over the top of the stone retaining wall, up the embankment and into the city. Joshua 6 24 then tells us that the Israelites burned the whole city and everything in it.
To understand what a burned city would look like in a tell, let's return for a moment to our cake analogy. This chocolate layer represents a city that was destroyed by fire. A burned layer stands out from the other layers of a cake, just as a burned city stands out when a tell is excavated.
Now just as we can remove a slice from a cake to expose the inner structure of the cake, the same thing is true for a tell. As this trench was dug, This burn layer that you see right here was exposed. When Kathleen Kenyon came in the 1950s, she opened up actually five squares in this area to kind of check Garstang's findings to see if she came up with the same results he found, because he found evidence for a massive destruction by fire. And he, of course, equated that to the biblical account, because the Bible says the Israelites charged up into the city and then they set it on fire.
So she opened up these squares and she found exactly the same sequence that Garstang had found. Vast destruction layer, about three feet thick of destruction debris, ash, collapsed roof timbers and all kinds of things. Now in this burn layer, both Garstang and Kinion found room after room of large storage jars that were full of grain and all of it was burned.
Domestic structures had been violently destroyed. There were storage jars full of grain that had all been burnt. Yes, the burnt wheat found there at Jericho is very important because it ties in with our biblical story.
Joshua 3.15 tells us that when the Israelites crossed the Jordan, it was at flood stage because it was during harvest time. And we see in Joshua 5.10, that after crossing the Jordan River, the Israelites celebrated the Passover. It tells us in the Bible, when the Israelites crossed the Jordan River, it was at flood stage because it was harvest time. Well, in the southern Jordan Valley, harvest time is in the spring of the year.
Would you agree with some of Wood's arguments as far as the wheat that was found there, that it at least tells us some basic information as far as... What time of year the city was destroyed? Yes, his assumptions I think are reasonable.
Those containers, those pots were full of grain, therefore they must have been filled fairly soon after the harvest. We know that the Israelites came into the land and attacked Jericho in the spring of the year after Passover. And that's the same time of year as it is right now in Israel.
All over Israel they're celebrating Passover and the people are bringing the wheat harvest in from the fields. And so we know both agriculturally and archaeologically that Jericho was attacked after the wheat harvest had been taken in. Now this is a very unusual find, because grain was valuable. Why would you leave it to be burned up?
Joshua 6.18 tells us that while destroying Jericho, the Israelites were commanded to keep away from the devoted things. Just the very fact that the grain was left to be destroyed in the fire tells us also that the Israelites obeyed God's command not to plunder the city. They're simply to offer up Jericho as an offering to the Lord as the first fruits of the promised land.
The basic sequence of events found in the Bible describing Jericho matched the layer sequence the archaeologists found in the Tell. And in fact, Kathleen Kenyon introduced what we call the stratigraphic method of excavation here at Jericho, where you just peel down the layers, layer by layer, and you in particular analyze the vertical sides of the trench or the square that you're digging, and you draw it, you photograph it, because in the vertical trench you have a sequence of the events that have taken place. as they're preserved in the earth layers. And she said, the evidence here shows that the walls collapsed first, the earthquake happened first, and then the fire happened. That's exactly what the Bible says.
The walls came down. The Israelites were marching around that seventh day. They went up into the city.
Then they set it on fire. Earthquake, fire. And she said, That's the sequence I have found here. In Joshua 6.26, On top of that destruction was this erosional layer. After the destruction, you get material rolling down the hillside.
And, uh... We can account that to the fact that the city was abandoned for some period of time. Then a period when Jericho was not settled, it was abandoned, it was deserted.
If you recall in the biblical story, Joshua pronounced a curse on Jericho, on anybody that would rebuild a city, there would be a curse on that person. The ancient text tells us that the walls collapsed, that the city was burned and afterwards laid abandoned. When archaeologists dug at Jericho, they found that the wall had collapsed, the city had been burned, and it had lain abandoned for quite some time. That's the sequence in the Bible.
That's the sequence Kathleen Kenyon discovered in her excavations. So if the archaeological evidence found here matches so well with the biblical account, then what's the problem? Why is there such a debate among scholars today about this site of Jericho? This obvious destruction of the city Which evidence Garstang found, evidence Kenyon found.
The debate is over the date of that. So does the Bible, in fact, give us a date for the time of Joshua's destruction of Jericho? According to biblical chronology, the conquest happened around 1400 BC.
Yeah, I mean, we have first... King 6, which talks about in the fourth year of Solomon's reign, and that's about 967 B.C., it says it was 480 years after the time of the conquest by Joshua, the entrance into the land. So if you add those numbers together, you come to what we would consider an early date around 1446 BC. So 1446, and then you got to take the 40 years out for the wandering in the wilderness.
And so you come to around 1406? Yeah, for the time of Joshua's conquest. Historically, we know that Solomon began building the temple in 966 BC. 1 Kings 6-1 tells us that this was 480 years after the Israelites had come out of Egypt. When we add 480 to 966, we come to 1446 BC.
And since we know that the Israelites wandered the desert for 40 years, we have to subtract that from 1446 BC, bringing us to 1406, the biblical date for the conquest. After analyzing the pottery, Garstang dated the destruction of Jericho to around 1400 BC in agreement with the Bible. But Kenyon disagreed, dating the city's destruction 150 years earlier to around 1550 BC. So the debate is over when the city was destroyed. The Bible says it was around 1400 BC.
Kathleen Kenyon said it was around 1550 BC. This 150 year discrepancy has huge implications. It would mean that when the Israelites came into the land of Canaan, there would have been no city of Jericho for them to destroy.
It would also mean that the writers of the biblical account would have fabricated the story of Joshua and the great battle of Jericho. She claimed quite clearly on the basis of the pottery dated to about 1550. I'm just saying John Garstang had it right, Kathleen Kenyon had it wrong. When you look over at the bulk over here and you see this rim of this pot, are you looking at that and seeing pottery from the time of Joshua? Yes, absolutely. Yes, those storage jars are Lake Bronze I, the same thing that Garstang had found, and that carries over to all the other pots, cooking pots, storage jars.
and bowls and so on, yes. So what is the deal with pottery anyway? And how is it used to date the events in a tell?
Well, think of it this way. Just like cars change in style over time, so did ancient pottery. So when archaeologists study pottery they excavate in a layer, they can estimate a date for the event that formed that layer. Pottery from different sites can then be compared with each other.
These are called parallels. Yes, in order to make my case for the dating of the destruction of Jericho, I have to show beyond doubt that the pottery in that destruction level dates to the end of the 15th century B.C. And the only way I can do that is to show that the pottery in that destruction level that in a credible fashion is to use parallels from other sites where scholars have already said this pottery dates to the end of the 15th century BC. And so it's not my word only, it's the word of the Bible.
the word of all the other scholars who have excavated similar material came to independent conclusions and I'm merely using their results and feeding it into my analysis and saying, yes, based on all this information, all this data we have from all these places, I can safely date this destruction to the end of the 15th century BC. Kenyon had dated that destruction 150 years earlier. How could she be so far wrong? She was a very good field archaeologist, but in her dating here, she made a critical error.
She based her date on what she didn't find, which is always dangerous, an argument from silence. She, in this destruction layer, did not find a type of imported pottery from Cyprus. which was relatively common in that time period, but it's easily distinguished, easily dated.
And so she was looking for that kind of pottery to date her destruction level. She never paid any attention to the local Canaanite pottery, which was there in abundance. That's what Garstang used from his area over to the south, that local Canaanite pottery.
He dated it based on that. She didn't pay any attention to that. She was looking for this imported Cypriot ware.
She didn't find it. She said, must be nobody was living here. Otherwise, there would be Cypriot pottery from the late Bronze I period.
And so she said, it must have been destroyed before. Now, even though Kathleen Kenyon never did find this particular kind of pottery that was imported from Cyprus, John Garstang, who dug before her, did find an imitation of this same kind of Cypriot ware. And what an...
an imitation is, is that it is a copy that uses the real type of pottery, and therefore they both date to the same time period, around 1400 BC. I have studied all of the pottery that she excavated out of this destruction level. I've studied all of Garstang's pottery, and it's very clear that that destruction happened at the end of late Bronze I, around 1400 BC.
Well, I think the strongest part of the argument was the question of pottery, where he said that the pottery that was found from the destruction, associated with the destruction, in view of the parallels he found at other sites, was to be dated close to 14... under the 1550. When we do an in-depth analysis of the finds from Jericho, we soon discover that the reason for the discrepancy is not because the Bible's wrong, but because of a misinterpretation interpretation of the archaeological evidence. I do tend, I suppose, to support Kenyon's interpretation, but at the same time, some of the other critics have studied the material in greater depth.
In this case, Kathleen Kenyon misdated the destruction of Jericho. So my mind is somewhat still open on the question of the date of that destruction. And once we analyze the material from the destruction level, we see she was wrong.
The real date is around 1400 BC, the biblical time of the conquest. I'm a neutral. I do not know whether Jericho was invaded and attacked by Joshua.
I tend to accept that there was a tradition that this is true. The rhythm. of the Old Testament, and I see no reason to believe that something like that didn't happen.
If there is a conflict between an ancient text and modern scholarship, and you had to go with one or the other because they were in opposition to each other, which one would you see as the most reliable source, the modern scholars or the ancient text? Well, I think we have to go with the folks who wrote the text way back in antiquity. They were closer to the events than we are today.
So when the archaeologists excavated at Jericho, did they find evidence that matched that text or not? Well, yes, they did. They found that it was fortified, as the Bible says.
We found that the walls fell down. as the Bible describes. This happened at harvest time as the Bible describes.
The city was burned as the Bible describes. You would not know those details. It had to be somebody who was there and witnessed these events.
and recorded it at the time, an eyewitness account. That's the only answer. There's no other answer. So I think we have to take the Bible literally and believe that this really happened, this is real history, and those walls came down exactly as described. The battle for Jericho is one of the most memorable stories in the Bible.
And since the Bible is our only ancient account for Jericho, and since the details in the text match so well with the archaeological evidence found here, then the best conclusion that we can draw is that at the time of Joshua's conquest, the walls of Jericho really did come tumbling down. Child Jericho, when on the seventh day, he let the trumpet blow, and the walls came, the walls came tumbling, it came tumbling down. Duh, duh