Jericho's Walls

Jericho is a mound by a spring, Tell es-Sultan, just north of the Dead Sea. People have dug it for a century. The question for this timeline is not whether a city stood there. It is whether a walled city fell in the years Joshua would have crossed, and whether the way it fell matches the book.

John Garstang, digging in the 1930s, thought he had found Joshua's walls and dated the fall near 1400 BC. Kathleen Kenyon, digging in the 1950s, redated the great fallen walls to the end of the Middle Bronze Age, centuries earlier, around 1550 BC, and she found little that she would call a fortified city in the Late Bronze Age, which is when a 1406 or a 1250 conquest would need one. Her judgment became the common one in textbooks. On that reading, Joshua's Jericho was already a ruin, or a small unwalled place, and the chapter is not a report.

Bryant Wood and others have argued that Kenyon dated by what she did not find in a limited trench, and that the pottery Garstang found, including a type of painted ware used in the early Late Bronze, still points to occupation into the 15th century, with a destruction then. They point to Egyptian scarabs from that general era, to grain stores that were full, which fits a city taken quickly in harvest rather than starved, and to walls that fell outward, which is what the book says the attackers climbed. Joshua 6:20 Grain left in jars also fits a city that was devoted and not looted for food. Joshua 6:17

The argument is not a victory lap. Specialists still divide. Dating pottery is a skill, and two competent readers of the same sherds have published opposite centuries. A website does not settle a dig by preferring the scholar who agrees with the Bible. What it can do is refuse the sentence "archaeology has disproved Jericho," because that sentence pretends the 15th-century case was never made. It can also refuse "archaeology has proved Joshua," because Kenyon's reading is still taught, and the Late Bronze city is thinner than a simple confirmation would want.

Rahab's house on the wall, the scarlet cord, the seven days, the ban on loot: none of those are the sort of thing a ruined mound can confirm or deny. Joshua 2:18 The timeline leaves the crossing as an estimate tied to the exodus date, and it leaves Jericho as a place where a find is relevant and not yet agreed. The text's claim does not wait on the next trench. The trench is allowed to be what it is.