Science: Score one for the Bible

THE WALLS OF JERICHO

So the people shouted when the priests blew the trumpets. And it happened when the people heard the trumpet sound, and the people shouted with a great shout that the wall fell flat. Then the people went into the city, every man straight before him, and they took the city.  Joshua 6:20

It is one of the most dramatic events chronicled in the Old Testament, but for generations, scholars have debated whether the Israelites’ assault on Jericho was fact or myth. Over the past three decades, the consensus has gone against the biblical version. The late British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon established in the 1950s that while the ancient city was indeed destroyed, it happened around 1550 B.C., some 150 years before Joshua could have shown up.

However, archaeologist Bryant Wood, who wrote in the March/April issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, claims that Kenyon was wrong. Based on a re-evaluation of her research, published in detail only recently, Wood says that the city’s walls could have come tumbling down at just the right time to match the biblical account. While that does not prove that the event happened, it does give plausibility to the Old Testament version.

Kenyon’s dating of Jericho’s destruction was mainly because she failed to find a type of decorative pottery imported from Cyprus that was popular in the region around 1400 B.C. Its absence, she reasoned, meant that the city had long since become uninhabited. However, Wood, an ancient pottery expert now at the University of Toronto, argues that Kenyon’s excavations were made in a poorer part of the city, where the expensive imported pottery would have been absent. He also says that other pottery dug up in Jericho in the 1930s was expected in 1400 B.C. 

Some of her finds include four wheel-thrown pedestal vases from the Middle Bronze Age (c2000-1750 BC) and an exuberant, large Iron Age (c700-586 BC) burnished bowl with a thickened rim and four loop handles. Archaeologists find objects. By extensively describing the matrix of materials in which these objects, such as pottery fragments or potsherds, are embedded, they establish historical contexts or timelines.

Kenyon's stratigraphy, as this descriptive method is called, which she developed from a 19th-century precedent while working with her mentor, Robert Mortimer Wheeler, is indicated in a mural-sized reproduction of a trench published in her 1957 book Digging Up Jericho.

The diagram includes visual and verbal descriptions of precisely delineated areas of, for example, ''white speckly'' and ''green silty'' soil, burnt timber, rubble, and so on, down to bedrock. Arranged in front of this drawing are the oldest exhibits in the show: Early Bronze Age (3300-2000 BC) finds from three tombs at Jericho, including two small, dipper jugs with rounded bases and loop handles.

Unlike the bowls from the same tomb with which they are displayed, these 5000-year-old juglets appear complete.

Except for the disputed dating, Kenyon’s discoveries at Jericho were largely consistent with the Bible story. For one thing, she found that the city’s walls had fallen in a way suggestive of sudden collapse. Many scholars think the destruction was caused by an earthquake, which could also account for a temporary damming of the Jordan River described in the Bible. Moreover, Kenyon found bushels of grain on the site. That is consistent with the Bible’s assertions that Jericho was conquered quickly. The grain would have been used up if the city had capitulated after a long siege.

A thick layer of soot at the site, which, according to radioactive carbon-14 dating, was laid down about 1400 B.C., supports the biblical idea that the city was burned, not simply conquered. Finally, Egyptian amulets found in Jericho graves can also be dated around 1400 B.C. Says Wood: “It looks to me as though the biblical stories are correct.”

Other experts find a minor fault in Wood’s archaeology, but they are more sceptical about his linking of the evidence with biblical events. The most serious sticking point is that few scholars think Joshua and his fellows entered the land of Canaan as early as 1400 B.C. Most believe the Israelites came about 200 years later, and then not as military conquerors but as a wave of immigrants. So, the scholarly disputes over Joshua’s military feats are likely to continue. In matters of faith, science can never provide the ultimate answers.