When the Walls Came Tumbling Down By David Rohl Everybody knows the story of Joshua and the Israelites who bring down the walls of Jericho with a blast from their trumpets. The fall of this mighty Canaanite city is one of the Bible's most colourful and dramatic episodes. Yet it never happened! At least that's what the majority of archaeologists and biblical historians will tell you. The story revealed by Jericho's archaeology lies at the very heart of the modern sceptical view of the Bible as an historical document. It all began in the 1930s when Liverpool University Professor of Archaeology, John Garstang, excavated the large mound of Tell es-Sultan rising out of the date-palm glades of Jericho Oasis in the Jordan Valley. He was soon proclaiming that he had unearthed the fallen walls of Jericho brought down by the miracle of Joshua's trumpets. At the time Garstang's discoveries were headline news but, within twenty years, this magnificent proof of the Bible's historicity crumbled to dust under the more rigorous trowel of Britain's greatest female archaeologist – Dame Kathleen Kenyon. Kenyon and her team from the Institute of Archaeology, London, began work at Jericho in 1952. In the days of Garstang the stratigraphy of the Holy Land had not been well defined, but by the time the new excavations got underway in the 1950s scholars had worked out that the Israelite Conquest of the Promised Land had occurred during the transition between the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age (conventionally around 1150 BC). What Kenyon found shocked the academic world. Garstang's fallen city wall was not from the Late Bronze Age but instead represented the fortifications of the Early and Middle Bronze Ages. What was worse, there was no archaeological evidence to show that any city existed at Jericho in the Late Bronze Age for the Israelites to attack and destroy. At the very time Joshua and the twelve tribes were supposed to be invading the Promised Land Jericho was just a pile of dust and rubble – and had been an abandoned ruin for the best part of three centuries. So, if Jericho did not exist, what of the invading Israelites? The logical conclusion was that they too were an invention of the biblical story-teller. Simply put: no Late Bronze Age Jericho = no Late Bronze Age Israelite Conquest = no historical basis for the Old Testament narratives. This conclusion, above all, has led to the current rejection of the Bible as history. But are we missing something here? It must be remembered that Garstang had indeed found a collapsed city wall which Kenyon reconfirmed in her own excavations. The difficulty was that this wall had fallen down much earlier than the date scholars had worked out for the Israelite Conquest. The solution seems obvious – just move the Conquest back to the time of the Middle Bronze Age when city and Israelites can be allowed to come together. Here in this earlier epoch was a Jericho with impressive fortifications - a defensive sloping rampart covered in slippery white plaster (known as a glacis), topped off by a ten-metre wide mudbrick wall. Any attackers would have been exposed to withering fire if they tried to scale the slope beneath the impregnable fortress. Inside was a tightly packed community of houses, some built within an inner and outer wall – just as the Bible describes for the house of the prostitute Rahab who aided the Israelite spies (Joshua 2:15). When Kenyon dug her deep trenches into the mound of Tell es-Sultan, she discovered piles of red bricks at the bottom of the sloping rampart. She concluded that the fortress wall at the top had collapsed (probably during an earthquake) and rolled down the slope affording easy entry for any attacker into the city. That city had then been burnt to the ground and abandoned for generations. Again, both Garstang and Kenyon had uncovered dozens of large storage jars full to the brim with carbonised grain which had been blackened by the fire. We learn from Joshua 3:15 that the assault upon Jericho took place during the harvest season and the evidence of the full storage jars also clearly suggests that the city was destroyed suddenly without a prolonged siege. The archaeology precisely fits the biblical picture. But then this can't be Joshua's Jericho … can it? The experts are pretty much convinced to a man that all this happened long before the Israelites had even left Egypt – if they were ever in Egypt in the first place! Oh how frustrating and confusing the Gordian Knot of chronology can be! In the previous blog I explained that the archaeology from Egypt also appeared to indicate that a huge mistake had been made by academia in respect of the dating of the Sojourn and Exodus. Rather than there being evidence for an Israelite presence in the Land of the Pharaohs during the Late Bronze Age, there were clear signs that these people from the Syro-Palestine region were resident in the Egyptian delta during the Middle Bronze Age. If a case can be made for re-dating the Israelite Sojourn to this era, then placing the Conquest in that same period must also surely merit consideration. The simple fact is that we have a large population of Asiatics in Egypt in the Middle Bronze Age (12th to 15th Dynasties); they up and leave, abandoning their principal city of Avaris, and, shortly afterwards, we observe a destruction of Jericho towards the end of the Middle Bronze Age. I repeat what I said in the earlier blog: archaeologists have been looking for the Israelites in the right places but, unfortunately, in entirely the wrong time. The first person to realise this was Dr John Bimson of Trinity College, Bristol. He published a PhD thesis and subsequent book entitled Redating the Exodus and Conquest (Sheffield, 1978) in which he demonstrated that the Middle Bronze Age city destructions throughout Israel matched the Conquest narratives extremely well, whereas the same was not true of the Late Bronze Age destructions. The latter were spread out over several centuries and were not consistent with the pattern of destruction (burning and abandonment) as described in the Joshua narrative. It was not only Jericho which failed to fit the bill. Gibeon, Hebron, Hormah, Gezer, Shechem and Arad, all mentioned in the Conquest narratives as being destroyed, were either not extant at the time or simply did not suffer destruction. On the other hand, all six were destroyed or abandoned at the end of the Middle Bronze Age, in line with the biblical story. The one great remaining flagship of a Late Bronze Age Conquest has been Hazor – 'the foremost of all these kingdoms' (Joshua 11:10). This huge city, located in northern Israel, was indeed burnt and destroyed at the right time for the conventional dating of the Israelite settlement … or so it was thought. However, even this jewel of the traditional view has been tarnished in recent years. Excavations during the 1990s by Israeli archaeologists under the direction of Professor Amnon Ben Tor, have now revealed that Hazor was destroyed around a century before the traditional date for the Conquest. Again, it simply does not fit the picture. However, if we turn to Middle Bronze Age Hazor, we find that it too was destroyed by fire and, astonishingly, a cuneiform tablet has been found belonging to the Middle Bronze Age palace there. The tiny tablet bears the name of a 'King Ibni-addu', Ibni being the original Canaanite writing of the biblical name Jabin, the ruler of Hazor slain by Joshua when he destroyed the city (Joshua 11:1). Once again the earlier date provides the perfect match. The remarkable parallels continue right up to the end of the Conquest narrative. A great assembly is described at the beginning of the final chapter in the Book of Joshua which brings to a close the campaign to seize the Promised Land. At the city of Shechem in the northern hill-country the Israelite tribes assemble outside the Temple of Baal-berith ('Lord of the Covenant'). There Joshua erects a great standing stone before which the Israelite warriors swear an oath of allegiance to the god who had guided them to victory (Joshua 24:25-26). Amazingly, that impressive monolith still stands erect in Shechem (modern Nablus) today – at the centre of a courtyard and in front of the ruins of a large temple. But the stone's true significance has been lost to both Palestinians and Israelis. Why? Because archaeologists have told the world that it dates to a period many centuries before the time of the Israelite settlement in the region – it can, therefore, have nothing to do with Joshua. The great white Covenant Stone which stands as testimony to the Israelite Conquest – and ultimately to the historical reliability of the Bible – remains forlorn and neglected. Daubed in intifada graffiti from the early 1990s, it's ownership, along with all the ruins of ancient Shechem, was handed over to the Palestinian authorities when autonomy was granted to the region. The very symbol of Israel's link to its past inheritance has been lost through a simple but far-reaching slip up on the part of those experts entrusted with the task of uncovering biblical history. So, story or history? Does the Old Testament give us a reasonably accurate account of events – or is it really just a collection of fictional tales? The answer seems to be that we have been too quick to dismiss the accounts of Joseph, Moses and Joshua simply as the inventions of later story-tellers. It is the modern reconstruction of the ancient time-line which has messed things up. What is needed now is a major and concerted effort to re-examine the chronology of ancient times so that the archaeological facts are allowed to find their true place in history. We owe it to our past to get this – 'the greatest story ever told' – back into the history books.

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