Space For Doubt

Archaeology is often like being handed a 1,000 piece puzzle and then attempting to ascertain what the picture was on that puzzle when you only have 11 pieces left of the original. It’s not easy, and any good Archaeologist will acknowledge that uncertainty.

Sometimes things in Archaeology are easier though, like finding out if a city was or was not burned to the ground. That evidence is abundantly clear and hard to miss. Not only clear, but also easy to date. (Thanks C-14 dating!)

Jericho has a bit of both of these going on.

The biblical story of Jericho is the following:

• The Gates of Jericho were barred because of the Israelite threat
• 40,000 soldiers marched on Jericho (along with some priests)
• The Lord tells Joshua He has given Jericho into their hands
• They are to march around the city once each day for six days
• On the 7th day, march around 7 times and then blow the trumpets and shout loudly all together
• The walls will then fall down and the people will rush in. Only the portion of the wall that Rahab lives in will apparently be left standing.
• They are to burn the city down to the ground along with everything in it
• They are to spare Rahab and her entire family only. Everyone else is to be put to the sword
• They are to recover all the gold, silver, bronze, and iron items and put them in the Lord’s treasury

Everything goes according to plan in the biblical narrative, and Joshua comes out of this with a boost to his fame. He also curses the city for any future rebuilding efforts.

The problem we have here is the pesky archaeology that throws wrenches in the gears, much like our modern science does today with a literal genesis reading. The city itself is quite ancient, and is one of the oldest cities in the world. Archaeology shows us that it was inhabited in some form as early as ~10,000 BCE.

Around ~8000 BCE the people decide they should start to fortify it with a defensive perimeter (walls). For some reason the city was then abandoned. It was again occupied around 7,000 BCE for a time, and again was fortified. Then for another unknown reason, the site was abandoned again for around 1,000 years until the end of the 4th Millennium BCE.

At this point the site was occupied continuously until a final full destruction around 1550 BCE (including a fire). There is near unanimous agreement here within the archaeology community. (Source)

Knowing this rough date, I went to the most biased source I know, Answers in Genesis, to get their take on the exodus date (Just to ensure I resonate with the traditionalists). This was the part that struck me.

In short, we cannot say for certain when the events of the book of Exodus occurred. A straightforward reading of the Bible, combined with some archaeological evidence, leads to a date of 1446 BC. A less-literal view of certain dates in the Old Testament, combined with fairly substantial extrabiblical evidence, would suggest a date around 1225 BC. 

This 1225 date lines up much better with the actual evidence we see in the real world. I covered this slightly in my exodus post, but it’s worth sharing here again. Taking the bible literally with it’s genealogies and various other timelines is not something ever required by the text, or supported by our Jewish brethren. In fact not only is it not required, it gets us into trouble sometimes when we do. The best course forward here is to rely on the real world evidence, and you can see that in its language, even Answers in Genesis leans towards this not being a literal dating chronology.

The issue now faced is neither 1225 BCE or 1446 BCE is the same as 1550 BCE. In either case, Jericho’s final destruction dates to a time period well before Joshua would have had a chance to destroy it.

In my research I found one or two authors that attempt to conjure up some theories that try to push that 1550 BCE date up to 1400 BCE (Quite a far jump) but these theories are unfortunately not accepted by even a handful of modern archaeologists. They seem to be people with a conclusion in search of evidence to support it. As such, some of the arguments presented are thin on substance and heavy on the hypothetical, while ignoring most everything else.

I follow a Youtube channel called Bible and Archaeology which is very centered. It’s about as plain and matter of fact as you can get. I don’t get a sense of spin or wild takes on evidence, but I also don’t get a sense of complete dismissal of faith based ideas or the abandonment of God’s interventional capacity.

A well spoken Archaeologist named Dr. Cynthia Shafer-Elliott presented her research on Jericho, and came to this conclusion in her video. I very slightly edited the video transcript for reading clarity.

Jericho is supposed to be a very old city, but it doesn’t seem like Jericho was occupied during the time period that the Israelites are supposed to have entered the land. That makes conquering it and destroying it when it didn’t exist at that time very difficult..

This is something people ask questions of, well why would we have a Biblical record saying they came in and they conquered this thing if the city doesn’t exist? The walls are already down what other options are there then for understanding how they’re shaping this story?

There could be of a few different reasons why. Maybe there was some sort of memory of Jericho being destroyed and when they saw the city destroyed later on maybe they just attributed that to their ancestors.

They just saw the ruins and they figured oh these must be the ruins of the city that our ancestors destroyed when they entered the land.

Then you get into all that story of, okay why would a story like this be important? It would be important [in] thinking of the Exile of course, where they’ve been taken away. The elite people who have lost their land and who are writing these things down, who know how to read and write, are looking at stories like this memory that provide hope for them in their current circumstances.

Just as with many other Old Testament stories, the story of Jericho’s destruction was most likely a fabrication or reattribution of the prior destruction. It was most likely done to convey hope and authority in the ancestral storyline.

Or…..is there another option?

It was after watching this video and doing hours of research I began to ponder on another hypothesis. Yes, this almost certainly predates when the Exodus could have been. No this could not have been done by Joshua, or at least who we think of Joshua as today.

As I discussed in my article Marvel Jesus, there is significant evidence for a conflation of two different bodies of people in the Israelite ancestral story. One group worshiped El and the other YHWH. This is evident in archaeology and in the bible itself. We see it in the numerous authors of the Pentateuch and how they write. There is growing scholarly consensus on this, and the more we discover, the more this seems to make sense.

My idea is, could this conquest have been done by the people already in the land of Canaan, who worshiped El, and who later merged with the inbound Levites? The story uses YHWH as the Israelite deity, but it could have been a conquest done by the Israelites (pre-levite arrival) and later harmonized by a Levitical priestly author.

We have numerous reattributions in the text for other stories, and clear evidence of multi-source story conflation. This doesn’t seem like a far stretch.

I guess we’re really left with two options here.

1.) The story was simply a reattribution to the ancestral story, of a legend of Jericho’s destruction in the distant past. It’s not a crazy thought, as the author of Joshua likely wrote this book close to 1,000 years after this event took place. Scholars think it was first partially composed in the court of King Josiah in the 7th century BCE, with a final extensive revision sometime either during or post Babylonian exile.

2.) This was done by the native Canaanites in the time period we have evidence for it. It was later reattributed to Joshua for the sake of loyalty and prestige. This too seems plausible. Done under God’s direction, just before the Israelites contained the Levites.

What seems painfully obvious is that the story as told in your Sabbath or Sunday schools doesn’t match with the evidence we see in the real world, and the real world matters.

So where does that leave us? Option 1 or 2, doesn’t either do damage to our faith?

I don’t think it needs to. The bible writers don’t appear particularly concerned with attempting to convey history with a sense of literalism, or textbook accuracy. We see so many examples of this in the bible, both in the OT and the NT. For example, the two different but disagreeing creation accounts, or the two different accounts in David’s rise from obscurity to fame (see my David post). There are numerous other examples.

The compilers of these texts were not stupid. It’s not like they didn’t realize there were two creation stories. Both had meaning in their own way, and in their view, both were desirable stories to keep. They probably did not view either of them as literal. I love Pete Enns statement on the matter.

“The biblical account of creation was not so much a history of how God created the world, but why He created the world.”

We see this behavior all the way into the NT gospels. Literal historical accuracy is not something these scribes were at all bothered by. This includes even statements attributed to Jesus. (I’ll get to that one another time)

The story of Jericho represents a belief and trust in a God that can do mighty things. A hope that this same God can perform mighty works again in the scribes’ time. It shows a story of faith that, despite not being literally historically accurate, paints a picture of a God that can reign sovereign over anything He so chooses. A God that wants to draw us closer to Him.

We do a disservice to the bible when we attempt to force a modern framework of literal historical accuracy on it. A framework that was never there to start with, or that the writers ever had in mind.

Peace