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Most of us have heard the familiar song, “Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, and the walls came tumblin’ down.”  But it is common in modern scholarship to deny the authenticity of the story of Joshua in the Bible.  Many cite a study by archaeologist  Kathleen Kenyon as having debunked this event as the Bible relates it.

Kenyon,  who excavated Jericho in the 1950s, said the city was indeed destroyed, but the time it was destroyed was too early to fit the biblical account. But  the evidence has been revisited,  and there are reasons to question this conclusion.

• First, only three of the many Canaanite cities conquered were described as destroyed in the book of Joshua (Jericho, Hazor and Ai).[1] One of the three cities destroyed according to the biblical account, Hazor, has been shown to have been inhabited and destroyed by fire, as described in the biblical account.[2]

Some of Kenyon’s conclusions using pottery found to establish the date of the destruction have been questioned as well. Bryant Wood analyzed the pottery found at Jericho and concluded the destruction happened about 1400 B.C., rather than 1550 B.C. as Kenyon claimed.[3]   She based her conclusions on the absence of  a type of imported pottery  common to the period 1550-1400 B.C.   Local pottery was also excavated at Jericho from this same time period but she chose to focus on the imported type.   But the type of pottery Kenyon did not find was expensive, and according to Wood she was looking in a very small excavation area in a poor section of the city far from trade routes  (See article by Bryant Wood:Did The Israelites Conquer Jericho? A New Look at the Archaological Evidence ) and so not likely to find these expensive imported types.

Wood analyzed the pottery evidence found earlier than Kenyon’s investigation, by British archaeologist John Garstang in the 1930’s.  This local pottery fit the correct time period (Late Bronze Age) for the Bible’s 1400 B.C. approximate date.  Ironically, Garstang also found some of the very pottery that Kenyon may have been looking for!  (Ibid.)

Wood found other reasons as well to accept the Bible account.  There were far too many archaeological levels (about 20), which Kenyon herself meticulously excavated, to fit into the Middle Bronze period (1650-1550 B.C.)  Garstang also found a continuous series of Egyptian amulets called scarabs, from the cemeteries, dating from the 18 century to the early 14th century.  This showed that the cemetery was likely in use up to the end of the Late Bronze I period.  Finally, there was a carbon 14 sample of charcoal from the destroyed area of the city that dated to 1410 B.C. plus or minus 40 years.  All these lines of evidence converge on the Biblical date for the conquest.

Once this time adjustment is made, he makes the case that the archaeological evidence harmonizes very well with the biblical account, including that the walls fell at the time the city was destroyed. [4]