The Fall of Jericho

24. What information does the Bible give us about the fall of Jericho?

²⁴ Does this mean that archaeology agrees with the Bible in every case? No, there are a number of disagreements. One is the dramatic conquest of Jericho described in the beginning of this chapter. According to the Bible, Jericho was the first city conquered by Joshua as he led the Israelites into the land of Canaan. Bible chronology indicates that the city fell in the first half of the 15th century B.C.E. After the conquest, Jericho was completely burned with fire and was then left uninhabited for hundreds of years.​—Joshua 6:1-26; 1 Kings 16:34.

25, 26. What two different conclusions have archaeologists reached as a result of excavating Jericho?

²⁵ Before the second world war, the site believed to be Jericho was excavated by Professor John Garstang. He discovered that the city was very ancient and had been destroyed and rebuilt many times. Garstang found that during one of these destructions, the walls fell as if by earthquake, and the city was completely burned with fire. Garstang believed that this took place in about 1400 B.C.E., not too distant from the Biblically indicated date for the destruction of Jericho by Joshua.​¹⁵

²⁶ After the war, another archaeologist, Kathleen Kenyon, did further excavations at Jericho. She came to the conclusion that the collapsed walls Garstang had identified dated from hundreds of years earlier than he thought. She did identify a major destruction of Jericho in the 16th century B.C.E. but said that there was no city on the site of Jericho during the 15th century​—when the Bible says Joshua was invading the land. She goes on to report possible indications of another destruction that might have taken place on the site in 1325 B.C.E. and suggests: “If the destruction of Jericho is to be associated with an invasion under Joshua, this [latter] is the date that archaeology suggests.”​¹⁶

27. Why should discrepancies between archaeology and the Bible not unduly disturb us?

²⁷ Does this mean that the Bible is wrong? Not at all. We have to remember that while archaeology gives us a window to the past, it is not always a clear window. Sometimes it is decidedly murky. As one commentator noted: “Archaeological evidence is, unfortunately, fragmentary, and therefore limited.”​¹⁷ Especially is this true of the earlier periods of Israelite history, when archaeological evidence is not clear. Indeed, the evidence is even less clear at Jericho, since the site has been badly eroded.

31. What new suggestion has recently been put forward regarding the fall of Jericho?

³¹ It is interesting to note that in 1981 Professor John J. Bimson looked again at the destruction of Jericho. He studied closely the fiery destruction of Jericho that took place​—according to Kathleen Kenyon—​in the middle of the 16th century B.C.E. According to him, not only did that destruction fit the Bible’s account of Joshua’s destruction of the city but the archaeological picture of Canaan as a whole fit perfectly with the Bible’s description of Canaan when the Israelites invaded. Hence, he suggests that the archaeological dating is wrong and proposes that this destruction really took place in the middle of the 15th century B.C.E., during Joshua’s lifetime.​²¹