Believers Score in Battle Over the Battle of Jericho
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Published: February 22, 1990
After years of doubt among archeologists, a new analysis of excavations has yielded a wide range of evidence supporting the biblical account about the fall of Jericho. It may well be true that, in the words of the old spiritual, ''Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, and the walls come tumbling down.''
A study of ceramic remnants, royal scarabs, carbon-14 dating, seismic activity in the region and even some ruins of tumbled walls produced what is being called impressive evidence that the fortified city was destroyed in the Late Bronze Age, about 1400 B.C.
The prevailing view among scholars has been that the city was destroyed some 150 years earlier and thus did not exist at the time of the Israelite invasion, which is believed to have occurred no earlier than 1400 B.C.
''When we compare the archeological evidence at Jericho with the biblical narrative describing the Israelite destruction of Jericho, we find a quite remarkable agreement,'' Dr. Bryant G. Wood, an archeologist at the University of Toronto, wrote in the March-April issue of Biblical Archeology Review.
Archeology and the Bible
Such an interpretation, if it survives critical appraisal, would be important to archeologists and biblical scholars alike. Jericho, Dr. Wood said, had become a ''parade example'' of the difficulties encountered in correlating archeology with the Bible, particularly the account of the military conquest of ancient Canaan in which Joshua is said to have led the Israelites after their 40 years of wandering in the Sinai desert. Many scholars had dismissed the biblical account as so much folklore and religious rhetoric.
Scholars were guarded in their reaction to Dr. Wood's conclusions.
Dr. Lawrence Stager, professor of archeology in Israel at Harvard University, said: ''On the whole, the archeological assessment is not unreasonable. There is evidence of destruction, and the date isn't too far wrong.''
But Dr. Stager questioned the linkage of the archeological evidence for Jericho's destruction at about 1400 with the Israelites as the agents of that destruction. As Dr. Wood acknowledged, many specialists in biblical history cite biblical and archeological evidence to indicate that the Israelites did not emerge in the land of the Canaanites, later to be known as Palestine, until about 1200 B.C.
Moreover, Dr. Stager said the story of military conquest may have been a ''literary embellishment'' for what more probably was a migration of pastoral Israelites, who began to settle into village life in Canaan and came into sporadic armed conflict with the inhabitants. As often happens, in the retelling the stories grew more heroic.
Confidence in Analysis
Dr. Wood, an authority on Canaanite pottery, said in a telephone interview that he was ''very certain'' of his analysis, but conceded that the association with Joshua was largely circumstantial and thus debatable.
As told in the book of Joshua, the Israelite army crossed the Jordan, whose waters had miraculously ceased to flow, and surrounded the walled city of Jericho. For six days Joshua marched his troops around the city, blowing rams' horns. On the seventh day, the tumult of their shouting and the rams' horns caused the wall to collapse. The Israelites then burned the city.
Over the years, some scientists have theorized that the walls of Jericho were destroyed by an earthquake. The area has a long history of temblors.
Jericho, the site of more or less continuous human occupation for 10,000 years, has been the object of three major archeological excavations this century. The ancient site is at Tell-es-Sultan, on the western edge of the Jordan Valley, just north of the Dead Sea.
An Austro-German expedition early in the century and the work of Kathleen Kenyon, a British archeologist, in the 1950's established that no walled city had apparently existed there in the time of Joshua's supposed invasion. In particular, Ms. Kenyon could not find any decorated pottery attributed to that period. This led to her conclusion that the city had fallen and been abandoned from 1600 to 1550 B.C. Scholars assumed the conquerors had been either the Egyptians or the Hyksos, Canaanites who then lived in Egypt.
In the 1930's, another British archeologist, John Garstang, proposed a date of 1400 for the destruction on the basis of pottery and amulets found in tombs. But with Ms. Kenyon's reputation for more scientific field methods, Mr. Garstang's conclusions were largely ignored. Both scholars are now dead.
In his study of recently published excavation reports by Ms. Kenyon, Dr. Wood concluded that she had been looking for the wrong kind of pottery, and in the wrong places. Her limited digging had occurred in what was a poor quarter of the city. He said this could account for her failure to find the expensive, imported Cypriot ceramics prevalent among many Canaanites. Mr. Garstang, on the other hand, found an abundance of the simpler, everyday clay pots and bowls of that period, which Dr. Wood said was the primary evidence for his new interpretations.
He said three other lines of evidence converged to support his conclusion. A three-foot layer of ash, containing many pottery fragments and mud bricks from a wall, was found at the site, well preserved because it was sealed by sediments that accumulated over the years the destroyed city lay unoccupied. The charred fragments have been dated at 1410 B.C., plus or minus 40 years. Finally, several Egyptian scarabs, or amulets, found in tombs at Jericho had inscriptions placing them in the same period.
Possibility of Decay
Dr. Wood said he could not firmly establish that the walls had crumbled in battle and not simply from decay. But the date of the fire and wall fragments found in certain sediments suggested a possible relationship, given all the other findings.
Other evidence examined by Dr. Wood seemed to bolster the case for a Joshua connection. As related in the Bible, the event occurred after spring harvest and the Israelites burned the city. Buried stones, bricks and timbers were blackened from a citywide fire. And excavations uncovered large quantities of grain stored in the ground floors of houses, indicating that the city fell shortly after the spring harvest.
''The presence of these grain stores in the destroyed city is entirely consistent with the biblical account,'' Dr. Wood wrote. ''The city did not fall as a result of a starvation siege, as was so common in ancient times. Instead, the Bible tells us Jericho was destroyed after but seven days.''
History of Earthquakes
And then there is the region's seismic history. Jericho is in a rift valley, an unstable terrain prone to earthquakes. Many times in recorded history, geophysicists say, earthquakes caused landslides and other disruptions leading to a blockage of the Jordan River for one or two days.
Dr. Amos Nur, a Stanford University geophysicist, has written: ''The combination, the destruction of Jericho and the stoppage of the Jordan, is so typical of earthquakes in this region that only little doubt can be left as to the reality of such events in Joshua's time.''
Like many scholars, Dr. Ephraim Isaac, director of the Institute of Semitic Studies in Princeton, N.J., said attempts to establish the historical reality of biblical stories were irresistible, and sometimes successful ''There is no doubt that a good deal of information found in the Bible has a grain of truth in it,'' Dr. Isaac said. ''However, we should be careful in trying to correlate biblical stories and archeological data.''
drawing; map of Jericho