The Walls of Jericho

Tell es-Sultan, ancient Jericho, is one of the oldest settlements on earth, with remains reaching back before 8000 BC. Joshua 6 tells how its walls fell after Israel marched around the city for seven days, and how the city was burned (6:20, 24).

John Garstang excavated the mound from 1930 to 1936. He reported a fallen double wall and a burned city that he dated to around 1400 BC, and took them as confirmation of Joshua. Kathleen Kenyon dug from 1952 to 1958 with more refined methods. She concluded that Garstang’s walls were about a thousand years older, and that the last walled city (City IV) was destroyed around 1550 BC, with only slight occupation afterward.

In 1990 Bryant Wood of the Associates for Biblical Research re-examined the pottery and argued for a destruction around 1400 BC after all. He pointed to collapsed mudbrick at the foot of the city’s revetment wall, a destructive fire, and storage jars full of grain, which suggest a short siege soon after harvest, as Joshua 2:6 and 3:15 imply. Radiocarbon measurements on charred grain from the destruction, published by Hendrik Bruins and Johannes van der Plicht in 1995 and calibrated by them in 1996, point to the 16th century BC, supporting Kenyon; Wood has disputed how those results should be read. An Italian–Palestinian expedition, working since 1997, dates the destruction to about 1550–1525 BC and reports traces of a smaller Late Bronze Age settlement afterward.

Scholars who favor a 15th-century Exodus read the destruction as Joshua’s. Some who favor a 13th-century date, such as Kenneth Kitchen, argue that erosion removed most of the later city. Many critical scholars see Joshua 6 as a later theological account rather than a battle report, and see Israel as emerging largely from within Canaan. Tell es-Sultan was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2023.