Joshua 6:20: Did Jericho's Walls Really Collapse?

Is the description of the capture of Jericho a real event or does it belong to the literary genre of fiction or myth? Is there any corroboration from archaeological sources, or any other external data, that this event actually took place? As one academician recently quipped, "All the shouting and trumpet blowing in the world will not cause fifteen-foot-thick walls to collapse. The whole Joshua/Jericho account is just a religious legend." The archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon affirmed right up to her death in 1978 that the evidence for a conquest of this city during the days of Joshua was plain missing.

However, Kenyon based her conclusion on a very limited excavation area (two 26-foot squares), and her dating was based solely on the fact that she failed to find any expensive, imported pottery from Cyprus, which was common to the Late Bronze I period (that is, the days of Joshua). But she grounded this conclusion on a small excavation area in an impoverished part of the city, a city obviously situated far away from the major trade routes.

However, an evangelical archaeologist, Bryant G. Wood, argues just the re- verse. In his judgment the ceramic evidence does validate a date around 1450 to 1400 B.C. Furthermore, Jericho is one of the oldest cities in the world and one of the best fortified. The outer wall surrounded the city with stone about twelve feet high. In back of that there was an inner mud-brick wall about eighteen feet high. Behind that wall there was a sloping earthen embankment going around the inside of the entire city. At the top of the embankment was another mud-brick wall approximately fifteen feet high, below which the houses of Jericho's outcasts were placed. This is where the harlot Rahab no doubt lived. Archaeologists found the base of the outer wall had collapsed into piles of bricks.

So how did the Israelites get over these walls? If an earthquake was responsible for stopping up the Jordan River as the Israelites crossed over in the days just prior to the siege of Jericho (Josh 3:16), it is reasonable to assume that the same earthquake left cracks and serious fissures in the walls of Jericho. Some think there is evidence for an earthquake of the magnitude of 8.0 on the Richter scale (a quake, if that estimate is correct, that would match the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco).

When a further quake at the time of the Israelites' seventh circling of the city on the seventh day hit (or, alternatively, as a result of aftershocks on the already weakened walls from the previous earthquake), the mud-brick walls collapsed over the outer stone wall, forming a ramp for the Israelites to go up and enter the city and set it on fire.

All archaeologists attest that there were great quantities of grain found within the city, indicating both that it was a very short siege and that the normal looting and plundering of whatever grain remained was not carried out since the Israelites were under an interdict that nothing should be taken; it was dedicated to the Lord for destruction (herem).

The earlier excavator of the city, John Garstang, at the beginning of this century, was confident that the city fell in the times of Joshua, around 1400 B.C. To demonstrate this, he produced a series of scarabs, small Egyptian amulets shaped like the scarab beetle, often with the name of a Pharaoh on the bottom of them. These scarabs represented the line of the Pharaohs right up to the time of the Pharaoh who died in 1349 B.C. Added evidence came from a recent carbon-14 sample from material from the Jericho site that dated to 1410 B.C. , plus or minus forty years.

Accordingly, the evidence is mounting that Jericho was captured as Israel claimed around 1400 B.C. The city, indeed, was heavily fortified (Josh 2:5, 7, 15; 6:5, 20). The attack did come just after the harvest time in the late spring (Josh 2:6; 3:15; 5:10). The siege was short (Josh 6:15) and the walls were breached, possibly by an earthquake (Josh 6:20).

.........

Bryant G. Wood, "Did the Israelites Conquer Jericho?" Biblical Archaeology Review 16 (1990): 44-59.