Editor’s note – The argument over when Jericho fell might look like a squabble over pottery shards, but it sits at the center of something much bigger: whether the book of Joshua describes real history or later legend. Duncan walks through three generations of archaeologists – Garstang, Kenyon, and Wood – who examined the same evidence and reached strikingly different conclusions about grain jars, scarabs, and imported ceramics. We’re running this piece because it illustrates something worth sitting with: the evidence rarely interprets itself. It’s read through a lens, and which lens you bring shapes what you’re willing to see.
Setting the Stage: Amarna, Habiru, and the Hunt for Jericho
We’ve been looking at the striking parallels between the Amarna letters and the book of Joshua.
Those letters came as a surprise to the emerging historical-critical school of Bible scholarship that sought to understand the Bible while discounting accounts of the miraculous.
Once the archaeological record validated that the cuneiform tablets were no forgeries, critical scholars holding to the documentary hypothesis found that one of their implicit historical assumptions was wrong. It didn’t disprove their theory entirely, but widespread scribal literacy fundamentally altered the view of Late Bronze Age Canaan.
Further, the letters painted a picture of a rampaging group of “Habiru” who were upending the status quo in Canaan in a similar manner to what the Bible describes the “Hebrews” doing.
The documentary hypothesis adjusted to account for Canaanite literacy, but rejected the idea that the Habiru of the Amarna letters were the Hebrews of the Bible.
Scholars on both sides of the debate dug in as the battle shifted to archaeology. The front line of the conflict was a site known as Tell es-Sultan, the location of ancient Jericho.
On to Jericho!
The first major excavations at Tell es-Sultan took place under Sellin and Watzinger in the early 20th century.
The dig initially seemed to corroborate the Bible’s account of Jericho’s fall to the Hebrews.
But Watzinger later published an update in 1926 based on pottery analysis that he said demonstrated that Jericho was abandoned during the Late Bronze Age of 1550 BC – 1200 BC.
Such a timeline would make it impossible for the Bible traditionalists to be correct. Many theological conservatives held that the Israelites conquered Jericho in the late 15th century BC following a 1446-1447 BC Exodus from Egypt.
Had the Bible conclusively been proven wrong?
That was the question archaeologist John Garstang faced when he began his own excavations at Jericho in 1930.
Editor’s note – Notice how fast a pottery report turned into a referendum on Scripture’s reliability. That pattern repeats through this whole piece: one archaeologist’s reading of ceramic layers gets treated as the final word on whether the Bible can be trusted. Keep that in mind as each new excavation claims to settle the question for good.
Garstang’s Jericho Findings: 1930-1936
Garstang was an accomplished scholar and archaeologist.
He founded the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara and The British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem.¹ He also served as Professor of the Methods and Practice of Archaeology at the University of Liverpool from 1907-1941.²
He was one of the first to preserve extensive photographic evidence of his dig sites long before it became standard practice.
He was thoroughly academic in his approach and considered the Bible to be more of a useful academic tool than divinely ordained Scripture.³ Although, it’s worth noting his dig was funded by a wealthy Christian industrialist named Sir Charles Marston who did believe the Bible recorded an accurate account of ancient history.
Garstang believed his discoveries at Tell es-Sultan strongly supported the description of Jericho found in Joshua. He found a walled system of fortifications ringing the city that had collapsed and fallen outward, in the same manner the Bible had described.
He also documented extensive evidence of a massive fire.
The Inferno at Jericho
The book of Joshua describes the destruction of Jericho ending in flames.
Then they burned the whole city and everything in it, but they put the silver and gold and the articles of bronze and iron into the treasury of the Lord's house. [Joshua 6:24]
Watzinger’s 1926 report had also noted a massive fire but Garstang’s discoveries went much further. He uncovered a three-foot layer made of collapsed debris, charred wood, and ash that pointed to the city being destroyed in a monumental blaze. And he discovered evidence in the burn layer of untouched grain jars.
The Grain Jars
The Bible describes the Israelites celebrating Passover shortly before attacking Jericho. This is the time of the spring harvest.
Garstang uncovered dozens of large earthenware jars that were full to the brim with burnt grain.
It eliminated any thought of a slow and peaceful abandonment of the city, since the grain would have been consumed or taken in such a scenario. It also precluded the possibility that Jericho had fallen after a long siege. It coincided with the Biblical picture of a city suddenly destroyed by fire that Garstang dated to the late 15th century BC – early 14th century BC.
And for the dating, Garstang relied most heavily on his discovery of Egyptian imperial scarabs.
Editor’s note – Full jars of scorched grain are a small detail carrying real weight. A city being slowly abandoned, scavenged, or starved out under a long siege doesn’t leave its food supply behind untouched. It’s the kind of evidence that’s easy to skim past in an academic paper but hard to explain away once you picture what it actually means for how the city died.
The Scarabs at Jericho
The Late Bronze Age was the time of the 18th Dynasty of Egypt.
It was the dawn of the New Kingdom and the height of Egyptian power. Nearby Canaan was a collection of vassal states that owed their allegiance to the Pharaohs.
The presence of imperial influence was made manifest in those regional kingdoms in part through the presence of the Pharaoh’s personal cartouche (signature) used by administrative officials to validate trade, handle paperwork, and administer the work of empire.
This imperial signature was often inscribed on the bottom of a “stamping device” that could be pressed into clay by royal officials. They were often made in the shape of a scarab beetle.
Having such an administrative scarab from the pharaoh was similar to having his signet ring. Although not all scarabs belonged to royal officials.
They were also symbols thought to bring divine protection and good luck. They were worn as amulets by the living and placed alongside the dead at the time of burial in the hopes of securing safe passage in the afterlife.
Garstang found scarabs in the ruins at Jericho that mapped the destruction of Jericho to the time of the Late Bronze Age.
He found scarabs from the following 18th century pharaohs in a tomb complex outside the city walls:
- Queen Hatshepsut: who ruled as regent while taking on many traditional artistic conventions and titles common to male pharaohs
- Thutmose III: Hatshepsut’s successor
- Amenhotep III: The great-grandson of Thutmose III
Dating by Scarab
Hatshepsut reigned beginning in 1504 BC according to the Egyptian high chronology.⁴ The start of her royal tenure was 1479 BC following the low chronology.⁵
Amenhotep the Magnificent (aka Amenhotep III) was Pharaoh beginning in 1417 BC following the high chronology. According to the low chronology his reign began in 1388 or 1386 BC.⁶
There were no royal artifacts found from Amenhotep III’s successor Akhenaten, nor anything from any later ruler.
Garstang dated the destruction of Jericho by the scarabs. He used the accepted view of Amenhotep’s III reign as the boundary for the years immediately preceding Jericho’s fiery destruction.
A news report published in 1932 summarized the findings that Garstang had presented before the Royal Asiatic Society regarding the 1,800 artifacts he uncovered, which included the ninety-four scarabs.
Objects numbering eighteen hundred, the great majority pottery, were obtained covering the history of the site throughout the Bronze Age. Most significant of all, however, were ninety-four royal Egyptian scarabs, which have been examined by Prof. Newberry and pronounced by him to range from the Hyksos period to the reign of Amenhotep III. Egyptian influence first appears about 1500 B.C.; but nothing of the Tel el-Amarna period and the age of Akhenaton has been found. It is, therefore, concluded that the city was destroyed at some date between 1411 B.C. and 1375 B.C.
Jericho, originally published May 21, 1932, nature.com
Watzinger’s conclusion of a Jericho abandoned by 1550 BC no longer appeared reasonable.
The collective picture of his work led Garstang to conclude that the Bible was remarkably accurate in its description of Jericho’s fall.
In a word, in all material details and in date, the fall of Jericho took place as described in the Biblical narrative.
Garstang, from a 1937 summary of his work
His conclusions were accepted by the majority of scholars, regardless of their views on the Christian faith.
A Challenger Emerges: 1952-1958
The next archaeologist to follow Garstang was one of his students, an accomplished scholar named Dame Kathleen Kenyon.
She developed the Wheeler-Kenyon method of dividing an archaeological site into 5-meter squares and digging only inside each square to preserve “walls” around each.
It was a more precise way to handle stratigraphic excavation and one she believed would lead to more accurate dating.
As the Kenyon team dug, they found something curious in the levels of the ancient “layer cake” corresponding to the Jericho fire.
Or, more precisely, they didn’t find something that Kenyon claimed should have been there if the Jericho destruction was truly around 1400 BC as Garstang argued.
The Missing Evidence
There was a particular style of imported pottery that was widespread throughout the Ancient Near East in the Late Bronze Age.
It is known today as Cypriot Bichrome ware.
It was a type of luxury pottery that was widely produced in the Mediterranean from 1550 BC – 1400 BC.⁷
Kenyon didn’t find any when she employed the Wheeler-Kenyon method to sort through the layers of history at Jericho.
And she used the apparent absence of such pottery to argue that the city was abandoned by ~1550 BC, before the bichrome pottery style became commonplace.
Based on that conclusion, she re-dated the filled jars of burnt grain, hypothesizing they likely belonged to a Middle Bronze Age city of around 1550 BC.
With that, she argued that the Israelites could not have conquered Jericho in the early 15th century BC. She argued there was simply no fortified Bronze Age city in existence at the time.
What about the scarabs?
Kenyon wasn’t convinced by the scarabs either.
She noted that they were found in multi-generational, communal tombs that were outside the walls of the city itself.
She conceded that the scarabs proved the tombs were in use at a certain time but argued that there was no way to know when they were removed from public use. She maintained it was most likely that Jericho’s tombs had been reused in the Late Bronze Age after the city itself had been destroyed.
According to her theory, the people who used those tombs had built small and unfortified settlements on top of the destroyed mound of Jericho. It was difficult to find evidence of this final settlement at Tell es-Sultan because the lack of strong walls meant it was exposed to the elements and had been erased over time due to wind, rain, and erosion.
The scholarly consensus had shifted. Garstang’s conclusion was out of date and the mainstream viewpoint aligned with Kenyon.
Editor’s note – It’s worth noticing how much of Kenyon’s case rests on absence rather than presence – pottery she didn’t find, rather than evidence she did. That’s not automatically the weaker argument, but it is a different kind of argument than Garstang’s grain jars and scarabs, and Wood’s rebuttal below is worth reading with that distinction in mind.
The Challenger Challenged: 1990
In 1990, archaeologist Bryant Wood published an updated study that cast doubt on Kenyon’s findings that the city had been destroyed by 1550 BC.
Wood is an expert in the field of Late Bronze Age pottery from Canaan and he was critical of Kenyon’s pottery conclusions.⁸
First, he argued that Kenyon dug only a small trench in a poor section of the city. According to Wood, people living here did not belong to a socioeconomic class that would have been paying for luxury imports. Rather, they would have been getting less expensive local options, which is what he claimed the pottery evidence showed.
Overlooked Local Pottery
Wood returned to the original excavation reports to examine the kitchen pottery that Garstang had dug up in the 1930s.
He discovered pottery painted in the same Cypriot Bichrome style but made from the local clay of the Jordan Valley.
It seemed to Wood that the people of Jericho were aware of the Late Bronze Age popular pottery style but manufactured their own instead of importing it.
Wood also reviewed images and reports from Kenyon’s dig site that had been released several years after her death in 1978.
He claimed that pieces of the Cypriot Bichrome ware pottery actually were present in the data. He said they must have been overlooked or misclassified by Kenyon’s team during the process of sorting the thousands of pottery fragments.
He also spotted another style called Chocolate-on-White ware that dated to the Late Bronze Age.
Further, Wood identified specific types of local Canaanite storage jars, bowls, and cooking pots that didn’t exist in 1550 BC. Instead, they only appeared in the region during the Late Bronze I period of 1550-1400 BC.
He also revisited the scarabs that had been the lynchpin of Garstang’s argument but had been largely dismissed by Kenyon.
Revisiting the Scarabs
Wood argued it would be highly unusual for Kenyon’s understanding of the scarabs to have actually taken place.
Even those of us who are not archaeologists or Ancient Near East experts can see why he would have had questions.
Because for Kenyon’s view of scarabs to be true, all the following would need to be true:
- Since many of the scarabs in the tombs date to after Kenyon’s claimed date of abandonment of Jericho, the scarabs found in the tombs must all be intrusive anomalies and disconnected from the city of Jericho itself. For this to be true the tombs must have been reused by passing nomads who were landless yet had access to high status ancient Egyptian royal amulets.
- Those landless nomads must also have been excellent at passing down family heirlooms. For her claim to be true, these scarabs dating back hundreds of years would need to have been preserved and passed down for hundreds of years from generation to generation.
- The sequence of scarabs stops at Amenhotep III, which is precisely the time when the Bible’s account claims that Jericho fell. For Kenyon’s claim to be true, there must have been a perfect chronological coincidence for these traveling nomads who reused the Jericho tombs. For the Bible’s claim to be true, no such incredible coincidence is needed.
- The “missing” Cypriot Bichrome ware must be seen as a more compelling argument for dating Jericho’s destruction than the actual physical presence of the scarabs. In other words, her logic relies on an argument from silence trumping direct archaeological evidence.
Wood argued that Kenyon had a significant blind spot.
Kenyon had based her dating almost exclusively on pottery she said was missing from Jericho, but she had focused her dig on a small, largely empty section that reflected the lives of the poorest people in Jericho while ignoring the large collection of 15th century artifacts.
And he concluded that it was Garstang, not Kenyon, who had been substantially correct and he placed the destruction of Jericho back around 1400 BC.
Jericho Today
There has been criticism, further study, and rebuttals following Wood’s 1990 report.
The competing views mean that Jericho remains one of the most heavily contested battlegrounds in archaeology. Ceramic analysis, Egyptian king lists, and science all weigh in on the underlying question of whether the Bible is historically reliable.
Archaeologists with a Christian worldview tend to support Wood’s findings. Many mainstream scholars with a secular perspective do not.
The mainstream view is generally skeptical of Wood’s pottery analysis and maintains that the disputed pottery conclusions are more important than the scarabs. Further, they point to radiocarbon dating which seems to support an earlier destruction.
Wood’s position is undeniably the minority interpretation.
And there are valid reasons to consider that Kenyon, with her methodical stratigraphic approach, had the most advanced dig. Yet there are also intellectually serious reasons to consider she did not have the most accurate view of reality.
Wrapping Up
Jericho shows us that the priority we place on evidence is ultimately filtered through our worldview.
We may say we want to review unbiased evidence, but we all have preferences for what conclusions we are willing – and not willing – to accept as true.
That’s one reason I believe there is no single “proof” that Jesus was the Son of God who lived in the flesh, died on a Roman cross, and was resurrected three days later. Nor is there a single piece of evidence for the existence of God that will convince every skeptic.
Yet, I am nonetheless convinced that these things are true. And, just as I believe the totality of the evidence supports Garstang’s views over Kenyon’s on Jericho’s dating, I think it’s the cumulative weight of the evidence that I believe ultimately supports the Christian worldview.
Am I biased? Sure. Every archaeologist, scholar, author, and reader approaches evidence with built in assumptions.
As a follower of Jesus I begin with the firm belief that God is real, good, and trustworthy. In some ways, you might say the Christian faith is a hopeful bias for trusting God. Others begin with different assumptions.
The question isn’t whether or not we have biases – we all do – but whether we will let new information continue to challenge and refine us. For me, the cumulative picture points more strongly than ever to the truth of Christianity.
Jesus is real. He saved the $uicideboys. He saved this satanist. He saved DMX. He saved this atheist Uber driver. He saved me from gambling addiction despite my anger towards Him for it at the time … and He will save you if you humble yourself and come to Him.
This article is one of several related to the Habiru, the Amarna letters, and the Conquest of Canaan. Also: Who were the Habiru?, The Amarna Letters and the Conquest of Canaan, The Battle Over Jericho: Part I, The Battle Over Jericho: Part II.
Notes
- 1: This is now called the Kenyon Institute
- 2: John Garstang: https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/garstang-museum/about-us/john-garstang/
- 3: Garstang belonged to the Church of England but does not seem to have been especially devout nor dogmatic in his faith.
- 4: If you’re curious for more on high vs. low chronology in ancient Egypt, see “There’s a big problem with ancient Egyptian chronology and we don’t know how to fix it” at historyskills.com
- 5: Hatshepsut: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatshepsut
- 6: Amenhotep III: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amenhotep_III
- 7: Cypriot Bichrome ware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypriot_Bichrome_ware
- 8: “Believers Score in Battle Over the Battle of Jericho”: https://www.nytimes.com/1990/02/22/world/believers-score-in-battle-over-the-battle-of-jericho.html
A Word from the Editor
Whatever you conclude about pottery chronology, the deeper point made by the author is the one worth carrying home: nobody examines evidence from a neutral vantage point. Scripture never asked us to pretend otherwise. “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” [Hebrews 11:1] – that isn’t blind belief, it’s confidence built on a God who has proven trustworthy across generations, in the ground at Jericho and at the empty tomb. Bring your hardest questions to the evidence. Just be honest, as the author is here, about what you’re already bringing to the table when you look at it. That kind of honesty is itself a form of humility before God, and it’s where real faith tends to grow.
Salvation – Eternal Life in Less Than 150 Words
Distributed by – BCWorldview.org
Editor Comment: You show that trusting Scripture doesn't mean ignoring evidence, and your account of Jericho reminds readers that God has left real fingerprints in history for those willing to look. Walking through Garstang, Kenyon, and Wood in sequence lets readers weigh the debate for themselves instead of just taking your word for it.
This article appeared on Medium and is reprinted with modifications and by permission.