Jericho, Ai, and the Conquest Narratives

Summary

"The walls of Jericho did not fall" is the best-known one-line refutation of the Bible in popular circulation.  It is also a claim about a specific mound, a specific stratum, and a specific set of radiocarbon dates, all of which can be checked.  This article checks them, and then does the same for Ai and Hazor.

• The book of Joshua predicts almost no burned cities, and almost nobody arguing about this has noticed. Joshua 11:13 is explicit: "Israel did not burn any of the cities located on mounds except for Hazor; it was the only one Joshua burned."¹ Add Jericho and Ai, which Joshua says were burned before that campaign, and the total is three. Joshua 24:13 has God telling Israel "you took up residence in cities you did not build."² So an archaeologist looking for a swath of thirteenth- or fifteenth-century destruction layers is looking for something the text does not claim happened. This single point removes most of the popular skeptical argument, and it is an argument from the Bible, not around it.
• The reverse is also true: the text's own sequel undercuts the sweeping language. Judges 1 lists city after city that Israel "did not conquer" — Beth Shean, Taanach, Dor, Ibleam, Megiddo, Gezer, Acco, Sidon, Beth Shemesh.³ Read together, Joshua and Judges describe a partial, patchy takeover, which happens to be what the archaeology of Iron Age I looks like. Read Joshua alone, and it sounds like annihilation. Both readings are in the text.
• Jericho really was a fortified town that really burned. The fight is about when. Four dates are live. Kathleen Kenyon put the destruction near 1550 BC. John Garstang and, later, Bryant Wood put it near 1400. John Bimson kept Kenyon's stratigraphy but moved the whole Middle Bronze/Late Bronze boundary down, dating the fall to about 1430.⁴ The current excavators, Lorenzo Nigro's Italian–Palestinian expedition, date the final Middle Bronze destruction to 1550–1525 BC on new radiocarbon from House A341.⁵
• Radiocarbon has gone against both conservative dates, and the clearest statement of that comes from the people who ran the test. Bruins and van der Plicht dated short-lived cereal grain from the destruction layer — the best kind of sample, because grain dies in the year it is harvested. Their conclusion names names: "The 14C dates do not support a low 15th century BC chronology for the end of the MBA, as Bimson (1978) proposed. Further, the fortified Bronze Age city at Tell es-Sultan was not destroyed by ca. 1400 BC, as Wood (1990) suggested."⁶
• The early date's best argument is a scarab, and it deserves more respect than it gets. Bryant Wood concedes that royal-name scarabs are usually poor dating evidence because they circulate as heirlooms — then points out that Hatshepsut is the exception: "After her death she was maligned, her name systematically obliterated from monuments and inscriptions. As a result, her scarabs were not kept or copied as good luck charms. Because of this, scarabs of Hatshepsut are extremely rare and are excellent chronological indicators."⁷ The Jericho cemetery has one, plus a rare flat seal of Tuthmosis III. The limitation is that these come from the cemetery, not the destruction layer.
• The one radiocarbon date the early date ever had turned out to be a laboratory error, and Wood reports this himself. His 1990 rejoinder to Bienkowski defended a British Museum date of 1410 ± 40 BC at length. It "was later found to be in error and corrected from 3080 ± 40 BP to 3300 ± 110 BP … which calibrates to 1590 or 1527 ± 110 B.C."⁸ The 1990 rejoinder still circulates without the correction attached.
• Wood's real answer to radiocarbon is a systematic-offset argument, and it has now been measured. He argues that "C14 dates are consistently 100–150 years earlier than historical dates" in the second millennium, pointing to the Thera dispute.⁸ Pearson and colleagues found a genuine offset in exactly that window in 2018; IntCal20 absorbed it; and Manning and colleagues then reported that the 1700–1500 BCE period "shows little offset," with Mediterranean series fitting the curve closely, and region-wide offsets running "~0–22 14C years."⁹⁹ The offset is real and it is a few decades. The early date needs a century and a half.
• The sharpest conservative argument reframes the question, and this article accepts the reframing. Rodger Young notes that Jericho City IV's unadjusted radiocarbon date is "45 ± 15 years later than the BP date for Thera."¹⁰ That relation survives any calibration. So the date of Jericho's fall reduces to the date of the Thera eruption: Thera at 1600 puts Jericho at about 1555, within a generation of the excavators' independent 1550–1525; Thera at 1450 on Bietak's pumice stratigraphy puts Jericho at about 1405, which is Wood's date. The Thera question has been moving toward the radiocarbon, not away from it.
• The strongest recent recalibration was published by an early-date advocate and it does not help him. Titus Kennedy re-ran the Kenyon samples through OxCal with IntCal20 and got ranges of 1699–1623 calBC and 1617–1531 calBC.¹¹ Those are seventeenth- and sixteenth-century numbers. Kennedy's response is to demote the method: radiocarbon "should be viewed with caution, and dating strata by means of pottery typology continues to be the primary and most reliable method employed by archaeologists."¹¹ He is describing real practice. But the same camp relies on radiocarbon to rule out revised Egyptian chronologies, and a method cannot be decisive there and unreliable here.
• What Kenyon actually wrote is far more interesting than either side's version of it. Her famous sentence is real: "It is a sad fact that of the town walls of the Late Bronze Age, within which period the attack by the Israelites must fall by any dating, not a trace remains."¹² But the next sentences are almost never quoted. She attributes the absence to erosion, and then says plainly: "The Late Bronze Age town must either have re-used this, or a new wall may have been built above it, so nothing remains of it."¹³ Kenyon is not asserting there was no Late Bronze wall. She is asserting that if there was one, it is gone.
• Kenyon also found Late Bronze Jericho — a little of it. Tombs on the west side were re-used "between about 1400 B.C. and c. 1350–1325 B.C." Garstang found a small quantity of pottery of the same period and a single building. Kenyon found one dipper juglet in situ, fourteenth century, "the only Late Bronze Age vessel we have found in situ on the tell." Her verdict: "That there was occupation of the town during the fourteenth century is shown by the finds in these tombs."¹⁴ The erosion explanation that conservatives lean on is not an apologetic invention. It is Kenyon's.
• And the current excavators report a Late Bronze wall. Nigro's team describes orange mudbrick "which apparently belonged to a wall erected on top of Wall 4 in Sultan Va (LB I, 1550–1400 BC) after the final destruction of Sultan IVc," with parts of it "found collapsed south of the Cyclopean Wall."⁵ Nigro draws no biblical conclusion and this article draws none either — a collapsed wall is not a dated event, and mudbrick on a tell slope collapses for many reasons. But the flat claim that Late Bronze Jericho had no fortification is now out of date at the level of the excavation report.
• Ai is the hardest problem in the file and there is no clean solution. Et-Tell, the traditional site, was a 27.5-acre town destroyed about 2400 BC and then abandoned; Joseph Callaway dug it for nine seasons and concluded it was unoccupied at the conquest.¹⁵ W. F. Albright wrote privately in 1970 that "there just isn't any other possibility for Ai than et-Tell and that Bethel can only have been modern Beitin."¹⁶ Associates for Biblical Research has since proposed two different alternative sites. The first, Khirbet Nisya, was dug for twenty-three years and, in ABR's own words, "a positive correlation with Ai proved [elusive]."¹⁷ The second, Khirbet el-Maqatir, does have Late Bronze I pottery, an Eighteenth-Dynasty scarab, a fortification, and a burned destruction.¹⁸ It is also 2.5 acres — a fortress, not a town. Two details are better than usually reported: the burning at the gate was confirmed by remanent-magnetization testing rather than by eye, and of six sites ever proposed for Ai in the Benjamin hill country, only Maqatir has substantial Late Bronze I occupation. Callaway's own scholarly verdict, now read directly, is narrower than his famous quotations: et-Tell's Iron I village "would fit in best with the picture of Israel's early history in the book of Judges," and "The evidence does not support at any point the account of the conquest of Ai in Joshua 7—8."¹⁹²⁰²¹ A published fourteen-parameter probability calculation putting the odds at "1 chance in almost 2 million" does not survive scrutiny, and this article explains why.²²
• And the conservative camp has since split on Ai, which this article originally missed. Titus Kennedy, who had dug at Maqatir, led a 2019 excavation at et-Tell itself reporting Late Bronze pottery and a burn layer, and concluded Maqatir "may have been a small village but not the fortified city of Ai."²³²⁴ A change of position against interest by people who dug both sites deserves attention — and after six years it remains unpublished, against Callaway's nine published seasons. Both leading conservative candidates, Khirbet Nisya and Khirbet el-Maqatir, have now been abandoned by parts of the camp that proposed them.
• A member of Kenyon's own team said on camera that the question is not closed. Peter J. Parr, who dug at Jericho under Kenyon, calls Wood's pottery correlations "the strongest part of the argument," and says of his own view: "I do tend, I suppose, to support Kenyon's interpretation, but at the same time some of the other critics have studied the material in greater depth … so my mind is somewhat still open on the question of the date of that destruction."²⁵²⁶ That is a qualified concession, not an endorsement, and it is not a publication — but it is a first-hand statement from inside the excavation that the 1550 date was not treated as beyond discussion there.
• The Maqatir case for Ai stands or falls on moving Bethel, and the fourth-century evidence is against the move. Genesis 12:8 fixes Ai relative to Bethel, so Khirbet el-Maqatir requires Bethel to shift from Beitin to el-Bireh. Albright called Beitin "one of the corner-stones of ancient Palestinian topography," resting on toponymy and on Eusebius, who puts Bethel twelve milestones from Jerusalem and describes Ai as a ruin still shown to visitors: "Even until today Baithel remains, while the deserted place of Aggai is shown alone."²⁷²⁸ That describes a conspicuous long-dead tell beside Bethel, which is et-Tell. The same entry also says Ai lay west of Bethel, contradicting the verse it cites — an error reported here rather than trimmed.
• The best-attested thing about Hazor is not its destruction but its rank, and the text gets it right. Joshua 11:10 says Hazor "formerly was the head of all those kingdoms." In the Amarna letters, where Canaanite city rulers are styled ḫazannu, "mayor," Hazor's ruler is twice called king; and in roughly 25,000 Mari documents from the eighteenth century BC, Hazor is the only city in modern Israel named at all.²⁹³⁰ This is a fact about second-millennium Canaanite politics that stopped being true long before the Iron Age. It does not confirm the conquest; it is evidence about the age of the tradition, and it is good evidence.
• Hazor is the one unambiguous hit on destruction, and its cause is disputed by the people who dug it. Late Bronze Hazor was violently burned in the thirteenth century. Amnon Ben-Tor attributes it to Israelites, partly because Egyptian and Canaanite statues were deliberately decapitated, which argues against both Egyptians and Canaanites. His own co-director Sharon Zuckerman argued for an internal revolt, on a specific empirical ground: "The internal explanation is better supported because there is no archaeological evidence of warfare, such as human victims or weapons, anywhere in the site."³¹ Notice also that Hazor's destruction is thirteenth-century, so it supports the late-date conquest and not the fifteenth-century one.

Verdict: the conquest narratives are neither confirmed nor refuted by current archaeology, and the standard framing of the question is wrong on both sides.  The skeptical version demands destruction layers the text does not predict.  The apologetic version demands a 1400 BC Jericho that the site's own radiocarbon does not currently supply, and an Ai that has needed two replacement sites in forty years.  What can be said firmly is narrower.  Jericho was a walled town of about nine acres that was violently destroyed and burned and then largely abandoned;  the destruction is currently dated by its excavators to 1550–1525 BC;  Late Bronze occupation at the site is real but thin, and Kenyon's own explanation for its thinness is erosion.  The most useful thing to have come out of the conservative literature is a reframing rather than a date:  Jericho's destruction sits about forty-five radiocarbon years after the Thera eruption, so the two questions are one question, and that one is better studied than either side's Jericho arguments.  Hazor burned in the thirteenth century and somebody did it deliberately.  Ai does not work.  Anyone who tells you archaeology has settled this, in either direction, is telling you about their conclusions rather than the evidence.

Part 1 — What the account actually predicts

Most of this argument is conducted against a version of Joshua that the book does not contain.  Before looking at any mound, it is worth reading what is claimed.

Bible quotations are from the NET Bible.

Three cities are said to be burned.  Jericho: "But they burned the city and all that was in it."³²  Ai: "Joshua burned Ai and made it a permanently uninhabited mound."³³  Hazor: "They annihilated everyone who lived there with the sword … and burned Hazor."¹

And the text says the rest were not burned, in so many words.

But Israel did not burn any of the cities located on mounds except for Hazor;  it was the only one Joshua burned. — Joshua 11:13

The cities were meant to be occupied, not destroyed.

I gave you a land in which you had not worked hard;  you took up residence in cities you did not build, and you are eating the produce of vineyards and olive groves you did not plant. — Joshua 24:13

This is decisive for how the archaeological question should be posed.  A military takeover that leaves cities standing, and that installs a population using the same houses, the same pottery traditions and the same agriculture, leaves very little that an excavator can see.  Ethnic change is not visible in a stratum unless the material culture changes with it, and the archaeology of Iron Age I Canaan shows continuity in almost everything except settlement location.

So the honest form of the skeptical argument is not "there are no destruction layers."  It is narrower: the three cities the text says were burned should show it, at a consistent date.  That is a real test, and it is the one this article runs.

The counterweight, which conservatives skip.  Judges 1 is a list of failures.  Manasseh "did not conquer Beth Shean, Taanach … Dor, Ibleam, Megiddo."  Ephraim "did not conquer the Canaanites living in Gezer."  Zebulun, Asher and Naphtali each get their own entry.³  Whatever Joshua's sweeping summaries mean, the next book in the canon describes something much patchier.  A reader who uses Joshua 11:13 to lower the archaeological expectation should accept that Judges 1 lowers the historical claim too.

Part 2 — Jericho

The site

Tell es-Sultan, by the spring at modern Jericho, is one of the most-dug mounds on earth: Charles Warren in 1868;  Ernst Sellin and Carl Watzinger 1907–09 and 1911;  John Garstang 1930–36;  Kathleen Kenyon 1952–58;  Nicolò Marchetti and Lorenzo Nigro 1997–2000;  and the Italian–Palestinian expedition under Nigro and Hamdan Taha from 2009.

It is small.  Kenyon speaks of "the eight acres of the town."³⁴  The area within the upper wall is about six acres, and about nine including the fortification system.³⁵  This matters in both directions.  It makes the Deuteronomy 9:1 language about cities "walled up to the sky" a description of height rather than extent — and Jericho's defenses were genuinely tall, a stone revetment topped by mudbrick with a second wall at the crest of the rampart.  It also means the population was in the low thousands, not the tens of thousands, which should temper any picture of Jericho as a metropolis.

Kenyon documented that the walls burned more than once, and that the burning was deliberate.  Her description of the south end of the tell is worth having, because it shows what a real attack on this site looked like:

Against the outer face of the wall was a layer of ash 3 feet thick, derived from an enormous pile of brushwood … The purpose of the fire can hardly have been simply the destruction of the wall, for in actual effect it hardened and strengthened it by burning the bricks.  The disastrous effect was undoubtedly on the town inside.³⁶

She also notes that the bricks were "tied together by timbers, again possibly an anti-earthquake measure."³⁶  Jericho sits on the Jordan rift.  Its builders knew about earthquakes.

Four dates

Kenyon, c. 1550 BC.  She associated the destruction of the Middle Bronze city with the Egyptian campaigns at the rise of the Eighteenth Dynasty, which she placed at 1580 BC on the chronology then current: "Both Tell Beit Mirsim and Jericho were violently destroyed at about this time, probably by such campaigns, and were not reoccupied for many years."³⁷  Bruins and van der Plicht point out the weakness in this — Kenyon's date was not derived from evidence at Jericho but from an assumed link to Egypt, and that Egyptian date has since drifted from about 1580 to about 1539.⁶

Garstang and Wood, c. 1400 BC.  Garstang found collapsed walls in the 1930s and dated them to Joshua's time.  Kenyon's re-excavation overturned that;  her stratigraphic argument was that the fortifications Garstang identified as Late Bronze are in fact Early Bronze.¹³  Bryant Wood revived the 1400 date in 1990 on ceramic grounds.  His own ranking of his evidence, quoted in this project's article on dating the Exodus, is candid: "Of these four lines of evidence, the ceramic data are first and foremost.  The other three are merely supportive and are not in and of themselves sufficient to compel a revision of Kenyon's date."

Bimson, c. 1430 BC.  John Bimson's move is different from Wood's and is often confused with it.  Bimson accepts that the destruction is the end of the Middle Bronze Age;  he lowers the absolute date of that whole period boundary.  "There is no evidence which compels us to date the destruction before 1500 BC;  it could equally well have occurred some decades after that date.  I submit, therefore, that MBA Jericho actually came to an end in the second half of the 15th century BC, and that its attackers were the Israelites as recorded in Jos 6."⁴  He puts the Exodus at about 1470 and Jericho "somewhere within a decade of 1430 BC."³⁸

Nigro, 1550–1525 BC.  The current excavation's answer, from new radiocarbon samples in a house east of the Middle Bronze tower: "The latest 14C samples from House A341 allow to date the final destruction of the Middle Bronze city in the third quarter of the 16th century BC (1550–1525 BC)."⁵  This is close to Kenyon's figure, but reached from carbon rather than from an Egyptian assumption.

The conservative case at its strongest

Bryant Wood's 1990 argument rested on four lines of evidence, and he ranked them himself: "Of these four lines of evidence, the ceramic data are first and foremost.  The other three are merely supportive and are not in and of themselves sufficient to compel a revision of Kenyon's date.  Taken together, however, they form a strong case for lowering Kenyon's date."³⁹  Piotr Bienkowski replied in the same magazine;  Wood's rejoinder is titled "Bienkowski is Wrong on All Counts."  Three of his points deserve to be reported properly, because critics of the early date usually skip them.

The pottery correlations.  Wood's central claim is stratigraphic rather than rhetorical: Kenyon's Phase 52, the destroyed Bronze Age city, is "solidly correlated with the Late Bronze IB strata of Shechem XIV, Lachish Fosse Temple I, Ashdod XVII, Hazor 2, Megiddo VIII, Mevorakh XI, Michal XVI and Rabud LB4."⁴⁰  That is a checkable claim about eight sites.  He also objects, fairly, that Kenyon's dating leaned heavily on the absence of imported Cypriot ware: "it is simply poor methodology to base dating almost exclusively on the lack of imported pottery … The presence or absence of imported pottery can be used as a supporting argument."⁴¹

The Hatshepsut scarab.  Bienkowski's objection to royal-name scarabs is the standard one — they stay in circulation as heirlooms and amulets long after the king dies.  Wood concedes it for Tuthmosis III and Amenhotep III, who were revered after death, and then makes a genuinely clever distinction:

The situation with Hatshepsut, however, was not the same.  After her death she was maligned, her name systematically obliterated from monuments and inscriptions.  As a result, her scarabs were not kept or copied as good luck charms.  Because of this, scarabs of Hatshepsut are extremely rare and are excellent chronological indicators.⁷

He adds a flat, double-sided seal of Tuthmosis III — also rare, also unlikely to be an heirloom — and argues that the cemetery outside Jericho yields a continuous scarab series from the eighteenth dynasty into the early fourteenth century, against Kenyon's abandonment after 1550.⁴²

Whether this works.  The Hatshepsut argument is the best single item in the early-date case and it is not obviously answerable.  Two cautions.  The scarabs come from the cemetery, not from the destruction layer, so at most they show the site was in use, not when the city fell — and Kenyon herself reported fourteenth-century tomb re-use, so the two sides may be closer here than the rhetoric suggests.  And the pottery correlations rest on a detailed study Wood conceded in 1990 "has not yet been published."⁴³

A witness from Kenyon's own team

In 2010 the documentary maker Joel Kramer took Peter J. Parr and Bryant Wood to Jericho together and filmed them.  Parr had worked with Kathleen Kenyon on the Jericho excavation — "50 years ago I worked with Kathleen Kenyon on the Jericho excavations;  she was someone admired and she was my boss."  That makes him about as close to a hostile witness for the early date as exists, and what he says on camera is more useful than either camp's summaries.

On the fallen brick.  Asked whether the mass of red mudbrick at the foot of the stone revetment is evidence of a collapsed wall, Parr answers with a physical argument rather than an interpretive one: "If you have a mudbrick wall sitting on top of the stone revetment and it falls over, where else can the bricks go?  They've got to go to the bottom."  He grants that it "certainly is evidence of that disruption."⁴⁴

On Wood's pottery case.  "Well, I think the strongest part of the argument was the question of pottery, where he said that the pottery that was found associated with the destruction, in view of the parallels he found at other sites, was to be dated close to 1450."²⁵

On his own position.  This is the sentence that matters, and it is a qualified concession rather than an endorsement: "I do tend, I suppose, to support Kenyon's interpretation, but at the same time some of the other critics have studied the material in greater depth … so my mind is somewhat still open on the question of the date of that destruction."²⁶  On the conquest itself he says: "I'm a neutral.  I do not know whether Jericho was invaded and attacked by Joshua.  I tend to accept that there was a tradition … and I see no reason to believe that something like that didn't happen."⁴⁵

What this is worth, and what it is not.  It is not a scholarly publication and it should not be treated as one.  Parr did not change his position in print, and "my mind is somewhat still open" is a long way from agreeing with Wood.  But it is a first-hand statement, on the record, by a member of Kenyon's own team, that the pottery argument is the strongest part of the revisionist case and that the question is not closed.  Popular accounts on the critical side often present the 1550 date as settled beyond discussion by the excavator's own circle.  On the evidence of this interview, it was not settled for at least one member of that circle.

One claim in the same film that does not hold.  The narration says the collapsed city wall at Jericho "is unique in archaeology — at no other site have we found evidence for a city wall that has fallen down."  That is not true, and it should not be repeated.  Collapsed mudbrick superstructure is a common find wherever mudbrick walls stood on stone footings, for the reason Parr gives: bricks fall downhill.  The significant fact at Jericho is the quantity of brick against the revetment and its stratigraphic relation to the burn layer, not that fallen brick is unheard of.  Overstating it invites a skeptic to discard the whole argument on one checkable error.

What radiocarbon says

Bruins and van der Plicht in 1995 dated two homogeneous sets from the destruction layer: short-lived cereal grain, weighted average 3306 ± 7 BP, and multi-year charcoal, weighted average 3370 ± 6 BP.⁶  The grain is the important set.  As they put it, "The age of the short-lived cereal samples is likely to be within a few years of the destruction date of the last MBA city at Tell es-Sultan."⁶

The calibrated result was, and remains, frustrating.  Wiggles in the calibration curve split the grain date into "equal probability for the 1σ result to be in the range 1601 to 1566 cal BC as in the range 1561 to 1524 cal BC."⁶  Their summary sentence for the whole paper: "The final destruction of MBA Jericho occurred during the late 17th or the 16th century BC."⁶

Two honest observations follow.

First, the result is against both conservative dates, and the authors say so by name.⁶  This is not a case where a skeptical reading has been imposed on neutral data.

Second, the authors themselves flagged the calibration as provisional.  They wrote that calibration "is a bit premature, because several groups are currently testing the accuracy of both the 1986 and 1993 calibration curves," and called for a regional calibration curve for the eastern Mediterranean.⁶  That caution is real and it is theirs.

And a third that the early-date camp reports about itself.  Wood's 1990 rejoinder to Bienkowski defended a British Museum radiocarbon date of 1410 ± 40 BC from Jericho's destruction layer, arguing at length that Bienkowski was wrong to suspect the sample of contamination.  Wood later reported, in answer to readers' questions, what became of it: the figure "was later found to be in error and corrected from 3080 ± 40 BP to 3300 ± 110 BP … which calibrates to 1590 or 1527 ± 110 B.C."⁸  The one radiocarbon date the early-date case had was a laboratory error, and correcting it moved it into the sixteenth century.  Wood says so himself, which is to his credit, and the 1990 rejoinder is still circulated without the correction attached.

Kennedy's 2023 recalibration with IntCal20 is therefore the right kind of follow-up.  It moved the numbers, but not toward 1400: individual samples now give 1699–1623 calBC at 70.3% and 1617–1531 calBC at 95.4%, with an outlier at 2031–1899 that probably reflects reused old beam wood.¹¹  Kennedy's own summary of where radiocarbon leaves the question is fair and worth stating exactly: the dates "appear to only rule out a ca. 1230 BC destruction hypothesis but have not been able to solve the dispute between a Middle Bronze III or Late Bronze I destruction of the city."¹¹

That is not quite right — a 1617–1531 range does not sit comfortably in Late Bronze I on anyone's periodisation — but the direction of his concession is the useful part.  Radiocarbon at Jericho rules out the thirteenth century decisively and pushes against 1400.  It cannot yet distinguish 1600 from 1525.

The systematic-offset argument, and how it was tested

Wood's own answer to the radiocarbon is better than a simple appeal to pottery, and it should be stated in his words:

Jericho is just one example of the discrepancy between historical and C14 dates for the second millennium B.C.  C14 dates are consistently 100–150 years earlier than historical dates.  There is a heated debate going on among scholars concerning this, especially with regard to the date of the eruption of Thera (Santorini).⁸

This is a real argument, not special pleading.  The Thera dispute is exactly what he says it is: radiocarbon put the Minoan eruption in the late seventeenth century, and Egyptian and Aegean archaeological synchronisms put it in the mid-sixteenth to early-fifteenth.  If a systematic offset of that size existed across the eastern Mediterranean, Jericho's cereal dates of 1600–1525 would correspond to a real date somewhere near 1450–1400, and the early date would be rescued.

The argument has since been tested directly, and the answer is that the offset is real and far too small.

In 2018 Charlotte Pearson and colleagues built an annual-resolution radiocarbon series from calendar-dated tree rings across 1700–1500 BCE — precisely the window at issue.  They found a genuine offset from the calibration curve then in use, "between c.1660 and 1540 BCE," which shifted the calibrated range for Thera later, toward the sixteenth century.⁴⁶  They also ruled out the obvious alternative explanation: "Outside this range, our annual measurements merge back toward IntCal, indicating that this offset is not a result of a specific Arizona Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) laboratory bias."⁴⁶  For a few years this looked like support for Wood.

The 2020 IntCal20 curve absorbed that work, and Sturt Manning and colleagues then re-tested the region against it.  Their finding is the one that matters here:

The 1,700–1,500 BCE period, where IntCal20 is informed predominantly by many new AMS 14C dates, shows little offset (contrary to the previous IntCal13) and low elevation Mediterranean time series from Miletos, western Turkey, and Noceto (NOC), northern Italy, fit the calibration curve closely and show a negligible offset.⁹

And across the Mediterranean-Anatolian region generally, where offsets from IntCal20 do exist, they are on the order of "~0–22 14C years."⁹

Twenty-two radiocarbon years is a few decades.  Wood needs a hundred and fifty.  So the systematic-offset argument was a fair hypothesis in 2008, has been measured, and does not deliver what the early date requires.  Note also that Kennedy's 2023 recalibration was run against IntCal20 — the curve Manning finds needs little correction in this window — so his 1617–1531 calBC range is already offset-corrected in the relevant sense.

The Thera relation, which reframes the whole question

There is one more conservative argument here and it is the sharpest of them, because it sidesteps calibration entirely.

Rodger Young, presenting to the Near East Archaeological Society in 2015, made a relative rather than an absolute argument.  Manfred Bietak's stratigraphy has Theran pumice appearing suddenly at Tell el-Dab'a stratum C/2, dated by scarabs of Thutmose III and Amenhotep II to roughly 1450–1400 BC;  and in the Levant, pumice from Thera occurs "only from the Late Bronze Age onwards, whilst all pumice from Middle Bronze Age strata is from other volcanoes."¹⁰  Young then observes that "the unadjusted BP (Before Present) radiocarbon date for the LB destruction of Jericho City IV is 45 ± 15 years later than the BP date for Thera," and concludes that anchoring Thera archaeologically at about 1450 puts Jericho in the late fifteenth or early fourteenth century.¹⁰

The 45-year relation is the useful part, and it belongs to nobody's side.  Two events dated by the same method in the same region, forty-five radiocarbon years apart, are forty-five years apart whatever the calibration does.  So the date of Jericho's destruction reduces to the date of the Thera eruption, and that is a much better-studied problem.

Run it both ways.  If Thera is about 1600 — where the radiocarbon puts it, and where Pearson's and Manning's work has left it after the offset was measured — then Jericho City IV falls about 1555.  That is within a generation of the 1550–1525 BC the current excavators derived independently from House A341.⁵  If Thera is about 1450 on Bietak's pumice stratigraphy, Jericho falls about 1405, which is Wood's date.

Young is candid that his talk "is not to give a balanced presentation of all sides in the current debate.  It is instead to show that there is a problem."¹⁰  He is right that there is a problem, and the problem is now well localised: the Jericho question and the Thera question are the same question, and the Thera question has moved toward the radiocarbon rather than away from it.

What Kenyon actually concluded, in full

Because this passage is quoted in fragments by everyone, here is the substance of it.  Kenyon, Digging Up Jericho (1957), pp. 261–262.

On the Late Bronze walls:

It is a sad fact that of the town walls of the Late Bronze Age, within which period the attack by the Israelites must fall by any dating, not a trace remains.  The erosion which has destroyed much of the defences has already been described.  It will be remembered that the summit of the Middle Bronze Age rampart only survives in one place.  The Late Bronze Age town must either have re-used this, or a new wall may have been built above it, so nothing remains of it.¹³

On Late Bronze occupation:

In a limited number of instances, among tombs on the west side of the town … the tombs were then re-used between about 1400 B.C. and c. 1350–1325 B.C.  On the tell, Professor Garstang found a small quantity of pottery of the same period, and a single building, his Middle Building, which might belong to it.  That there was occupation of the town during the fourteenth century is shown by the finds in these tombs.¹⁴

On why so little of it survives:

The houses of Late Bronze Age Jericho have therefore almost entirely disappeared.  We have already seen that over most of the summit of the tell even the houses of the certainly populous Middle Bronze Age town have vanished, and only levels of the Early Bronze Age remain … This process was arrested when the town of 1400 B.C. was built on top of the wash, but this in turn was abandoned, and erosion has almost removed it.⁴⁷

And her closing:

The excavation of Jericho, therefore, has thrown no light on the walls of Jericho of which the destruction is so vividly described in the Book of Joshua.  One can visualise the Children of Israel marching round the eight acres of the town … But as to what caused the walls to fall down flat, we have no factual evidence.  We can guess that it was an earthquake, which the excavations have shown to have destroyed a number of the earlier walls, but this is only conjecture.  It would have been very natural for the Israelites to have regarded such a visitation as divine intervention on their behalf, as indeed it can be regarded.³⁴

That last clause is from the archaeologist whose work is universally cited as having disproved Joshua 6.  It should be read carefully rather than triumphantly: Kenyon is saying the excavation found no evidence, not that it found contrary evidence, and she offers the earthquake as a guess.  But her position is plainly not "the story is false."  It is "the walls of the relevant period are gone, and we cannot test it."

The Late Bronze wall in the 2024 report

The current expedition's interim report describes something Kenyon did not have.  Behind the Cyclopean Wall, a stone filling was found supporting "another mudbrick structure (W.2154=W.1714), apparently forming the Sultan V city-wall."  In a later section the report is more specific: "Scanty Sultan V (Late Bronze) remains were identified along the head of the Cyclopean Wall in a layer of in situ and fallen down orange mudbricks (W.2154/F.2154a), which apparently belonged to a wall erected on top of Wall 4 in Sultan Va (LB I, 1550–1400 BC) after the final destruction of Sultan IVc.  The same Sultan Va structure (W.1714/F.1714a) was identified on top of the Cyclopean Wall to the east … Other parts of this wall made of orange bricks were found collapsed south of the Cyclopean Wall."⁵

What this does and does not establish should be stated carefully, because it will be over-claimed.

It does show that a Late Bronze I fortification wall existed at Jericho, built after the Middle Bronze destruction, on exactly the reconstruction Kenyon said was possible.  That removes the "no Late Bronze wall" claim as a bare fact.

It does not date any collapse.  The report says "in situ and fallen down" bricks and parts "found collapsed," which on a tell is the normal condition of unfired mudbrick after three and a half thousand years.  No destruction event is claimed, no burning is reported in connection with it, and Nigro connects it to nothing biblical.

The right conclusion is a modest one: Jericho's Late Bronze phase is better attested than the standard summary allows, and the site is not as empty as either the popular skeptical account or Kenyon's own 1957 report suggested.

Part 3 — Ai

The problem

Joshua 7–8 has Israel take Ai after an initial defeat, kill its inhabitants, burn it, and leave it "a permanently uninhabited mound."³³  The traditional identification is et-Tell, endorsed by Albright and excavated by Joseph Callaway for nine seasons from 1964.  Et-Tell was a substantial Early Bronze town — about 11 hectares, 27.5 acres, at roughly 2400 BC, three times the size of Jericho — which was destroyed and then left unoccupied until a small Iron Age I village appeared on it.⁴⁸  There is no Late Bronze city there to conquer.

Callaway, who was an evangelical and a student of both Kenyon and Albright, published this as a defeat for the conquest account.  His often-quoted verdicts — that "archaeology has wiped out the historical credibility of the conquest of Ai as reported in Joshua 7–8," and that Ai "is simply an embarrassment to every view of the conquest that takes the biblical and archaeological evidence seriously" — come from a Biblical Archaeology Review piece of 1985.¹⁵

His scholarly statement of the same position is better and more constructive, and this article previously had only the popular quotations.  In a 1987 essay titled "Ai (et-Tell): Problem Site for Biblical Archaeologists," he opens with a parody of Job 1 in which Satan proposes that God "put forth your hand and give them the site of Ai and they will curse you to your face" — "So Satan went forth from the presence of the Lord, and the site of Ai was given to the archaeologists."⁴⁹  That is a fair description of the century of work the site has absorbed.

His conclusion is where the substance is:

The site of Ai as I have come to know it in nine seasons of excavations would fit in best with the picture of Israel's early history in the book of Judges.  Points at which the material evidence of the site is compatible with Israel's backgrounds in the book of Judges are: (1) prominence of small villages;  (2) an agricultural subsistence base;  (3) the characteristic of isolationism;  (4) dominance of fertility religion;  and (5) social and family life.  The evidence does not support at any point the account of the conquest of Ai in Joshua 7—8.¹⁹

Notice what that concedes and what it does not.  Callaway is not saying et-Tell has nothing to do with Israel.  He is saying its Iron I village fits the Judges picture — small, agricultural, isolated — and does not fit Joshua 7–8.  That is a much more specific claim than "archaeology refutes the Bible," and it is one a reader of The Emergence of Early Israel will recognise: the Iron I village at et-Tell is one of the highland settlements that article describes.

Albright, for his part, closed the door on alternatives.  In a personal letter to David Livingston dated 23 February 1970:

You can take it from me, and from Callaway and others, that there just isn't any other possibility for Ai than et-Tell and that Bethel can only have been modern Beitin.  Since 1921 we have examined and reexamined the whole countryside, and there just isn't any archaeologically viable identification.¹⁶

The two replacement sites

David Livingston founded Associates for Biblical Research to answer this, and excavated Khirbet Nisya as his candidate from 1979 to 2002.  ABR's own retrospective concedes the outcome: the findings "illuminated the background of the Old and New Testaments, but a positive correlation with Ai proved [elusive]."¹⁷  Twenty-three seasons, no identification.

In 1994 Bryant Wood proposed Khirbet el-Maqatir, 1 km west of et-Tell, and excavated it from 1995 to 2016, latterly under Scott Stripling.  What was found there is genuinely relevant: Late Bronze I pottery "around and be[neath]" the fortification, two scarabs, one of them Eighteenth-Dynasty, found inside the fortress near the gate in association with refired LB I sherds — refired, that is, in a conflagration — and a fortification with gate socket stones.  Nothing at the site postdates LB IB, about 1445–1400 BC.¹⁸

The physical evidence, and a probability argument

Two further items should be reported, one because it is good and one because it is instructive.

The conflagration is measured, not just observed.  In 1999 materials from Area G at Khirbet el-Maqatir — the gate structure, in a Late Bronze I context — were tested for remanent magnetization, which records superheating.  Three samples showed statistically significant levels, and an ash layer was exposed in the adjacent square.²⁰  Testing for remanent magnetisation is a real method and is better evidence of burning than an ash layer alone, because ash on a tell can arrive many ways.  More than a hundred slingstones and three gate post socket stones were also recovered.⁵⁰

And there is a probability calculation, which does not work.  Peter Briggs published a four-part study applying a fourteen-parameter "criterial screen" drawn from Joshua 7–8 to the candidate sites, assigning each parameter a probability of being satisfied accidentally by a site chosen at random in the Benjamin hill country, and multiplying.  His result: "the computed value for the probability of all 14 parameters being satisfied by a single site selected at random in the Benjamin hill country of Palestine is 5.343 x 10-7, which is equivalent to only 1 chance in almost 2 million."²²

Why the number should not be used, in four steps.

The parameters are not independent, and they are multiplied as though they were.  "Late Bronze I occupation," "fortified in Late Bronze I," "under seven acres," "evidence of conflagration," "gate socket stones" and "line of sight to Bethel" are heavily correlated: a small fortified Late Bronze I site in that region will tend to satisfy most of them together.  Multiplying correlated probabilities inflates the result, often by orders of magnitude.

The criteria were selected after the site was known.  Any specific place satisfies a long list of specific descriptions if the list is drawn up with that place in view.  This is the same defect this article identifies in the Tall el-Hammam airburst paper's six-point match to Genesis, and it should be called by the same name on both sides.

The reference class is wrong.  Khirbet el-Maqatir was not selected at random from the Benjamin hill country;  it was selected because Bryant Wood already thought it was promising.  A probability computed against random selection does not describe what actually happened.

And the author concedes the inputs are soft.  Several values are "judged to be no greater than" a round fraction, and Briggs writes that the fourteen probabilities are evaluated "but not necessarily with the desired rigor in a number of cases."⁵¹

One parameter survives and is worth keeping.  Of six sites in the Benjamin hill country that have at any time been proposed for Joshua's Ai, only Khirbet el-Maqatir shows substantial Late Bronze I occupation.²¹  That is a plain fact about the survey record, it does not depend on the arithmetic, and it is the real strength of the Maqatir case.

The conservative camp has split, and this article did not know it

Since 2019 the Khirbet el-Maqatir identification has been abandoned by two people who worked on it, in favour of the traditional site.

Titus Kennedy, who had participated in the Maqatir excavations, led a small team that dug a series of squares at et-Tell in 2019 and reports Late Bronze pottery and a burned destruction layer.²³  Joel Kramer, who says he reached the same conclusion independently, gives their reasoning: "with the remains of houses and Late Bronze pottery, Maqatir may have been a small village but not the fortified city of Ai."²⁴  His account of the dig has three squares — inside the ancient city-wall line, on the acropolis, and north of the western gate — with "layers that were literally filled with Late Bronze I pottery and then into a destruction by fire.  A layer filled with black ash."⁵²

Why this deserves more weight than a popular claim usually gets.  It is a change of position against interest by people who have dug both sites.  Kennedy worked at Maqatir and concluded it was not Ai.  If the finding stands it retires forty years of ABR fieldwork and removes the Bethel relocation that was the Maqatir case's weakest link.  And it is a positive, checkable claim — Late Bronze I pottery in stratified context at et-Tell — of exactly the kind Callaway's nine seasons are held to have excluded.

Why it cannot be used yet.  The et-Tell soundings themselves are unpublished.  Six years on, this project has found no excavation report for them, no peer-reviewed article and no ceramic corpus — only video and secondary reporting.  Kennedy has published near the site: "El-Qanabiz Near Khirbet et-Tell" appeared in the Near East Archaeological Society Bulletin 69 (2024).  That is a different site, and this project has not obtained the article;  it is recorded here as the one published output of the post-2019 work in the area and as the place a reader should look first.

Fairness to ABR, which the paragraph above understates.  Setting Kennedy's unpublished soundings against "Callaway's nine published seasons" is a fair contrast for et-Tell, but it would be unfair if it left the impression that the Khirbet el-Maqatir excavation was never written up.  It was.  Associates for Biblical Research dug fourteen summer and five winter seasons between 1995 and 2016, and the final report — The Excavations at Khirbet el-Maqatir, Israel: 1995–2001 and 2009–2016, edited by Scott Stripling — was published by Archaeopress in 2023 in two volumes.⁵³  This project has not obtained it, which is a real gap in the treatment of Ai here, and any reader weighing the Maqatir case should go to it rather than to the 2016 summary paper this article leans on.  The point being made above is narrower than it may have sounded: the new claim, that et-Tell has Late Bronze I material, is the unpublished one.

And a conflict a skeptic will find in about thirty seconds.  The Near East Archaeological Society Bulletin lists Titus Kennedy as its editor, and the society's president is Scott Stripling, who directed the Maqatir excavation;  Rodger Young, whose reframing of the Jericho radiocarbon problem this article accepts, sits on its publications committee.⁵⁴  So Kennedy's el-Qanabiz report, and the forthcoming Zoar report, appear in a bulletin he edits, issued by a society run by the people whose conclusions they bear on.  That does not make any of it wrong — small specialist societies are often staffed by the handful of people doing the work, and the same could be said of many field journals.  It does mean the independence of the review cannot be assumed, and that a finding published there carries less evidential weight than the same finding in Levant, PEQ or BASOR would.  Kennedy publishes in those venues too, which is the relevant comparison: his 2013 four-horned altar note went to Palestine Exploration Quarterly.

The access problem, which explains why this is all so thin.  Et-Tell and Beitin lie in the part of the West Bank administered by the Palestinian Authority, where Israeli citizens are legally barred from entering.  The Israeli scholars with the strongest interest in Iron Age highland sites therefore cannot dig them.  That is the main reason the Ai question has been argued for fifty years on the basis of Callaway's 1960s work and a handful of small foreign expeditions, rather than settled by a modern excavation.  It is a political constraint rather than an evidential one, and it should temper how much anyone reads into the silence.  Callaway's conclusion rests on nine published seasons, and overturning it requires publication rather than assertion.  Three squares is also a very small sample against Callaway's exposure, and "Late Bronze pottery" needs a specialist ceramic identification before it means anything, because the Late Bronze I repertoire continues Middle Bronze forms closely — the very difficulty that makes Jericho's date contested.

How this article treats it.  As an open claim that would matter a great deal if published, and as evidence that the conservative position on Ai is currently unsettled from within.  A reader should notice that both leading conservative candidates — Khirbet Nisya and Khirbet el-Maqatir — have now been abandoned by parts of the camp that proposed them, and that the current move is back to the site Albright named in his 1970 letter.

The fourth-century witnesses, and why they matter for the Bethel relocation

The Maqatir case has one structural requirement that is easy to lose sight of: it needs Bethel to move.  Genesis 12:8 fixes Ai relative to Bethel — Abram pitched his tent "with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east" — so a new Ai four kilometres from et-Tell needs a new Bethel to keep the relation.  ABR relocates Bethel from Beitin to el-Bireh.  Everything else in the Maqatir argument can be granted and the case still fails if that relocation fails.

The relocation runs into a body of evidence older than any excavation.  Albright, in the Bethel excavation report, states the position bluntly: "there can be no doubt about the correctness of the identification of Beitin with Biblical Bethel," an identification "regarded by all topographers of competence as one of the corner-stones of ancient Palestinian topography."²⁷  His grounds are not archaeological.  They are toponymy — Beitin preserves Beth-El by regular sound change — a continuous local tradition, and, decisively, the agreement of the fourth-century itineraries.

Eusebius locates Bethel three times.  In the Onomasticon, compiled in the 320s, Bethel is twelve milestones from Aelia (Jerusalem) on the road to Neapolis (Nablus), on the left-hand side going north.²⁸  The Itinerarium Burdigalense, the Bordeaux Pilgrim's road-book of AD 333, independently puts Bethel 28 miles from Neapolis on the left of the Jerusalem road.²⁷  Albright works the arithmetic: the Roman road was not over 41 Roman miles end to end, and Beitin lies opposite a point about 11 Roman miles north of Jerusalem — "a nearly perfect agreement between our sources and the actual topography."²⁷

And Eusebius saw the ruin of Ai.  The entry is worth quoting in full, because it is the earliest description anyone has of the site's condition:

Aggai (Gen. 12:8).  West of Baithel.  They are not far from one another.  On the way from Ailia to Neapolis Baithel is on the left of the road about twelve milestones from Ailia.  Even until today Baithel remains, while the deserted place of Aggai is shown alone;  Scripture calls it Gai.²⁸

Jerome's expanded Latin version adds the detail Kramer's Bethel film turns on — "There also is a church built where Jacob slept as he passed through to Mesopotamia, whence also he gave it the name Bethel, that is, House of God" — and on Ai: "Of Aggai indeed only a few ruins remain and so mark the place."²⁸

What this does and does not establish.

It supports et-Tell.  A large, conspicuous, long-deserted ruin immediately beside Bethel, still pointed out to pilgrims in the fourth century, describes et-Tell and does not describe Khirbet el-Maqatir, which is a small site that had to be found by survey in the twentieth century.  The modern editors of the Onomasticon identify Aggai with Khirbet et-Tell without qualification.⁵⁵

It does not prove Ai was et-Tell in Joshua's day.  A fourth-century AD tradition is seventeen centuries after the event.  It shows where late antiquity thought Ai was, which is a fact about the tradition, not about the Bronze Age.  Byzantine site identifications are wrong often enough that this cannot carry the argument alone.

And it contains an error nobody should hide.  Eusebius says Aggai is west of Bethel, and Jerome repeats it — "Aggai adjoins the western side of Bethel."  Genesis 12:8, which the entry itself cites, puts Ai on the east.  Either the compiler reversed the direction, or a copyist did.  This is a real defect in the witness and it is quoted here rather than trimmed.  It weakens the entry as a topographical instrument while leaving intact the two facts that matter: Ai was immediately adjacent to Bethel, and it was a deserted ruin.

The milestone figure is not by itself decisive between Beitin and el-Bireh.  El-Bireh is roughly ten Roman miles from Jerusalem and Beitin roughly eleven or twelve, and ancient road distances are not surveyed to that precision.  The strong leg of Albright's case is the name, not the number.  But the name is a strong leg: Beitin is what Beth-El becomes in Arabic by regular sound change, and el-Bireh is not.

Net effect.  The Bethel relocation was always the load-bearing weakness in the Maqatir case, and it is the point on which two of Maqatir's own excavators have now moved.  That the fourth-century evidence for Beitin is independent of any modern excavation, and was assembled by Albright — who had every motive to want a conquest-friendly result — makes it harder to discount.

How much this solves

Less than ABR claims, and more than nothing.

The scale problem is real but cuts both ways.  Khirbet el-Maqatir is about 1 hectare, 2.5 acres.⁴⁸  That is a fortress, not a city.  But Joshua 7:3 says exactly that: the scouts report "About two or three thousand men are adequate to defeat Ai … for Ai is small."  Against this, Joshua 8:25 says "12,000 men and women died that day."  Those two verses are in tension with each other regardless of which site is chosen, and no site can fix an internal problem.  A 2.5-acre fortress cannot hold twelve thousand people.

The name is an argument.  Ha-Ai means "the ruin."  A site already called The Ruin, with a fortress on it, is a coherent reading of a Late Bronze outpost built on or beside an abandoned Early Bronze mound.  It is also, conveniently, exactly what the northern-Jordan-valley scenario needs, which is a reason to hold it loosely.

The Bethel problem is not solved.  Joshua 7:2 places Ai "near Beth Aven" and "east of Bethel."  ABR's solution requires Beitin to be Beth Aven rather than Bethel, and Bethel to be somewhere else.  That is a second relocation to rescue the first, and it is the weakest link in the chain.  Albright's flat denial that any alternative exists was overconfident, but the burden ABR has taken on is heavy: two site identifications overturned, one after twenty-three years of digging.

The honest position is that Ai remains unresolved.  Khirbet el-Maqatir is a real Late Bronze I fortress that was really destroyed by fire at approximately the time the early-date conquest requires, which is more than nothing.  It is not the city of Joshua 8 as described, and the identification depends on relocating Bethel.

Part 4 — Hazor

Hazor is the only one of the three burned cities where the burning is beyond dispute.  Yigael Yadin's excavations and Amnon Ben-Tor's renewed work both found a violent thirteenth-century destruction of the Late Bronze city — a fire hot enough to crack basalt, with ash layers up to about a metre in the public buildings.

Ben-Tor's argument that Israelites did it rests mainly on what was done to the statues.  Egyptian and Canaanite figures had heads and hands deliberately broken off.  Egyptians would not mutilate their own gods and kings;  Canaanites would not mutilate theirs;  which leaves a third party with an iconoclastic motive.

The detail the text gets right

Before the destruction question, there is a smaller and better-attested point that this article previously missed.

Joshua 11:10 says of Hazor: "formerly it was the head of all those kingdoms."  Judges 4:2 calls its ruler not merely king of Hazor but "king of Canaan who reigned at Hazor."  The biblical writers single Hazor out from every other Canaanite city.

The Amarna correspondence singles it out the same way.  In the fourteenth-century letters from Canaanite rulers to the Egyptian court, the standard title is ḫazannu, conventionally translated "mayor."  Hazor's ruler is twice called king — in EA 148, by a rival at Tyre, and in EA 227 — and EA 228 names him Abdi-Tirshi.²⁹  EA 364 has the ruler of Ashtaroth complaining that Hazor has seized three of his cities.⁵⁶

And Hazor's prominence runs back further.  In the roughly 25,000 documents from the Mari archives of the eighteenth century BC, Hazor is the only city in what is now Israel that is named at all, and the tablets record substantial trade between the two.³⁰

The honest caveat.  The mayor/king distinction is not as clean as apologetic uses make it.  The two titles appear to reflect different registers — ḫazannu is the Egyptian administrative designation, and a Canaanite ruler could be "king" within his own society, which EA 147 seems to show.⁵⁷  So the argument is not that only Hazor was ever called a king;  it is that Hazor's ruler carries the higher title in the Egyptian correspondence where others do not, which matches a real regional hierarchy the Mari material independently supports.

What it is worth.  Not a confirmation of the conquest.  It is evidence that whoever wrote Joshua 11 and Judges 4 knew a fact about second-millennium Canaanite politics — Hazor's pre-eminence — that stopped being true long before the Iron Age and that a later writer had no obvious way to reconstruct.  That is an argument about the age of the tradition, and it is a good one.

Who destroyed it

Sharon Zuckerman, Ben-Tor's co-director, disagreed in print.  Her 2007 study reads the destruction as the end of a long internal decline, marked by "crisis architecture" and by ritual terminations in the temples — and she rests the case on an absence:

The internal explanation is better supported because there is no archaeological evidence of warfare, such as human victims or weapons, anywhere in the site … This observation serves as an argument against the involvement of external forces such as the Israelites or the Egyptians in the destruction of [Hazor].³¹

She adds that "the view of the final destruction of the LBA city of Hazor as a sudden unexpected attack on a strong flourishing kingdom does not concur with the archaeological evidence."⁵⁸

Two things follow for a reader weighing the conquest.

Hazor supports the late date, not the early one.  A thirteenth-century destruction fits a conquest around 1200 and not one around 1400.  Advocates of the early date must either re-date Hazor's fall or attribute it to someone else — which is the same class of move they criticise when Kenyon makes it at Jericho.

"Somebody burned it" is as far as the evidence goes on its own.  Ben-Tor's iconoclasm argument is a good one and Zuckerman's absence-of-weapons argument is a good one, and they point opposite ways.  Neither is decisive.  Ben-Tor's is an inference from motive;  Zuckerman's is an argument from silence in a burned and looted stratum where the absence of bodies and weapons has ordinary explanations.

Part 5 — The rest of the list

Joshua names thirty-one kings.  The sites where a Late Bronze answer is available look like this, and the picture is not favourable to a single dated campaign in either century:

• Jericho — destroyed and burned; date disputed, currently 1550–1525 on the excavators' radiocarbon.
• Ai (et-Tell) — no Late Bronze city. A nearby Late Bronze I fortress at Khirbet el-Maqatir was destroyed by fire.
• Hazor — destroyed and burned in the thirteenth century. Cause disputed.
• Lachish, Bethel, Debir — Late Bronze destructions exist, but at dates clustering in the late thirteenth and twelfth centuries, too late for 1400 and spread over too long a span for a single campaign.
• Gibeon, Arad, Heshbon, Dibon — the awkward ones. These are named in the narratives and, on published excavation, lack Late Bronze occupation altogether. Donald Redford's summary is the sharpest statement of the problem: "Sites such as Hormah, Arad, Jericho, 'Ai, and Jarmuth had indeed suffered violent destruction, but this had been during the Early Bronze Age or at the end of Middle Bronze … others such as Kadesh Barnea, Heshbon, and Gibeon were not to be settled until the Iron Age."⁵⁹

The conservative answer to the last group is that excavation is incomplete and that a named site may have been an unwalled settlement leaving little trace, or may be misidentified.  Kenneth Kitchen makes exactly this argument for Dibon, where he has a specific text to set against the dig — an Egyptian topographical list and relief of Ramesses II naming a place Dibon in Moab about 1270 — and concludes: "The archaeology is badly incomplete (as it currently stands), and stands supplemented and corrected by the texts, as in other clear cases (e.g., Jerusalem)."  Of Heshbon he grants that Tell Hesban "shows (at present) clear urban occupation from the twelfth century onward (Iron I, stratum 19), but not Late Bronze II before it."⁶⁰

Rate this carefully, because half of it is stronger than the other half.  At Dibon he is not arguing from silence;  he has a thirteenth-century Egyptian attestation of the toponym and is preferring it to an incomplete excavation, which is ordinary historical method.  At Heshbon he has no such text and the move really is an appeal to incompleteness.  And in both cases it is the same move the early-date camp refuses to accept from Kenyon at Jericho, where she also argued that the relevant remains had not survived.  Consistency here is rarer than it should be.

Common objections

"Kenyon proved the walls of Jericho did not fall."  She proved that no Late Bronze town wall survives at Jericho, and she attributed that to erosion, and she explicitly allowed that a Late Bronze wall may have existed and been lost.  Her published conclusion was that the excavation "has thrown no light" on the question, and that "as to what caused the walls to fall down flat, we have no factual evidence."³⁴  That is a null result, not a refutation.  The 2024 interim report has since identified Late Bronze I mudbrick fortification on top of the Cyclopean Wall.

"There are no destruction layers, so there was no conquest."  Joshua 11:13 says Israel burned exactly one of the tell cities, and Joshua 24:13 says Israel moved into cities it did not build.  The absence of widespread destruction is what the text predicts.

"But Jericho and Ai were burned, and neither fits."  This is the argument that survives, and it has force.  Jericho's burning is currently dated a century and a half before the early-date conquest and two and a half centuries before the late-date one.  Ai's has no site.  A defender of the historicity of Joshua has to answer this, and the available answers — redate the pottery, redate the period boundary, or relocate the site — have each been tried and none has carried the field.

"Radiocarbon settles it."  Not yet.  The published range from the best samples spans roughly 1600 to 1525 calBC at 1σ and reaches to 1531 at 2σ on the IntCal20 recalibration, and the original authors called the calibration provisional and asked for a regional curve.⁶  It is good enough to exclude 1230 and to weigh heavily against 1400.  It is not good enough to name a decade.

"Conservative archaeologists just move dates until they fit."  Sometimes.  Wood re-dated Jericho's pottery;  Bimson re-dated a whole period boundary;  ABR has relocated Ai twice and now relocates Bethel to make the second relocation work.  But the same is true in the other direction: Kenyon's 1550 date was not derived from Jericho at all, but from an assumed link to an Egyptian campaign whose own date has since moved forty years.⁶  The discipline is more fluid than either side's confidence implies.

"Hazor proves the conquest."  It proves a thirteenth-century burning.  Attribution is contested by the site's own co-director, and the date suits only one of the two conservative chronologies.

What would settle it

• A regional radiocarbon calibration curve for the eastern Mediterranean, which Bruins and van der Plicht asked for in 1995 and which would collapse the wiggle-induced ambiguity at Jericho. This is the single highest-value technical fix in the whole question.
• A dated destruction associated with the Late Bronze I wall at Jericho. Nigro's team has identified the wall. Burning, collapse direction, and short-lived samples from beneath the collapse would turn an interesting stratigraphic note into evidence.
• An inscription at Khirbet el-Maqatir, or anywhere, naming Ai or Bethel. The Ai problem is fundamentally a toponym problem and only a text can fix it.
• Publication of the 2019 et-Tell soundings. Titus Kennedy has reported Late Bronze pottery and a burn layer at et-Tell itself, which if it stands would reopen the traditional identification and make the Maqatir detour unnecessary. This project has found no peer-reviewed publication of that claim and treats it as unverified.
• Weapons or victims at Hazor, which would decide between Ben-Tor and Zuckerman.

Sources and further reading

The literature reviewed for this article, including sources considered and not used, is in literature-review.md.