2.3 The Exodus and Conquest

I have heard it suggested that there because there is no evidence of a large exodus from Egypt it doesn't follow that there wasn't one. When this suggestion was first made perhaps there wasn't any evidence, but these days there is a lot of evidence for how the Israelites came into being and it runs counter to the Biblical account.

Archaeologists who want to discover how the people currently known as the Israelites first emerged no longer look to Egypt for their roots. They have also concluded that the traditional early date for the exodus of around 1450 BC can not be correct as too much counter evidence is now known about that period. So they look to a date more like 1250 BC as a better setting for the beginnings of Israel. With this background I have included below the current thoughts of some reputable archaeologists.

The three quotes below are in chronological order of writing, starting with one from Dever who is a “moderate” and was Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Arizona until 2002 when he retired. The second is from Lawrence who studied Akkadian, Hebrew and Near Eastern Archaeology at the University of Liverpool graduating in 1982 before going on to do a PhD on Assyrian Generals. I’m not sure of his ideology but I suggest it’s sympathetic to the Bible as he is writing in The Lion Atlas of Bible History. The most recent is from the Biblical “maximalist” Hoffmeier who is Professor of Old Testament and Ancient Near Eastern History and Archaeology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

So here are the quotes from their books:

Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? (William G Dever), 2003, p45
Another crushing blow to the conquest model came from the excavations of the great British archaeologist Dame Kathleen Kenyon at Jericho between 1955 and 1958. Another British archaeologist, John Garstang, had already dug there in the 1920s, sponsored by an evangelical foundation, the Wellcome-Marston Trust. He brought to light massive destruction of mud brick city walls that he confidently dated to the 15th century BC. As a result, he announced triumphantly that he had found the very walls that Joshua and his men had brought tumbling down (dating the Exodus, of course, ca. 1446 BC, as was fashionable at the time). 

Kenyon, however, equipped with far superior modern methods, and proclaiming herself unencumbered by any “biblical baggage” (so she once told me in Jerusalem), proved that while this destruction indeed dated to ca. 1500 BC, it was part of the now well-attested Egyptian campaigns in the course of expelling the Asiatic “Hyksos” from Egypt at the beginning of the 18th Dynasty. Moreover, Kenyon showed beyond doubt that in the mid-late 13th century BC – the time period now required for any Israelite “conquest” – Jericho lay completely abandoned. There is not so much as a Late Bronze II potsherd of that period on the entire site. This seems a blow to the biblical account indeed. (Nevertheless, I always reassure those who need it that here we have a stupendous “miracle”: Joshua destroyed a site that was not even there!). Even Kenyon searched for an answer; she suggested perhaps later erosion had removed all traces of the Israelite “destruction layer”. But regardless of possible explanations, no trace remains of Late Bronze Age II occupation. Nor is there any other possible candidate for biblical Jericho anywhere nearby in the sparsely settled lower Jordan Valley. Simply put, archaeology tells us that the biblical story of the fall of Jericho, miraculous elements aside, cannot have been founded on genuine historical sources. It seems invented out of whole cloth.

The Lion Atlas of Bible History (Paul Lawrence), 2006, p48

Jericho: A key Site 

When the British archaeologist John Garstang excavated Jericho (Tell es-Sultan) between 1930 and 1936 and found evidence of the whole city having been destroyed by fire, and part of the city having fallen in an earthquake, it seemed there was conclusive evidence in favour of the earlier placement c. 1400 BC. However, when another British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon, recommenced excavations at Jericho between 1952 and 1958, she showed that Garstang’s dating of City IV at Jericho (the so-called Middle bronze city) to c. 1400 BC was in fact to be dated to c. 1550 BC. Historically, this action was linked to the Egyptian war of retaliation against the expelled Hyksos, not to Joshua’s armies. Attempts have been made to lower this 1550 BC date to c. 1400 BC, but they have not met with widespread acceptance. The problem has to be faced that there is little archaeological evidence for the Israelite conquest of Jericho either in the c. 1400 BC Late Bronze IB placement or the c. 1230 BC Late Bronze IIB placement.

The Archaeology of the Bible (James K Hoffmeier), 2008, p65 

Sothern Canaan: Was there a Conquest?

The first place the Bible claims Israel attacked was Jericho, located just north of the Dead Sea, and less than 5 mile (8 km) west of the Jordan River. Because the Joshua narratives give such a vivid description of the defeat of this city, along with its toppled walls, there has long been interest in excavating this site. Indeed, Tell es-Sultan was identified as Jericho early in the history of archaeology and was first excavated by Captain Charles Warren in 1868 – and by many others thereafter, as its sacred surface attests. The excavations of John Garstang (1876 to 1956), a professor from the University of Liverpool, between 1930 and 1936 initially offered great hope for the reality of the conquest as he uncovered a severely demolished and burnt city, with a section of mud brick wall that appeared to have been toppled. Garstang, no conservative Biblicist, maintained that the destroyed layer, known as City IV, was demolished and burnt around 1400BC by Joshua and the Israelites. This dating would accommodate nicely the 1447 BC exodus date, followed by 40 years in the wilderness. For the next twenty years Garstang’s interpretation held sway, until Kathleen Kenyon returned to undertake further excavations at Tell es-Sultan. From 1952 to 1956 she excavated using her more precise methods. The results led her to redate the destruction of City IV to around 1550 BC, that is, the end of the Middle Bronze Age. Kenyon assigned the destruction to Egyptian activity associated with the expulsion of the Hyksos and the beginnings of Egypt’s hegemony over the region. After its destruction, this city was unoccupied for several centuries, and then reoccupied briefly during the Late Bronze Age (thirteenth century). It was not fully built up as a city till the beginning of the ninth century BC. This occupational history, however, posed problems for a conquest date around 1400 BC.

Admittedly Jericho is only one element of the exodus and conquest story, but the further you get into this the more it unravels from a Biblical perspective. The evidence from archaeologists digging in Israel has conclusively shown that there was no 'conquest' in the biblical sense. Rather the Israelite material culture grew out of the surrounding Canaanite material culture, i.e. the Israelites were largely the descendants of Canaanites, perhaps with some nomadic Bedouin's settling down to become pastoralist thrown in for good measure.

So what do we make of the Biblical tradition. For what it's worth, my thoughts are that there was an oral tradition that harked back to the time that the Hyksos were expelled from Egypt that had been shaped over the centuries into a mythical recollection that became the origin of our Exodus story. That's not to say that the event was the Exodus, just that the memory of the event was told as an exodus.

I'd also like to comment about Biblical formation and consistency while we are considering Jericho. Many Christadelphians know that when Jericho falls in the Bible record Joshua put a curse on the one who would rebuild it in Joshua 6:26 and that this came true in 1 Kings 16:34. At first sight this seems remarkable until you discover that both these books were written by the same individual or group (see Deuteronomic History) and it is easy to write this type of occurrence into you own work. Further the Bible tells us in 2 Samuel 10:5 that David told a group of humiliated messengers to stay in Jericho, while it didn't exist, to wait for their beards to grow back. One wonders where they stayed since Jericho was apparently not inhabited at that time.

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