The Conquest Defeated

Biblical archaeology began about 150 years ago with the goal of proving the veracity of the biblical stories. The adage is that these early pioneering scholars had the Bible in one hand and a spade in the other. And the early discoveries indeed seemed to verify events described in the Bible. But as a fuller picture emerged, confidence in the Bible as a reliable guide to history was shaken to its foundations.

Digging up the Past

Let’s begin with a brief lesson on how the science of archaeology works. In ancient times, when a city was rebuilt after having been destroyed by war or natural disaster, the inhabitants would construct new buildings atop the ruins of the old. Over time, these layers would build up into something resembling an artificial hill. Scientists realized they could dig down through the layers and, the deeper they dug, the further back in time they could go.

What the archaeologists lacked, however, were the proper reference points. For example, they could identify the various levels – or strata – of the ruins of a city, but unless they had inscriptions or texts that were datable, they would have no idea how much time passed between the city in level 2 and the one in level 3. The invention of radiocarbon dating provided a method for establishing a fixed date, but it required finding organic material like wood or grain.

The major breakthrough was the discovery that pottery provided a fairly accurate clock for establishing dates. Unlike inscriptions or organic material, pottery fragments were plentiful at excavation sites. Scientists were able to create a relative sequence of pottery styles from oldest to youngest and then plug in any absolute dates provided by radiocarbon testing of organic material. Since pottery styles changed frequently enough, a well-trained archaeologist could identify the date of any strata based on the pot shards found within it.

The Missing Conquest

Naturally, the first sites to be excavated were cities mentioned in the Bible, cities like Megiddo, Shechem, and Jericho. Jericho is well-known from the Book of Joshua where, forty years after the exodus, Joshua led the Israelites in a systematic campaign of genocide against the Canaanites. First on their list of conquests was the walled city of Jericho (Joshua 6) where, after the walls came down, the entire population was put to the sword and the city destroyed. This was followed by the destruction of the city of Ai (Joshua 7-8). Seeing what happened at Jericho and Ai, the people of Gibeon made a treaty with the Israelites (Joshua 9) to avoid the destruction of their town.

Digging at ancient Jericho in the 1930s, John Garstang found destroyed mudbrick city walls that he attributed to the battle mentioned in the Book of Joshua. He dated the level to 1400 BCE, fifty years or so after the traditional date for the exodus.

In the 1950s Kathleen Kenyon re-visited the site with more refined techniques and was able to date the destruction of Garstang’s wall to 1560 BCE, a century and a half earlier. Not only that, but she discovered that the city had remained unoccupied for several centuries after its destruction. Not only was Jericho unoccupied during the traditional 15th century date for the exodus and conquest, but also for the currently accepted 13th century date as well.

Kathleen Kenyon discovered the remains of 23 cities at Jericho, the earliest dating back to the 8^th millennium BCE, making Jericho the oldest city in the world. At the 9000-year old stratum, Kenyon unearthed this circular tower built of stone and mud. (Photo by author, 1993)

Jericho is not the only such case. Archaeological evidence at the site of Ai shows that it was unoccupied from the 15th century BCE to the 12th. At Gibeon, no remains at the site were found earlier than the 8th century BCE. In short, at Ai there was no occupied city in the 13th century for Joshua to destroy and at Gibeon no city had yet been built to surrender to Joshua.

And on it goes. Joshua 12 lists the kings of 31 cities defeated by the invading Israelites. With only a few exceptions (e.g., Hazor, Bethel), the cities were either not occupied or not destroyed in the 13th century. Of the few cities that were destroyed, there is no evidence of who destroyed the city.

The Israelites were Canaanites

Just as we saw with the exodus, the scientific data does not square with the biblical accounts. But whereas with the exodus the problem primarily was the absence of evidence supporting the Bible, in the case of the conquest of Canaan, the evidence contradicts the Bible.

Indeed, the Bible itself is inconsistent when it comes to the conquest. For example, Joshua 12:10 says the king of Jerusalem was defeated by Joshua and the Israelites. But the Book of Judges begins with the death of Joshua and describes how the people of Judah fought against Jerusalem and took the city (Judges 1:8). Then again, 2 Sam 5:6-9 describes how David took the city of Jerusalem from the Jebusites. The Bible provides three different stories naming three different conquerors of the same city.

The traditional “conquest” model as portrayed in the Book of Joshua has been dismissed by all but fundamentalists. What, then, can archaeology tell us about the formation of Israel?

The facts on (and underneath) the ground show rapidly-growing communities in the hill country during the 13th to 12th centuries. The material culture (architecture, pottery, etc.) of these open villages were in continuity with the Canaanite material culture of the walled cities of the lowlands. The Hebrew language is essentially a Canaanite dialect and worship of Canaanite gods continued for centuries in Israel. Had an invading people defeated and supplanted the indigenous one, you would expect to see a sharp break in the culture from what went before. Also, you would expect the invaders to take the best lands in the lowlands, not the poorer land of the hill country.

The prevailing explanation today is that the early Israelites were Canaanites who had resettled from the lowland cities to the rural highlands. Archaeology can’t provide the reason for the move – perhaps to escape warfare or high taxation – but the theory does explain the continuity of architecture, pottery, language, religion, etc. If the refugees fled the cities for political or economic reasons (the kings seizing the resources of the poor), it could explain the strong resistance to a king cited in biblical passages such as 1 Sam 8:10-18.

Perhaps at some point, a group of migrants settled in the area, bringing with them their story of having escaped persecution in Egypt and their worship of the god Yahweh as well. The origin story and religion slowly caught on, providing a national identity to a people who became known as Israel. We’ll go into this theory in more detail in the next article.

Absence of Exodus

The one event from the Bible for which we should be able to find ample evidence in extra-biblical sources is the exodus from Egypt. According to the biblical account, various plagues wracked the nation of Egypt over the course of several months. This was then followed by the exit of 600,000 men and their families (estimated population of over 2 million) from Egypt. When the pharaoh attempted to stop them with a squadron of 600 chariots, they were drowned in the Red Sea. The 2 million people wandered the desert for 40 years before finally settling in the land of Canaan after defeating the indigenous population in a series of battles.

Surely, events on such a scale should have left a record in either Egyptian texts or archaeological strata that would allow us to assign them to an appropriate point in world history.

Getting the Date Right

According to the Bible (1 Kgs 6:1), work on Solomon’s Temple began in the 480th year since the Exodus. Since we know that date with some degree of confidence, a simple calculation would give us 1447 BCE for the date of the exodus. But that places the exodus during the reign of Thutmose III when Egypt was at the height of its powers and Canaan was firmly under his control. Egypt’s power over Canaan only began to weaken in the 13th century BCE.

The Bible also provides a clue that suggests the 15th century is not the right era. Ex 1:11 reports that the enslaved Hebrews were forced to construct the supply cities of “Pithom and Rameses.” Most experts identify the biblical city of “Rameses” as the old Hyksos capital of Avaris (modern-day Tell ed-Dab’a). The city was destroyed in 1530 BCE and long abandoned until it was rebuilt as the royal city of Pi-ramesse during the reign of Ramesses II (1279-1213 BCE). The construction referenced in Ex 1:11, therefore, could only have taken place in the 13th century.

We also can’t look at Egypt in isolation, but have to consider what happened in Canaan once the Israelites arrive. All the experts agree that a major break in the archaeological record indicating a shift from an urban “Canaanite” to a rural “Israelite” culture occurred at the end of the Bronze Age, ca. 1250-1150 BCE. If a large number of people suddenly settled in Canaan from elsewhere, it could only have happened in this period.

Therefore, the mid-13th century is the era in which we need to situate the biblical stories of exodus.

Missing Evidence

We can’t quite yet call it a day, though. The big events recounted in the Book of Exodus should have left plenty of evidence in both the written and in the archaeological record, but many have searched and found nothing. There are no Egyptian records of a series of plagues that would surely have destroyed the economy and killed thousands. No records of a mass migration of 2 million former slave workers. No record of a major military defeat in a freak tidal wave.

The typical counter-argument is that Egyptians do not record their defeats. True, Egyptians did put a positive spin on things, but we don’t see that, either. Where are the boasts of a pharaoh who forcefully expelled troublesome aliens from his land or bravely rescued his soldiers from a flood? Sure, there could have been Egyptian texts or inscriptions that did not survive, but we have to make judgments based on the evidence we do have.

And there’s no archaeological evidence of the desert wanderings, either. Two million people could not have passed through the Sinai desert and left behind no evidence behind. It’s certainly not because people weren’t motivated to look or looked in the wrong places. Any discoverers of sunken Egyptian chariots or ruins of ancient Israelite desert encampments would have their names written in the history books, but alas! At some point you have to admit that nothing has been found because there’s nothing there to find.

The First Thanksgiving 1621 by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris (1899) shows many common misconceptions such as the outfits worn by the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag.

Where Does That Leave Us?

While many scholars believe the exodus story was invented by the Israelites as their own rags-to-riches tale, there are some biblical clues that some portion of Israel recalled once having lived in Egypt. For example, several of the individuals named in the biblical story of the exodus – Moses, Hophni, Hur, Phinehas – have Egyptian names. The description of the Tabernacle (or Tent of Meeting) has architectural parallels with the war tent of Ramesses II and the Ark of the Covenant has parallels with ritual Egyptian barks. (I hope to go into more detail on this in a future article.) These details could have been invented hundreds of years later to provide Egyptian color to the story, but they could also be relics of memories handed down for hundreds of years.

The prophet Amos wrote in the 8th century BCE, “Did I not bring Israel up from the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor?” (Amos 9:7) Caphtor is the area of Cypress and Crete and historians agree that the Philistines did arrive in Canaan from there in the 12th century BCE. If Amos knew where Philistines originated 400 years previously, why would we not expect him to know the origins of his own people?

It is not inconceivable that a relatively small group of Semite immigrants left Egypt during the time of Ramesses and settled in the hill country of Canaan, bringing with them tales of having once lived as strangers in an alien land. We would not expect Egyptians to record the departure of a small group nor would we find traces of them in the desert unless we knew exactly where to look. No plagues, no miracle of the sea, just one of many quiet migrations in and out of Egypt.

But if this theory is true, then only a fraction of the people who became Israel would be able to trace their story back to Egypt. How did the entire nation of Israel come to see themselves as having been brought up from the land of Egypt?

Americans can look to Thanksgiving as an example. While very few Americans can trace their ancestry back to one of the 102 passengers on the Mayflower, we teach our children the story of Pilgrims sharing food with Native Americans every Thanksgiving as though it were our story. The Pilgrims’ desire to flee religious persecution in Europe became a central theme in American history and culture.

And what happened once the Egyptian pilgrims arrived in their promised land? We’ll look at the stories of the conquest of Canaan in my next article.

Biblical Dating

No, this article is not about whether or not the Bible says it’s okay to kiss on the first date. (But there will be some discussion of begetting.) Mainly, we’re going to talk about how can we assign a date to events reported in the Bible and if the relative chronology provided by the Scriptures is reliable.

When Was Christ Born?

In my last article I discussed how, in the 17th century, Archbishop James Ussher of Ireland used time indicators in the Bible to develop a biblical chronology covering 4000 years from the creation of the world to the birth of Jesus. Following the thinking of the time, he placed the birth of Jesus in the year 4 BC. How could Jesus be born 4 years “Before Christ”?

Back in antiquity, years were counted from the beginning of the reign of a monarch (e.g., the 15th year of Tiberius Caesar) or some other notable event (e.g., the founding of Rome). In the 6th century CE, a monk named Dionysius Exiguus (Latin for “Dionysius the Humble”) decided that we should count the years from Christ’s birth, not from the reign of the 3rd-century Roman Emperor Diocletian who had been a notorious persecutor of Christians. Therefore, he reckoned years should be dated either “before Christ” or “years of our Lord” (in Latin, anno domini). (There is no Year 0 and his calendar goes from 1 BC to AD 1.)

The problem is that Dionysius didn’t get the year of Christ’s birth right. Matt 2:1 and Luke 1:5 both agree that Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great. Dionysius thought that Herod died 754 years after the founding of Rome (AUC, for ab urbe condita, from the founding of the city), but Herod died in 750 AUC. This mistake was known in Ussher’s day and their best guess was that Jesus was therefore born in 4 BCE. Historians today would estimate that Jesus was born a few years before  the death of Herod (e.g., 7-6 BCE).

It's a well-known fact that back in the 50s, guys could only afford one milkshake.

It’s Written in the Stars

All of which raises the question: How we can date any event in the past to any degree of accuracy? Occasionally, we get lucky. The Babylonians, for example, not only recorded the reigns of kings and dates of battles, but they also recorded astronomical observations. On one astronomical diary for the 37th regnal year of Nebuchadnezzar, there are about thirty precise observations of the moon and planets that allow astronomers to determine the 37th regnal year ran from March/April 568 to March/April 567 BCE. Such dates are called “absolute dates” because we know with mathematical precision when they occurred on our BCE/CE calendar.

From such absolute dates, the relative dates in a chronology can be assigned. For example, with the 37th year of Nebuchadnezzar fixed as an absolute date, it can be easily calculated that his 18th year, during which he destroyed Jerusalem and Solomon’s Temple was 587/586 BCE. With absolute dates, the entire Babylonian chronology can be recreated. And the same can be done using data from the records of other cultures.

Then, by cross-checking events mentioned in the biblical Books of Kings with known dates in the chronologies of Assyria, Babylonia, and other surrounding kingdoms, scholars can establish with some degree of confidence that the Divided Monarchy (Israel in the north, Judah in the south) began with the death of Solomon in 931/930 BCE.

But that’s the end of the road because if we try to push back before the time of Solomon, it becomes increasingly difficult to find synchronisms between the Bible and historical records from the surrounding nations. We’re left with only the witness of the Bible and its authors were not trying to document events with historical accuracy.

The Lost Generations 

As we saw in my previous article, the Bible records the Exodus occurred after the Israelites had lived 430 years (to the day!) in Egypt. Solomon began construction on the Temple in the 480th year since the Exodus. That’s 910 years to account for. Yet when we look at genealogical lists such as Ruth 4:18-22, there are simply not enough generations.

Gen 46:12 says that Judah, his son Perez, and his grandson Hezron were 3 of the 70 members of Jacob’s family who went down to Egypt. An adult Nahshon was a chieftan of the tribe of Judah (Num 2:3; 7:12) during the desert wanderings. Over 400 years separate Hezron from Nahshon, but only 3 generations.

It’s even crazier for Moses. According to Gen 46:11, Levi and his son Kohath migrated to Egypt with Jacob. But according to Ex 6:18-20, Kohath was Moses’ grandfather and lived to be 133. Amram, Moses’s father, died at age 137. Adding these two ages gives you 270 years. Even if they both fathered children on their deathbed, that’s not enough time to have an 80-year old Moses at the time of the Exodus.

I was curious how fundamentalists handle this and one such solution is the same as that used by Archbishop Ussher: follow the LXX which says the 430 years covers the time the Israelites spent in both Canaan as well as Egypt. This drops the time the Israelites spent solely in Egypt to 215 years and reduces the gap between Moses and his grandfather to a mere 135 years.

This still leaves 480 years from the time of Nahshon to the time of Solomon and only 6 generations separating them. Did each man father his son at the age of 80? Interestingly, 1 Chr 6:3-8 records 10 generations from Aaron (Moses’ brother and brother-in-law of Nahshon) to Zadok (priest of Jerusalem at the time of Solomon). Ten generations covering the same timespan in one genealogy as six generations in a different genealogy suggests that some intermediate ancestors were lost or one (or both) are both fictional.

An Unreliable Witness

Despite the earnest desires of biblical literalists, the time indicators in Scripture are not salvageable as historical data any earlier than the 10th century BCE. And it’s not just the dates but the events themselves. While there are a couple of mentions in extra-biblical inscriptions to a “house of David,” there are no references to a King David or a King Solomon outside of those in the Bible. There are no mentions in Egyptian chronicles of plagues or a mass exodus of Hebrew slaves. Archaeological evidence does not support the conquest story described in the Book of Joshua. All of this leads scholars to question whether any of the events described prior to the Divided Monarchy happened at all.

We will explore these topics further in my next article.