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Site Excavation

Walls of Jericho Stratigraphy

At Tell es-Sultan the mudbrick city wall collapsed outward into a climbable ramp at the foot of its stone revetment, the city burned under three feet of debris, and the storage jars were still full of grain — a city taken fast, just after harvest, and not plundered. Bryant Wood's 1990 re-reading of the pottery, the scarabs and a radiocarbon date puts that destruction near 1400 BC; Kathleen Kenyon put it near 1550.

medium confidenceArchaeological

THE CLAIM

Bryant Wood's 1990 re-reading of the pottery

  1. 1The mudbrick wall collapsed outwardArtifact
  2. 2Storage jars were still full of grainThe record
  3. 3The burn layer reaches three feet thickArtifact
  4. 4Bryant WoodArtifact
  5. 5The stored grain also dates the fallThe record
  6. 6Sellin and Watzinger found thin-walled houses builtArtifact

WHERE IT STANDS

How far this gets

medium confidence
Excavated city wall at Tell es-Sultan (Jericho), photographed by the American Colony, with the Mount of Temptation behind.
Excavated city wall at Tell es-Sultan (Jericho), photographed by the American Colony, with the Mount of Temptation behind.Matson Collection · Public domain

The span, dated

  1. c. 1400 BC

    Joshua 6: seven days, then the wall

    1 Kings 6:1 counts 480 years from the Exodus to Solomon's fourth year, placing the conquest here. The people go up “every man straight before him,” burn the city, and are forbidden the spoil on pain of death.

  2. 1907-11

    Houses on the wall

    Sellin and Watzinger find thin-walled houses built against the inside of the stone revetment on the lower rampart — the arrangement Joshua 2:15 gives Rahab.

  3. 1930-36

    Garstang digs City IV

    Fallen red mudbrick heaped outside the revetment into a climbable ramp; a burn layer up to three feet thick; storage jars still full of grain.

  4. 1952-58

    Kenyon dates the fall to c. 1550 BC

    Her verdict rests on what she did not find — no imported Cypriot bichrome ware in two 26-foot squares dug in a poor quarter. Her own sections show the collapsed brick and the burnt debris.

  5. 1990

    Wood re-reads the evidence

    In Biblical Archaeology Review: Garstang's fifteenth-century painted pottery, a run of royal-name scarabs down through Amenhotep III, and a charcoal date of 1410 BC ± 40.

  6. 1995

    The counter-series

    Bruins and van der Plicht publish eighteen high-precision radiocarbon determinations in Radiocarbon, six on short-lived charred grain from the burn layer; the grain average calibrates near 1562 BC.

  7. Today

    Live, technical, unresolved

    The majority still follows Kenyon. Not in dispute: the city was violently destroyed and burned, at harvest, with its grain still in the jars — which is not what a starvation siege leaves behind.

Sources: Wood, BAR 16:2 (1990) with Bienkowski's reply; Bruins & van der Plicht, Radiocarbon 37 (1995); Kenyon, Excavations at Jericho.

THE EVIDENCE

The mound

Tell es-Sultan sits beside the spring of Ain es-Sultan, a mile from modern Jericho, and has been dug for more than a century: Charles Warren in 1868, Ernst Sellin and Carl Watzinger from 1907 to 1911, John Garstang from 1930 to 1936, Kathleen Kenyon from 1952 to 1958, and an Italian-Palestinian expedition under Nigro and Marchetti from 1997.

The layer everyone argues about is Garstang's "City IV" — the last fortified Bronze Age town on the mound.

THE EVIDENCE

What the ground shows

The defences were a two-part system: a stone revetment wall retaining a steep earthen rampart, with a mudbrick wall standing on the crest above it.

Kenyon's own section drawings show a heavy fill of fallen red mudbrick piled against the outside of the revetment, nearly to its top. The brick came from the wall above. Collapsed that way, it forms a ramp an attacker could walk up.

The destruction was total. Kenyon described walls and floors blackened or reddened by fire, every room filled with fallen brick, timber and household goods, the debris in most rooms heavily burnt. The burn layer runs up to three feet thick.

The grain

Then the detail that does not fit a siege. Both Garstang and Kenyon found storage jars still full of grain; Kenyon recovered six bushels in a single season from a small excavation area.

Cities that fall to long sieges are starved out first, and victorious armies carry off the food. Here the harvest had just come in, the city fell quickly, and nobody took the grain.

The biblical profile

Joshua 6 describes a seven-day operation, not a starvation siege. The wall "fell down flat" and the people "went up into the city, every man straight before him" (Joshua 6:20) — up, over a collapse. They burnt the city with fire (6:24).

Everything in it was devoted to the LORD and taking spoil was forbidden on pain of death (6:17-19) — a rule Achan's theft in the next chapter proves was real.

The crossing came at flood stage "in the time of harvest" (Joshua 3:15) and Passover was kept at Gilgal (5:10): spring, just after the barley harvest. Rahab's house was built into the wall (Joshua 2:15), and Sellin and Watzinger found thin-walled houses built against the inside of the revetment on the lower rampart.

THE DATE — WOOD'S CASE

Kenyon dated City IV's fall to about 1550 BC, and she dated it by what she did not find: no imported Cypriot bichrome ware in her trenches. Bryant Wood's 1990 re-examination in Biblical Archaeology Review pressed four points.

Her trenches were two 26-foot squares in a poor quarter, where imported luxury ware would not be expected in the first place. Garstang, digging elsewhere on the mound, recovered red-and-black painted pottery of the sort current in the fifteenth century. The cemetery northwest of the tell yielded a continuous run of Egyptian scarabs from the Thirteenth Dynasty down through royal-name scarabs of Hatshepsut, Thutmose III and Amenhotep III — into the fourteenth century, long after 1550.

And a charcoal sample from the destruction debris returned a radiocarbon date of 1410 BC, give or take forty years.

Why it matters

1 Kings 6:1 dates the Exodus 480 years before the fourth year of Solomon, which places the conquest around 1400 BC. If Wood's reading of City IV stands, the archaeological signature of that Jericho — wall collapsed outward into a ramp, total burn, unplundered grain, spring destruction, houses on the wall — matches Joshua 6 point for point.

That is not a general claim that the Bible is historical. It is a convergence of independent details that were not selected to agree.

WHERE IT STANDS

Where scholarship stands

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The majority position remains Kenyon's. Piotr Bienkowski answered Wood in the same year's BAR and Wood replied in turn. In 1995 Hendrik Bruins and Johannes van der Plicht published eighteen high-precision radiocarbon determinations in the journal Radiocarbon, six of them on short-lived charred cereal grain from the burn layer; the grain average calibrated near 1562 BC, and they concluded the city was not destroyed around 1400.

Wood's defenders press the discrepancy between the grain and charcoal series and the provenance of the Kenyon-era samples. The debate is live, technical and unresolved. What is not in dispute is that the city was violently destroyed and burned, with its grain still in the jars.

6 pieces of evidence

What this establishes

  1. 01Artifact

    The mudbrick wall collapsed outward, piling against the stone revetment into a climbable ramp — matching Joshua 6:20, "the people went up into the city, every man straight before him."

  2. 02The record

    Storage jars were still full of grain — Kenyon recovered six bushels in one season — indicating a short assault right after harvest with no plunder taken, exactly the ban of Joshua 6:17-19.

  3. 03Artifact

    The burn layer reaches three feet thick, with blackened walls and charred timbers: "they burnt the city with fire" (Joshua 6:24).

  4. 04Artifact

    Bryant Wood (BAR 16:2, 1990) redates the destruction to about 1400 BC on local painted pottery, a cemetery scarab series running through Amenhotep III, and a charcoal date of 1410 ± 40 BC.

  5. 05The record

    The stored grain also dates the fall to spring, just after harvest — where Joshua puts it, at Jordan flood stage and Passover.

  6. 06Artifact

    Sellin and Watzinger found thin-walled houses built against the inside of the revetment — the kind of dwelling Joshua 2:15 describes for Rahab, "her house was upon the side of the wall."

7 passages

Key verses

Berean Standard Bible

THE RECEIPTS

Sources

◈Contested pointscontested
  • Kathleen Kenyon's stratigraphic excavation (1952-1958) dated City IV's destruction to about 1550 BC, the end of the Middle Bronze Age, and found essentially no Late Bronze occupation around 1400 — on her reading there was no walled Jericho for Joshua to take.
  • Bruins and van der Plicht (Radiocarbon 37, 1995) dated eighteen samples from the destruction, including six of short-lived charred cereal grain; the grain averaged about 1562 BC and they concluded explicitly that the city was not destroyed by 1400 BC.
  • Piotr Bienkowski (BAR 16:5, 1990) argued that Wood misreads the ceramic sequence and that the pottery Wood assigns to Late Bronze I is Middle Bronze.
  • Wood's 1410 ± 40 BC figure rests on a single charcoal sample; one determination cannot outweigh a series, and charcoal carries an old-wood bias that pushes dates earlier, not later.
  • On the mainstream thirteenth-century Exodus chronology the conquest is decoupled from City IV altogether, and the correspondence with Joshua 6 becomes a coincidence of destruction patterns common to burned Bronze Age towns.