The story of the excavation of Jericho, the site of Joshua's famous battle, has long symbolized the tensions that can arise between archaeological explorations and faithful readings of the Bible. The story begins at the dawn of the twentieth century, when some European scholars first undertook a formal scientific excavation of the site. Perhaps not surprisingly, the excavators initially dated a wall to Joshua's time, presumably expecting to find one because of the biblical account. Later, however, they revised their conclusions to reflect an earlier date for the wall.
It was an easy enough mistake to make, since the archaeology of the land of Israel was still a rising field in which new discoveries were constantly refining scholars' understanding of the dating and sequence of previous finds.
John Garstang, a British scholar, felt dissatisfied with the earliest excavators' failure to find the Jericho of Joshua's fame and revisited the site in the 1930s. He arrived during what became known as the "Golden Age of Biblical Archaeology," an era when the discipline grew exponentially in the breadth and depth of its knowledge. Excavators of the time are often described as having had "a spade in one hand and a Bible in the other." While these archaeologists tried to maintain a scientific stance, their Christian convictions often remained visible behind their archaeological interests. Even so, in his 1940 book The Story of Jericho, Garstang saves the topic of Joshua's Jericho for the seventh of his eight chapters (though realistically, he anticipates that the reader has only been wading through the previous chapters to reach this one). Here Garstang details his successful discovery of the remains of city walls dating to the time of Joshua's conquest and, not only that, but fallen city walls, just as in the biblical story! Although Garstang assumes an interest in the biblical account, he believes that his discovery rests on pure science. In fact, he takes at least as much interest in trying to establish a nonmiraculous cause for the fall of Jericho's walls as he does in matching the archaeological evidence to the biblical account. These divided loyalties embody the peculiar admixture of biblical affirmation and archaeological "science" that characterized the archaeology of Palestine in Garstang's day, as the phrase "biblical archaeology" suggests.
Jericho would only briefly fill this role in the popular imagination, though, before further refinements in archaeological technique would reverse Garstang's findings. Jericho's next key excavator was Kathleen Kenyon, one of the developers of an excavation method that went on to become the new standard for archaeologists in Israel. This method was particularly suited to the archaeological sites of the biblical lands, which often consist of layers of successive occupation built one upon another. Over time, the accumulated ruins form a mound, with the most recent level of occupation at the top and the oldest at the bottom. Kenyon's method involves systematically excavating squares laid out on a grid, leaving a "wall" of soil remaining between each square. In this way, a cross-section of the layers of occupation in each square can be viewed in the "walls," and the findings in each square can be related to these various layers.
The way the story is often told, it seems that Kenyon approached Jericho with a much looser view of the Bible's relationship with historical fact than did Garstang. Surprisingly, then, her 1957 book Digging Up Jericho seemed more comfortable speaking about Jericho's biblical connections than Garstang's did’picturing the Patriarchs strolling past the mound during their travels’even as she eschews a "literal" historical reading of biblical accounts. Her redating of Joshua's wall appears to owe less to inherent bias than to a find that is basic, ubiquitous, and vital to chronology in the archaeology of the Middle East: pottery. That's right’broken pottery is strewn everywhere across Israel's archaeological sites, and in some sense, it's the most mundane find possible. Within its original context, however, it will often be the key to dating an occupational layer. That's what happened in Kenyon's case. In the years between Garstang and Kenyon, the publication of evidence from additional sites had refined the ability of archaeologists to date layers of a site's occupation by their association with specific types of pottery. In this way, Kenyon determined that "Joshua's wall" as identified by Garstang had been destroyed at least a hundred years before Joshua ever entered Canaan. Evidence of a later wall may once have existed at the site, she concluded, but severe erosion had eroded away any trace of it. Various hypotheses have arisen since her time to explain the wall's absence, generally proposing that the city of Joshua's time reused earlier fortifications. Both confirmations and revisions of Kenyon's date for the wall have been offered as recently as the mid-1990s. Kenyon's verdict remains, in any case, the baseline of archaeological opinion, and no alternative theory has been securely established.
But I have good news for you, faithful readers of the Bible. It's not that material evidence doesn't matter for our understanding of God's Word. It's that material evidence can't serve as our basis for knowing God. Archaeology will never furnish proof of the Bible's inspiration or authority for its readers, because that is the wrong thing to ask of it. Indeed, as John Calvin affirms, we lack any need to find "rational proof" outside of Scripture to demonstrate that God speaks therein. Rather, it is the "testimony of the Spirit" that provides this proof, for "God alone is a fit witness of himself in his Word" (Institutes 1:7:4). And thank goodness for that, since our understanding of archaeological discoveries is always changing and open to revision as new finds are made. We can appreciate the dynamism and excitement of discoveries about life in ancient Israel even as we retain our confidence that God's speech in Scripture does not depend upon pottery sequencing and reliable archaeological data.
While we acknowledge that the stories in the book of Joshua depict apparently historical people and places, we must resist the pressure to "get behind" the biblical text and reconstruct the historical details of biblical events. For it is not by a scholarly reconstruction of "behind-the-text" history that God speaks, but by the biblical text itself. We live in the "meanwhile," when much has yet to be understood, discovered, even conceived of. In this "meanwhile," we sometimes must be content with our inability to see how certain stories in the Bible match up with what archaeologists find in the ground.
We must keep our focus on the biblical story that unfolds before us’a story that primarily aims to teach us about God's action on behalf of Israel and Israel's response to God. A quirk of erosion doesn't change that. The book of Joshua depicts a complex interplay between God's gift of the land of Canaan and Israel's obedient response in receiving this gift, not just an account of Israelite warfare. Battles occur, yes’but only occasionally and set in an expansive context of iterations of the importance of the Book of the Law, ceremonial actions, moments of hesitation, ethical dilemmas, and exhortations to obedience. In fact, I've argued recently that the main message of the book of Joshua is summarized in a statement near its end, that "Israel served the Lord during all the days of Joshua" (Josh. 24:31). This statement requires the reader to puzzle through how Israel ends up as obedient in each dilemma it faces in the book of Joshua, thereby schooling the reader in obedience as well. Although we don't at this point have certainty about exactly how the archaeology of Jericho corresponds with the book of Joshua, for those whose ears are open, God's call upon us through this book remains as clear as it ever has been.
