By Will Hall, Baptist Message executive editor
ALEXANDRIA, La. (LBM) – Jericho is significant to the trustworthiness of Scripture because its existence is tied to key historical events documented in both the Old and New Testaments.
BIBLICAL CORNERSTONE
In Jericho Jesus continued his mission to “seek and save that which is lost” (Luke 19:10) with his encounter with Zacchaeus. During the same visit to the city, He healed two blind beggars, including Bartimaeus, on His way to Jerusalem and the cross.
Meanwhile, Jesus cited the Jericho Road as the setting for His “Parable of the Good Samaritan.”
Moreover, Jericho is mentioned in what is known as the “Roll Call of Faith” because “By faith the walls of Jericho fell” (Hebrews 11:30).
Jericho also was a key location for events in the Old Testament such as Elijah’s miraculous whisking up to Heaven in a chariot of fire and the first miracle by Elisha, upon succeeding Elijah, when he healed the city’s “bad water” (II Kings 2).
But perhaps the city is most well-known for the victory God wrought there, not through military might but through faith and obedience.
Joshua 6 records that on the seventh day of Israel circling the heavily fortified city, when the priests blew the trumpets and the people made a great shout, “the wall fell flat” (v. 20). Then after rescuing Rahab and her family because of her act of faith, Israel “burned the city and all that was in it” (v. 24). Importantly, the redeemed pagan prostitute became a revered matriarch in the lineage of Jesus Christ, and a key example of salvation for those who trust in the Lord (Joshua 2:9-13, cf. Genesis 15:6, Romans 4:3), and specifically “to the Gentiles” and “to the ends of the earth” (Isaiah 49:6).
Moreover, the defeat of Jericho launched the conquest of Canaan, which undergirds the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham (Genesis 15:18-21) and the establishment of the Davidic line, which leads to Jesus.
SCIENTIFIC BATTLE
The first excavations of Jericho took place in 1868 under the direction of Sir Charles Warren, a British Royal Engineer. However, he found nothing of interest to him.
Then in 1930, John Garstang, a preeminent British archaeologist who pioneered many of the rigorous standards for fieldwork, including extensive high-quality photographic documentation, began a seven-year investigation of the city. Using his mastery of the science of stratigraphy (understanding layers in the earth in terms of human activity) and his wife Marie’s expertise in dating ancient pottery, he unearthed Jericho’s massive collapsed walls as well as evidence that the city had been heavily burned in its destruction. Moreover, he dated the destruction to about 1400 B.C. and concluded that the charred ruins were associated with the biblical account about Israel’s conquest of Jericho.
However, in 1952, Kathleen Kenyon, a member of the British School of Archaeology, challenged Garstang’s dating of Jericho’s ruin, claiming the double-walled fortification had been destroyed 150 years before Israel entered the promised land. Although her conclusions were published in 1957, details of her analysis were not made available until 1982. But by then Bible critics had jumped on the bandwagon. Now the Book of Joshua is panned by them as “more like an adventure story than history” and with the claim that “Joshua destroyed a city that wasn’t even there!”
Unfortunately, her conclusions were largely unchallenged until 1990.
Then Bryant G. Wood, an American archaeologist with a mechanical engineering background who is a specialist in Canaanite pottery of the Late Bronze Age, challenged Kenyon, not for her field work or her methodology but for her conclusion about the materials she had unearthed. Specifically, he criticized Kenyon for having not “published an analysis of her pottery to support her claims” and lamented that “her impromptu dating has
been blindly accepted without question”, especially because she based her conclusion largely on the absence of some pottery instead of the presence of what she and Garstang both had found.
NOTE: Kenyon did not find any imported Cypriot Bichrome ware, a distinctive red-and-black painted pottery that in the region is a diagnostic marker for the Late Bronze I period (the timeframe when Israel conquered the city). Based on the lack of this one pottery type, she concluded the site was abandoned before the biblical timeline for the Israelite conquest – even though all the other evidence (collapsed walls, widespread charred ruins, etc.) fit the Bible’s account about Jericho’s fall.
Wood, who also has degrees in nuclear engineering (M.S.) and Syro-Palestinian Archaeology (Ph.D.), based his assessment on the pottery Garstang and Kenyon recovered in each layer of earth and concluded that “the hard evidence” from both “favors a model in which the Bible should be treated as a valid historical source for this time period.”
CHOOSE TRUTH
Paul wrote the Thessalonians about the lawlessness that “is already at work,” and described how the unrighteous prefer a lie rather than receive the truth and be saved. Unfortunately, such “pleasure in unrighteousness” continues today, especially among those who even pervert science to attack the truth because that truth is stated in God’s Word (2 Thessalonians 2:5-12).
Moreover, Jesus declared “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life” (John 14:6), and that “the truth shall set you free” (John 8:32).
So, regardless of the controversy or attack, rest assured you can stand firm in the Person and the Word of Truth. And in this matter, you can believe that Jericho’s walls came tumbling down just as the Bible says!
