JERICHO
Jericho is the site of the oldest settlement yet discovered, with significant archaeological remains dating back as far as 8000 BC. Located about 2 km from the modern city's center, the settlement included a walled community and a high tower. Additional findings from the period indicate that there was irrigated agriculture, revealing the prehistoric shift from nomadic to settled forms of life.
Jericho is well-known in biblical history as the site of a siege by Joshua and the Israelites.
Jericho, the world's first city, was built in the Stone Age sometime between 11,000 and 10,000 years ago. The wild grasses its inhabitants gathered were later domesticated. That is, they were genetically engineered via selective breeding to produce ever fatter seeds. We know the results today as wheat and barley.
The city functioned as an administrative center for the Persians in the 6th century BC and became a royal resort in the time of Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC. Around 30 BC Jericho was awarded to Herod the Great by the Roman emperor Augustus. Herod laid out new aqueducts and built a theater and winter palace there.
Between the 4th and 7th centuries AD Jericho attracted many pilgrims and the population grew considerably. The city was taken over by Arabs in the 7th century, and during the 12th and 13th centuries Crusaders controlled Jericho and greatly expanded the cultivation of sugarcane in the region.
After the defeat of the Crusaders by the Muslim leader Saladin, Jericho's vitality declined. In 1840 the Egyptian general Ibrahim Pasha razed the city when he withdrew his army to Egypt.
The first major excavation of the site of Jericho, located in the southern Jordan valley in Israel, was carried out by a German team between 1907 and 1909. They found piles of mud bricks at the base of the mound the city was built on.
It was not until a British archaeologist named Kathleen Kenyon re-excavated the site with modern methods in the 1950s that it was understood what these piles of bricks were. She determined that they were from the city wall which had collapsed when the city was destroyed!
 Cross-section of the fallen bricks from the wall of Jericho. |
The story in the Bible goes on to say that when the walls collapsed, the Israelites stormed the city and set it on fire. Archaeologists found evidence for a massive destruction by fire just as the Bible relates. Kenyon wrote in her excavation report,
"The destruction was complete. Walls and floors were blackened or reddened by fire, and every room was filled with fallen bricks, timbers, and household utensils; in most rooms the fallen debris was heavily burnt."
What caused the strong walls of Jericho to collapse? The most likely explanation is an earthquake But the nature of the earthquake was unusual. It struck in such a way as to allow a portion of the city wall on the north side of the site to remain standing, while everywhere else the wall fell.
 The spies leave Rahab's Jericho wall house. |
Rahab's house was evidently located on the north side of the city. She was the Canaanite prostitute who hid the Israelite spies who came to reconnoiter the city. The Bible states that her house was built against the city wall. Before returning to the Israelite camp, the spies told Rahab to bring her family into her house and they would be saved. According to the Bible, Rahab's house was miraculously spared while the rest of the city wall fell.
This is exactly what archaeologists found. The preserved city wall on the north side of the city had houses built against it.
The timing of the earthquake and the manner in which it selectively took down the city wall suggests something other than a natural calamity. A Divine Force was at work. In the New Testament, we read,
"By faith the walls of Jericho fell, after the people had marched around them for seven days. By faith the prostitute Rahab, because she welcomed the spies, was not killed with those who were disobedient" (Hebrews 11:30-31).
In the spring of 1997, two Italian archaeologists conducted a limited excavation on the ancient tell of Jericho. Lorenzo Nigro and Nicolo Marchetti, working under the auspices of the new Palestinian Department of Archaeology, excavated for one month on the fringes of Kathleen Kenyon’s west and south trenches. Their dig was the first foreign expedition in the Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank since self-rule began in 1994.
After their excavation, Nigro and Marchetti announced they found no evidence for a destruction from the time of Joshua. While it is too soon for the academic community to see details of their discoveries, their announcement suggests their excavation was conducted to disprove the Biblical account of Joshua’s capture of the city. Is it further possible that the Palestinian Authority supported this dig for the express purpose of denouncing any Jewish connection to the site?
As to their evidence, Dr. Bryant Wood, Director of the Associates for Biblical Research and one of the leading experts on the archaeology of Jericho, recently responded.
"It matters little what the Italian archaeologists did not find in their month-long dig. The evidence is already in. Three major expeditions to the site over the past 90 years uncovered abundant evidence to support the Biblical account."
As Wood went on to point out, John Garstang (1930-1936) and Kathleen Kenyon (1952-1958) both dug at Jericho for six seasons and a German excavation directed by Ernst Sellin and Carl Watzinger dug for three. All found abundant evidence of the city’s destruction by fire in a layer related to the Biblical date of 1400 BC.
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In September 1997, Dr. Wood visited Jericho and examined the results of the Italian excavation first hand. Incredibly, he found the Italians had uncovered the stone outer revetment wall at the base of the tell with part of the mudbrick wall built on top of it still intact. In the balk of the Italian excavation, at the outer base of the revetment wall, Wood noticed the remains of the collapsed mudbrick city walls which had tumbled. Not only did the Italians find the same evidence uncovered in the earlier excavations, it fits the Biblical story perfectly!
Wood reports:
"The Italian excavation actually uncovered most of the critical evidence relating to the Biblical story. But even more exciting is the fact that all the evidence from the earlier digs has disappeared over time. We only have records, drawing and photos. But the Italians uncovered a completely new section of the wall which we did not know still existed. I had my photograph taken standing next to the wall where the mudbrick collapse had just been excavated!"
Unfortunately, the Italian archaeologists, the Palestinian Authorities, the Associated Press and most of the world doesn’t realize any of this. It is a sad commentary on the state of archaeology in the Holy Land, when the purpose of an excavation at a Biblical site is to disprove the Bible and disassociate the site with any historical Jewish connection.
The most prominent literary record of Jericho's existence appears in The Old Testament. In its pages Joshua's priests blow seven trumpets on seven days to bring the walls of the city down. By the time this could have taken place, Jericho was an old city, a very old one. During its previous 7,000 years, its walls had crumbled many a time. Some collapses had been caused by earthquake. Others had apparently been the result of military assault. Little do those who read of Jericho in the Bible suspect that the real importance of the place lays not in its appearance in a holy book, but in its status as the world's first metropolis and in its role, as Global Brain shows, as a catalyst which would change the nature of human identity.
