The Battle is the Lord’s: Holy War: Jericho and Ai
1 Samuel 15; Book of Joshua
Open your Bibles with me to Joshua 2. We are in the middle of a study in
1 Samuel. Do not get confused. Last week I started talking about what was going
on with the Amalekites.
The Amalekites were Israel’s traditional enemy. They are descendants of
Esau’s grandson Amalek. They are therefore related ethnically to the
Israelites, but they are not Israel because they are descendants not from the
seed that went through Isaac and then Jacob. Esau was Jacob’s twin brother.
The Amalekites were a tribal group that grew to quite a huge population
that were somewhat nomadic for a period of time in the Old Testament, but they
also had some cities down south of the Negev.
Because they stood against Israel, when the Israelites had come out of
Egypt at the time of the Exodus, God had sworn that He would ultimately destroy
them and wipe them out as a people group.
There were some that survived:
But God’s instructions to Saul at that time often cause a lot of
confusion among people, especially among people who start with a somewhat
skeptical look at the Bible. God wanted every man, woman, child, and nursing
infant, and all of their animals killed, annihilated, wiped off the face of the
earth by Saul and the Israelites.
It was not for their pleasure. It was not for them to gain plunder or
booty. It was not for their benefit. It was that they were the judgmental tool of God in order to remove this malignant cancer from
the human race.
We studied this under the doctrine of the question that we looked at: is
there such a thing as biblical Holy War?
I want to review that. Some of you were not here last week. It is a good
thing to be reminded of, so I am going to run through this quickly. The slides
are all up on the Internet.
I do not think we should use it either. As far as I can tell from the
history of the term is that this did not come into existence until perhaps
Islam used it in the term of “jihad.”
It was an English term and a Latin term, sacra bellum. It was not used until the Crusades. Neither the
Crusades nor what is practiced as jihad in Islam bears any resemblance to what
God was doing in the ancient world.
I pointed that out last time that the Lord’s command to Saul was
designed to remove a culture, a people group, from humanity because they had
reached such a level of evil that God, out of His righteousness, was protecting
the victim, the rest of the human race, from the presence of this blight.
Just today I learned of an episode that would have been very common
among the Canaanites in the ancient world. The Canaanites practiced live child
sacrifice. There was a four year old that was decapitated. This was an ISIS
event. The mother had to put her hands in his blood and swear allegiance to
Allah.
That was mild compared to the evil of the Canaanites in terms of
probably tens of thousands of infants that were burned alive in sacrifices to
Molech, Chemosh, and some of the other pagan deities. These were horrific
cultures. God had given them grace upon grace for over almost 600 years. He had
given them the opportunity to turn to Him. Yet they continued not only to
reject Him, but to go deeper and deeper into the
quicksand of their own evil.
The term Holy War as it is
used with jihad and as it is used in terms of the Crusades, were wars where the
soldiers could benefit from the destruction of the enemy:
“Jihad” basically means “struggle.” You have
many people who say, “Well, the struggle is a personal, internal struggle.” But
if you read the Koran and the Hadith you will discover that that personal
struggle goes outward into violence toward the enemies of Allah and the enemies
of Mohammed.
That is a necessary part of what they mean by jihad. Again, it accrues
to the benefit of the individual who is committing these acts. This is not what
went on in the Bible. What went on in the Bible, as I
pointed out last time, is described by the term cherem.
It is almost a term like qadash,
which means to set it apart to God. God is using Israel to destroy an enemy,
but they cannot benefit from it. They are to destroy all of their economics.
If there is any gold, silver, or precious stones, these are to go into
the temple and to be used in the worship of God. As Israel goes into the land
of Canaan, the first city they are to destroy is Jericho. Everything in Jericho
is as it were offered as a sacrifice of firstfruits to God. Everything belongs
to God and is under the ban. God is destroying them. It is not for the benefit
of Israel. It is not for the benefit of anyone. It is for the destruction of
this evil.
That was the Roman Catholic view that energized the Crusades as well,
i.e., that the crusaders would be able to avoid certain punishments in the Lake
of Fire or in purgatory if they participated in the Crusades.
The reason God did it was because of their evil and their sin. God has
removed numerous civilizations and cultures from the face of the earth because
of their sin.
If you want to read about a culture that was demonic, that was as evil
as any culture that God used, that is what the book of Habakkuk in the Old
Testament is about. It is about how God uses one group of people, in that case
the Chaldeans, to bring judgment upon the evil apostate southern kingdom of
Judah. God does that.
In Mexico, in the 1500s, God used the Spaniards to bring judgment
against the Aztecs. The Aztecs were sacrificing human beings. They would go out
and defeat these various Indian tribes, or raid their villages and capture
people. Then they would offer them as human sacrifices. Cortez did not have
that many Spaniards with him, only a handful. But he had an army of well over a
thousand by the time he got to Mexico City because over the course of time the
Aztecs had really angered all the Indian tribes. And they joined up with the
Spaniards so that they could kick some Aztec butt. They wanted to get rid of
them.
You do not know any Aztecs do you? No. That is because God destroyed
them. There was not any revelation to do that at that time. That was in the
Church Age, and God does not do that, but God still works that way.
In Deuteronomy 9:5 God specifically says, “It is not because of your righteousness or the uprightness of your
heart that you go in to possess their land, but because of the wickedness of
these nations that the Lord your God drives them out from before you …”
It is not because you are so good. Do not get the big head. It is
because they are so evil that God is removing them from the land.
We are not to be involved in violence against others for a spiritual
cause. There was some uninformed idiot who wrote an article in the New York Times this last weekend. He
said in that article that based upon Revelation 1:18–24, and Revelation 20:14
where it says that “these will suffer the second death.” This writer said that the
Apostle Paul instructed Christians to execute homosexuals.
There is nothing like that in the Bible. That is so offensive that if I
were a liberal I could probably have a cause. I am tired of the liberals being
so concerned about being offended, but they do not understand that the way they
vote offends a lot of conservatives—but it is a one-way ticket.
Liberals are so hypersensitive about what conservatives do. They are not
at all concerned about offending conservatives. They offend conservatives all
the time by the way they assault the Constitution, which is what is going on
with this 2nd Amendment stuff right now. The liberals cannot
identify the problem, so they try to sugarcoat it and do something they think
they can do. Hopefully they will not.
Spiritual warfare in the church is personal. It is what goes on between
your ears. It is not offensive in terms of attacking anybody else, and
Bible-believing Christians have never held to that. You have had whacko groups
that have, but they have not been consistent evangelical Bible-believing
Christians.
They were to be killed: man, woman, child, nursing infant, and in many
cases all of their livestock. But those who were living in contiguous
territories were not allowed to do that. They gave them an option to surrender.
They treated them with more grace. It was limited to a specific group of people
living in a specific territory.
How can a righteous and good God allow this?
It is because He is righteous and because He is good. Because
He puts the focus not on the victim, but on the perpetrator. In order to
protect the victim He has to remove the perpetrator. It is like a surgeon and
cancer. The surgeon has to remove that part, which if it is not removed will
destroy the whole. That is what love is:
It is interesting, the people who have the
problem with God eliminating the evil of the Canaanites are the same people who
have a problem with God. They say:
“How can a good God allow evil to exist?”
When God does something to remove evil, then they do not like that
either. It is inconsistent.
The beginning of this cherem
is at the beginning of the book of Joshua. There are a lot of lessons there:
on why we can believe these accounts are true based on history and
archeology?
That is not often the case. When I was in Israel, about eight weeks ago,
I spent the better part of a Sunday traipsing around the archeological sites of
Ai and Bethel. Previously I had spent a lot of time walking around the archeological
site of Jericho. These are the three areas that are a part of this initial
narrative in the battle for the land God was giving to Israel.
We are going to see the spiritual lessons, but one of the lessons we are
going to learn from this is yes, you can trust the Bible. “Yes, Virginia, there
is a God and He revealed Himself and He is true, and His Word is true.”
It has taken me a long time to figure this stuff out. I remember back in
1978, when I was sitting in a biblical archeology class taught by Dr. Kenneth
Barker at Dallas Theological Seminary. At the time he was the head of the Old
Testament department. I would usually sit next to my good friend Randy Price.
Sometimes we ended up coming out of those classes a bit more confused at the
end than we were at the beginning.
One of the things that has happened in
archeology, specifically related to Jericho, is that the Bible is not trusted.
If you look back at the notes that we had from that class, there was a level of
uncertainty whether archeology had demonstrated that Jericho had been destroyed
in the way that the Bible said that it had. We are going to get into that a
little bit.
We did not know quite where Ai was located or Bethel or some of these
other cities. We were not sure that archeology could confirm the Bible. Of
course, we believed the Bible was true, but archeology seemed to be at odds
with what the Bible said. We were left at the end of all that with just a vague
sense of well:
There has been a lot of debate over the last 100 years or less over
whether we had found Jericho, whether the walls fell down, and whether “Joshua
fought the battle of Jericho and the walls came tumbling down.” A lot of you
know that children’s song or spiritual. But we can be sure of that.
In regard to Ai there has been a historical identification for many
years that it is at a location called et-Tell. In recent years there are some
conservative Bible-believing scholars who believe it is located at a place not
too far, maybe two miles away from et-Tell, called Khirbet el-Maqatir.
In fact, there was a group who came here to Houston last year. A group
of archeologists had the head of the team, Bryant Wood, the new head of the
team, plus a couple of other scholars, one of whom was a really solid professor
at Dallas Theological Seminary, Eugene Merrill. These archeologists spoke on
things that they had found in their excavations at et-Tell.
Bryant Wood has been the primary moving force, claiming that Khirbet
el-Maqatir is really Ai, not et-Tell, which was the previous location. We will
get into this later on. Hopefully it will make sense to you when I am done.
After 35 years, almost 40 years of studying this, I had great clarity because
nothing beats boots on the ground intelligence.
Walking around those sites really helped. I was with an archeologist who
has spent probably eight seasons digging at one or another of these sites. He
was very, very convinced that Bryant Woods was right, as I have been. Bryant
Woods is a great guy. He is solid. He believes in the inerrancy and
infallibility of Scripture. He has done the best work to date on Jericho.
But, based on what I have been told and seen, I do not think he has hit
the mark when it comes to the location of Ai. But that is just our
understanding. Remember, the target here is understanding what God is doing in
terms of cherem, in terms of why God
is authorizing the annihilation of the Canaanite people group, and how is that
justified in letting the Israelites come in and take their territory.
Let’s start at the beginning of Joshua 1. There has been a change of
leadership from Moses to Joshua. Joshua is the general. He is in charge, but
there is a higher General, as you learn reading through this. That is the Angel
of the LORD. At the beginning of Joshua 1 Joshua receives his commission to
lead the Israelites into the Promised Land. He is given a promise from God that
is stated in Joshua 1:6–7.
Joshua 1:6, “Be strong and of good
courage, for to this people you shall divide as an inheritance the land which I
swore to their fathers to give them.”
God is making a promise. He is giving them what He had promised to the
fathers. That is referring to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Joshua 1:7, “Only be strong and very
courageous, that you may observe to do according to all the law which Moses My
servant commanded you; do not turn from it to the right hand or to the left
that you may prosper wherever you go.”
In other words, political and military leadership has to be grounded
upon a sound biblical ethic, the ethic of the torah. We see this going on today in the Israeli Defense Force
(IDF.) They bend over backwards to make sure that everything they do is
ethically sound. That does not mean that everything that they do is right. They
make mistakes. They spend a lot of time evaluating and reevaluating and second guessing every mistake that is made.
Michael Rydelnik’s son went over and served two years in the IDF.
Most of you know of Rydelnik. He is the head of the Jewish Studies Department
at Moody Bible Institute. His son told his dad that the IDF has
got to be the most ethical army in the world. It is amazing how much time they
spend analyzing the ethics of every decision that they make. That is the Jewish
heritage. That is the heritage from the Old Testament that you are grounding
everything on the Law.
That is what God says to Joshua, in Joshua 1:8, “the Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth ...” You are going to obey the Law
to the letter. This is going to be a special kind of war. It is a war related
to the holiness of God.
Then we get down to the second half of the Joshua 1. Joshua passes on
the orders, God’s instructions to the people, and then he basically calls upon
them to obey it and asks them if they are going to do what the Lord says to do?
We get into Joshua 1:16–18 where briefly they answered Joshua. They
said:
“All that you command us we will
do.”
In other words, they understood the commands that Joshua was saying:
Joshua 1:16, “All that you command us we will do, and
wherever you send us we will go.”
Joshua 1:18a, “Whoever rebels (disobeys) against your
command …”
That is important because you are going to have this big episode of an
individual disobedience when we get to Joshua 7.
Joshua 1:18b, “… and does not heed your words, in all that
you command him, shall be put to death.”
It is the death penalty for anybody who does not obey everything down to
the minutia, crossing every “t” and dotting every “i”. If somebody leaves a
little kitten alive then they are worthy of the death penalty. They all
understood that. They understand the Law. They understand what God’s
expectation was.
Joshua brings the people together and takes them across the Jordan. As
they are to engage in this cherem war
they are led by the Ark of the Covenant, indicating that God is leading them,
and they are led by the priests who are carrying the Ark of
the Covenant. They cross over the Jordan and before they cross over the
Jordan the people are told:
Joshua 3:5, “… ‘Sanctify yourselves, for tomorrow the LORD
will do wonders among you.’ ”
They are to be spiritually and ritually purified before they go into
war. This was something they were to do. It was something serious. They were
not engaged in this because they were angry, because they were executing some
kind of vendetta against the Canaanites, or trying to steal their land. They
were doing this, as we read the text of Scripture, because God is using them to
punish people.
Of course, the liberal theologians can come along and say, “Well, God
does not really exist. That is just what they thought.” You know, it is too bad
they are not figments of God’s imagination as well. If you are going to argue
like that then you cannot talk about anything because you are denying the
ultimate reality of everything.
The Israelites cross the Jordan. They set up a memorial stone of twelve
uncut stones representing the twelve tribes of Israel so that this will stand
as a memorial for coming generations. Then they have to do something else
related to spiritual ritual purification. The males over the age of 14 years
old have to be circumcised. That is because they have had a whole generation
that has not been circumcised.
Circumcision is not the sign of the Mosaic Covenant. It is the sign of
the Abrahamic Covenant. This shows that they are being set apart to God in
terms of God’s promise to Abraham.
What did God promise Abraham?
I am going to give you this land. It goes back to that promise. If they
are going to take the land they are going to have to do it according to God’s
rules and God’s Law, God’s instruction, the torah.
In Joshua 5:2–3 the Israelites are going to make flint knives for
themselves.
In conversations I’ve had, I have learned that you can get a surgically
sharp flint knife that is as sharp as anything that we have today to perform
circumcision.
The Israelites circumcised the sons of Israel. The place of circumcision
was “at the hill of the foreskins.” We know it as Gilgal. That is just west
of the Jordan River.
Then we get into Joshua 6:6 where we see that Joshua calls the priest
and tells them to take up the Ark of the Covenant. They are going to lead the
procession against Jericho. This is according to the Lord’s instructions and
His guidance. He tells them exactly what they are to do.
The Lord gives these instructions to Joshua. When He does so, in Joshua
5:14, He appears to Joshua. “He” as the Commander of the Army” says:
Joshua 5:14–15, “ ‘… as Commander of the army of
the Lord I have now come.’ And Joshua fell on his face to the earth
and worshiped, and said to Him, ‘What does my Lord say to His
servant?’ Then the Commander of the Lord’s army said to Joshua, ‘Take
your sandal off your foot, for the place where you stand is holy.’
”
This all lets us understand that what is going on is something that is
unique and distinct in history.
Then in Joshua 6 it goes on and the Angel of Yahweh gives him
instructions. We believe that is the Preincarnate Lord Jesus Christ. He tells
Joshua what his tactics are starting in Joshua 6:3:
“You shall march around the city,
all you men of war; you shall go all around the city once. This you
shall do six days.”
According to Numbers we know that that is about 625,000 men. That would
take a little while, but Jericho is not that big. It was rather small. They
would spend most of the day walking around the city. They would do that for six
days. They were led by the priests. After the six days
they are told that on the seventh day they are going to march around the city
seven times. The priest will then blow their trumpets.
Joshua 6:5, “It shall come to pass, when they make a
long blast with the ram’s horn, and when you hear the sound
of the trumpet that all the people shall shout with a great shout; then the
wall of the city will fall down flat. And the people shall go up every man
straight before him.”
This is one of the most significant things that happened in the Old
Testament. You would think that if you have all of these layers of occupation
on a tell—a tell is a mound that has been built up
through the centuries of human occupation—that you would be able to dig down
through that tell.
Think about an 18-layer chocolate cake. What you are going to do is you
are going to take a slice out. When you do that you are going to see all those
different layers. Each one of those layers represents another period of
occupation at that particular site. In those layers you are going to find the
trash, the detritus of human occupation and human civilization.
One of the things that you find is pottery. Pottery, especially in
Israel in the ancient Near East, can be found. People do not always make
pottery the same way they did 30–40 years ago. Think about in our own culture
how many times the styles of dishware change over the years. If you were
digging down and you found a number of places where people had the old “Apple
Time” pattern.
Some of you may remember that pattern. That is what I grew up with. It
was very common in the 1950s and 1960s. You would be able to say that the
people who lived here lived here in the 1950s. You would be able to identify
that.
If you dug down to a layer and you found a few remnants of paper plates
you might think that this is the age of the microwave. Anyway, you get my
understanding here. This is what happened with archeology. That is how you can
learn things. Archeology is neither going to prove or disprove the Bible, but
it can validate certain things that the Bible says as having happened or is
consistent with what the Bible says.
But what is going to happen with Jericho is that God has put Jericho
under the cherem, under the ban.
Jericho is going to be offered as a whole burnt offering to God. All the men,
women, and children are going to be killed. All the animals are going to be
killed. Everything is going to be burned. Nothing is to be taken to benefit any
individual Israelite. It is, as it were, the firstfruits of the offering as
they enter into the land of Israel.
As such, as it is being set apart unto the Lord, the people have to be
set apart to God. It is a picture of the fact that even today, if we are going
to serve the Lord, we have to be consecrated or set apart to Him. This is one
of the reasons why we confess sins. It is one of the reasons in the Old
Testament why the people would go into the tabernacle, later the temple, they
would wash their hands, wash their feet, as a sign of ongoing cleansing and
sanctification.
When we get down to Joshua 6:17 we read what Joshua says. He says:
“Now the city shall be doomed
[cherem] by the LORD to destruction, it and all who are in it. Only Rahab
the harlot shall live, she and all who are with her in the house, because she
hid the messengers that we sent.”
That story was told back in Joshua 2. Just to remind you. Joshua sent a
recon team into Jericho to find out what the lay of the land was. They were protected by a woman who operated an inn. Those
inns had a little bit of a hazy, off-color reputation. That is why she is known
down through the centuries as Rahab the harlot.
The king, the ruler of Jericho (population of no more than 1,500—not a
very large place) found out that Rahab was hiding them. Rahab protected the
spies and told the king’s men that she did not know which way they went. The
spies told her that she would be protected and her family would not be killed.
She was to hang a scarlet tread outside the window of her house.
Rahab’s house butted up against the wall of Jericho. They could see it.
I have read that when John Garstang excavated the area that there was one small
area of the wall that had not collapsed. That is confirmation, although that is
going to be attacked by numerous people. We will see what the problems are
there.
What Joshua says in Joshua 6:17–19:
“… only Rahab the harlot shall live, she and all
who are with her in the house, because she hid the messengers that we sent. And
you, by all means abstain from the accursed things …”
They are not to touch anything. They are to destroy everything.
“… lest you become accursed when you take of the
accursed things, and make the camp of Israel a curse and trouble it. But all
the silver and gold, and vessels of bronze and iron, are consecrated to the
Lord; they shall come into the treasury of the Lord.”
But everything else is destroyed.
Joshua 6:24–25, “But they burned the city and all that was in
it with fire. Only the silver and gold, and the vessels of bronze and iron,
they put into the treasury of the house of the Lord. And Joshua spared Rahab
the harlot, her father’s household, and all that she had. So she dwells in
Israel to this day …”
Rahab was a believer. She is in the line of Jesus Christ according to
Matthew 1.
Joshua 6:26, “Then Joshua charged them at that time,
saying, ‘Cursed be the man before the Lord who rises up and builds the city of
Jericho; he shall lay its foundation with his firstborn, and with his youngest
he shall set up its gates.’ ”
That happened in the time of King Ahab. The man who rebuilt Jericho,
when he started to rebuild it, his oldest son died. When he completed it, some
four or five years later, his youngest son died. Joshua 6:26 was
fulfilled.
Let’s look at this map. This is not a great map. In fact, this map is
wrong. I am going to show you another map later that is right, but it is hard
to see. This is from the Logos Bible
Software map set. They actually misidentified the locations of Bethel, et Tell, Khirbet el-Maqatir, and Ai. These three places are
important. This map is completely wrong. The other places are right. (Slide 26)
Gilgal is on this map just north of their route of march.
To the east we have Shittim. This means Acacia grove. Even today if you drive
down there you will see a lot of Acacia trees, as well as shrub, mimosa, and
other things. The Israelites would have come across the Jordon. Gilgal is
located north after they crossed the Jordan. Then they moved east to Jericho.
We have to figure out the time here because when we get into some of
this archeology and some of the things I read to you. You are going to be as
confused as I get when you start talking about the Iron Age and Bronze Age and
the Early Bronze and Middle Bronze and Late Bronze. People go to sleep.
I put a chart together that will help you. Remember, we are talking
about BC. All the way to the left is the oldest period. As you move from left to
right you get from older to more recent. The Bronze Age lasted approximately
from 3300 BC. I think that is off. I think the Bronze Age lasted from 2500 BC to
1200 BC. That is what modern periodization says. The Bronze Age and Middle
Bronze Age are the only two periods we are concerned about.
The Middle Bronze Period is 1800–1600 BC. Joseph is dead by
1800 BC. He probably died in 1900 BC. Joseph, the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob would have been in the Early Bronze Period. The Late Bronze Period is
1600–1200 BC. Just for your reference point, the Exodus occurred in 1447 BC.
That is in the Late Bronze Period. The conquest was 40 years later, which is
1407 BC. It is also Late Bronze.
One of the reasons I state that is because as you get into the
archeological data you will discover that Jericho is considered to be the
longest occupied site in human history, going back to not long after the flood.
Other people think it is Damascus. I do not know. God knows.
It is clear from the archeological excavation that it has been occupied
for an enormously long period of time. When you talk about the other place that
we are going to look at, which is Ai, and you go to et Tell, the claim from
Bryant Wood and others, and lot of conservative evangelicals, because of some
of the other issues we are going to talk about, have decided that it cannot
really be et Tell. We are going to go with Bryant Wood.
I will show you what the arguments are as to why Bryant Wood is probably
wrong on this. The claim is that et Tell was not
occupied in the Late Bronze Period and had not been occupied. The trouble is
that when John Garstang, who is the first person to excavate et
Tell and Jericho and Bethel, wrote his findings (he excavated in AD 1928 and AD
1930) saying that when he excavated at et Tell he found that the occupation
ended in approximately 1400 BC.
When did the conquest begin?
1407 BC. His findings were right on target.
Slide 28: Let’s look at this a little bit. This is going to be interesting. Here
is an artist rendition of what ancient Jericho looked like. It is not very
large. We will go over some statistics on the size, but it covered probably
about nine acres. It was about 230 yards in length, and 130 yards in width.
That is like two and a half football fields long, and a little over one football field in width. In circumference it is not more
than 650 yards. It probably did not have more than 1,500 people living there.
Jericho had two sets of walls that were made of brick. The outer wall, which is also called the lower wall. It is
six-feet thick. The space between the lower wall and the upper wall was about
five to six yards across, according to Garstang. The second wall was pretty
massive. It was several yards thick, much taller, and higher up.
Slide 30: This is a picture today, an aerial photo of the tell.
You can see that it is not very large. In the slide, on the east side you can
see the Tourist and Visitor Center. This is where they have the Mount of
Temptation Restaurant because the Mount of Temptation is just to the west.
The entry point onto the side comes up right to the northwest. The area
to the north of that is a little covered area where you can sit down and talk
and have a lesson. That is where we were on the last trip. You can see the
northern end and the southern end. The slide shows how big it is. You can see
that it is not a huge, huge area. It is only about nine acres.
Slide 31: This is another photo. In the center of the slide you see the one tower
that has been found there. To the southwest is Elisha’s Spring,
why the settlement was there to begin with. It had an abundance of water. No
place anywhere near here has water, but this has an enormous spring out of
which came a tremendous amount of water. This is why this area was settled to
begin with.
There is an exposed revetment wall down on the southern end. I have
walked all over these particular areas that I am showing you. I have seen these
particular parts.
Slide 32: This is a chart of the ruins. You would go in on the east side in the
center. I pointed out that the covered area where we talked is to the north.
The southern end is where the revetment wall is located. Area A is the area
excavated by John Garstang in AD 1928 and 1930. Here he found evidence for the
destruction of Jericho by the Israelites. He dated that to about 1400 BC.
Garstang is not just some guy who went out there and dug and found some
stuff and said that this looks like this could be Joshua. It
kind of fits. This is a guy who was absolutely brilliant.
Garstang excavated in 1928 and 1930. He wrote the definitive work on
Bronze Age pottery. It is still used today. Everybody who digs in the Middle
East goes to John Garstang’s classification of Bronze Age pottery in order to
date the strata that they are looking in. This guy was a brilliant man. He
dated Jericho to 1400 BC.
In Slide 32, the two squares that are much,
much smaller to the north of where Garstang excavated. You see the
topographical lines that indicate there is quite a topography
here, quite a terrain down and up. It is quite a rough area. You do not see so
much of that in these two squares. That area was excavated in
the AD 1950s by Dame Kathleen Kenyon. This is where there is so much
confusion.
Dame Kathleen Kenyon said that she did not find any evidence of the
destruction around the time of the conquest. She found no evidence of
Israelites ever being there. She found no evidence of the Bible. We will see
her quote later. She dated it to 1550 BC, long before any of this. She said that this destruction was caused by the Egyptians. We have to
understand something.
What is going on politically in the Middle East in AD
1928 and 1930?
The area is under the British Mandate. The Jews are increasing their
presence. The Arabs are getting upset about it.
By the way, in the AD 1920s, it may have been in the teens, there
has been discovered and it is clear that it was written them that an Arab
travel guide to the Dome of the Rock, Arabic: Qubbat al-Sakhrah, which stated that this was built on the site of
the ancient Jewish temple. Today they deny that. But back then there was not
all the controversy that there is today.
By the AD 1940s things changed a little bit politically.
What happened in AD 1948?
Israel won their independence. In AD 1948 Israel wins
their independence and this area of the West Bank is now
occupied by the Kingdom of Jordan. It went from being Transjordan to
being the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Since they already control the east bank
and now they are on the west side of the Jordan. They called it the West Bank.
Since Jordan does not control the west side of the Jordan anymore:
Why do you call it the West Bank?
It is Samaria. The biblical term is Samaria and south of there it is
Judea.
Garstang digs in AD 1928 and 1930.
Is there a big political problem? No.
Garstang clearly finds evidence of the Israelites there. Until AD 1948
archeologists like Garstang and William Foxwell Albright and many others
clearly found evidence of Israelites in the so-called West Bank. After 1948, up
until the present, nobody ever finds the Israelites in the West Bank anywhere.
Do you think it has something to do with politics?
Of course it does. Because the so-called Palestinians
do not want anybody to find it. This is why there are not a lot of
active digs going on inside Samaria. It is because the Palestinians do not want
people coming in and finding evidence that the Israelites were there from an
ancient time, and the Palestinians have not been. That destroys their whole
narrative.
Dame Kathleen Kenyon comes in and she cannot find any evidence that the
Israelites have been there. Who knew? She re-dated a lot of the stuff. Notice
that her dig area is not nearly as large as Garstang’s. After she died they
found warehouses of pottery that did not fit her hypothesis. She was hiding the
evidence. In bookkeeping they call it “cooking the books.” That is what she was
doing.
Garstang is absolutely brilliant. He is one of these early archeologists
who believes the Bible. In the mid-19th
century you had these Victorians: Charles Warren, Charles Wilson, and Edward
Robinson. These are men, if you remember, Robinson’s Arch, Wilson’s Arch, all
of these places. These men believed the Bible.
Garstang said that Jericho was “… occupied long before the Bronze Age by
people using floors and receptacles of beaten and stuccoed earth, and whose
weapons were of flint, …”
He is referring to early Bronze Age civilization there and before. That they had been there a long time. Then when he talks
about the Late Bronze city he says:
“The date of destruction [of the later city] is estimated from the
complete absence of Mykenaiean (Mycenaean) deposits in the occupation layers
and other details at about 1400 BC.”
That is when he is dating the destruction of Jericho at that time.
Slide 35: This is what Jericho
looked like at the time of Garstang’s excavation.
Kathleen Kenyon came along in AD 1957. She said:
“It is a sad fact that of the town walls of the Late Bronze Age, within
which period the attack by the Israelites must fall by any dating, not a trace
remains … (cannot find any evidence of it). The excavation of Jericho,
therefore, has thrown no light on the walls of Jericho of which the destruction
is so vividly described in the Book of Joshua.”
In other words, it is all made up. She does not come right out and say
it, but she says it is all made up. Kathleen Kenyon had this reputation in the AD
1960s and 1970s of being this great archeologist who had done this great
excavation of Jericho. A lot of people, conservatives as well, bought into her
conclusion. They said, “Well, Kathleen Kenyon went back there.” See, you
believe that they are legitimate! You believe that they are being honest and
she was not.
This threw confusion in there. You get people like Randy Price and me
coming out of biblical archeology at Dallas Theological Seminary and going,
“Well, I guess there is no evidence of Joshua fitting the battle of Jericho
because Kathleen Kenyon did not find anything.”
Well, there were a lot of reasons she did not find anything. The fact is
that she was cooking the books.
Slide 37: I am going to show you some other pictures that show some things. Here
we have a burn layer. There is a dark layer that shows this burn layer that is
dated by Garstang to about 1400 BC. That is what Joshua says. It is all burnt
down.
Slide 38: This is a closer look
at the burn layer. It runs all through the tell.
They also found storage jars of grain. It shows that everything was
destroyed in a very short amount of time. The people did not have time to grab
food and grab things and leave. Jericho was destroyed quickly. It also shows
that the storage jars were full of burnt grain. This fit a destruction period
in the spring, just after harvest time because they were full. It shows that
the city was not looted. That is what God had commanded. That it would not be
looted. The army could not take grain for their food supplies. All of this
substantiates what the Scripture says.
Slide 40: This slide shows a
graphic of the upper wall and the lower wall. Then you had the revetment wall,
which is the retaining wall at the bottom. What happens is that when the walls
fall down they are going to fall from (in this picture) right to left. All
these bricks come tumbling down the slopes. It basically created a ramp up
which the Army could go to enter into Jericho.
Slide 41: Here is another photo of the dig and the revetment wall, which is in the
middle. As they are excavating along the base of that
revetment, which is dated to the time of Joshua. Below the revetment
wall they found remains of the mud brick wall. That was the second lower wall
that fell down and created that ramp going up.
This was found by Kenyon in her excavations as well on the west side of the tell, but she dated the mud brick wall to the last
Canaanite city.
Garstang says this:
“The defenses of this time consist of two parallel walls built of brick.
The outer one was about six feet thick. The space between the
two, being four to five yards across. Though so massive, these walls
were faulty in construction.”
This is really insightful.
“The bricks were sundried, contained no binding straw (that means they
are not going to be as solid), and varied greatly in size, though their
thickness was fairly uniform and averages about four inches. The foundations
consisted generally of two or three layers of field stones, which lacked
uniformity of size and were unevenly laid.”
What does that tell you?
That tells you that the base of the walls is not stable.
Furthermore, he says:
“The outer wall was built wholly upon debris, and as is now found, on
the very brink of the mound, which must have been leveled out for the purpose.
…”
“A number of houses leaned against the inner face of the main city wall,
…”
You have pressure from these houses against the upper wall already. The
lower wall is built on debris. It is not going to take a whole lot to knock
them over. God supernaturally did it at a particular point of time. I am not saying
that it is all a natural thing, but there was more going on there than what
would meet the eye.
Slide 44: Here is a mud brick wall collapsed in front of the revetment wall.
Slide 45: Here is a photo of Bryant Wood pointing out the evidence of the
collapsed mud brick wall.
It is difficult for you to see this. I have been there. I went through
it with John Cross’ son, Andrew, one time. I went through it on my own another
time. It is easy to see (on the ground).
Bryant Wood wrote:
“The meticulous work of Kenyon showed that Jericho was indeed heavily
fortified and that it had been burned by fire.”
There is no doubt that that happened. It is when?
“Unfortunately, she misstated her finds, resulting in what seemed to be
a discrepancy between the discoveries of archeology and the Bible. She
concluded that the Bronze Age city of Jericho was destroyed
about 1550 BC by the Egyptians. An in-depth analysis of the evidence,
however, reveals that the destruction took place at the end of the 15th
century BC (end of the Late Bronze 1 Period), exactly when the Bible says the
conquest occurred.”
Bryant Woods has written several articles on the walls of Jericho that
have been published in Bible and Spade archeological
journal, as well as on-line with Biblical Resource Associates. He has always
done extremely fine work. I am going to disagree with him, probably, on what he
says about Ai, but on other stuff, he is just as solid as he can be.
We do not have time to look at Ai tonight. I will come back and talk
about it and the archeological and spiritual issues related to Ai and cherem when we start next Tuesday night
in the next class.