Did Joshua destroy Jericho and Ai? The conquest and the excavations

The passages

So the people shouted when the priests blew with the trumpets: and it came to pass, when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, and the people shouted with a great shout, that the wall fell down flat.

Joshua 6:20

And Joshua burnt Ai, and made it an heap for ever, even a desolation unto this day.

Joshua 8:28

So Joshua took the whole land, according to all that the LORD said unto Moses.

Joshua 11:23

And the children of Benjamin did not drive out the Jebusites that inhabited Jerusalem; but the Jebusites dwell with the children of Benjamin in Jerusalem unto this day.

Judges 1:21

The problem

Jericho has been excavated several times. John Garstang, in the 1930s, proposed that a collapsed wall belonged to the time of Joshua. Kathleen Kenyon redated it to centuries earlier, about 2300 BC. The city of the Late Bronze Age, around 1400–1200 BC, was a small and eroded settlement with little evidence of a wall. Ai (identified with et-Tell) was uninhabited from about 2400 to about 1200 BC, so there was no city for Joshua to burn. Inside the Bible, Joshua 11 says the land was taken, and Judges 1 lists many places where the Canaanites remained.

What believers and scholars say

Dating arguments. Wood has argued that Kenyon's dating of the destruction is wrong and that pottery and scarabs support a destruction around 1400 BC, in line with a high date for the Exodus. Other archaeologists have disputed his analysis. Defenders of the conquest also suggest that Ai has been misidentified.

Rhetoric of conquest. Kitchen and others note that the language of "took the whole land" and "utterly destroyed" is the stock vocabulary of ancient Near Eastern victory reports, which routinely overstate. Judges then gives the more modest operational picture.

Settlement from within. Finkelstein and many archaeologists see the Late Bronze and Iron I evidence as showing a gradual rise of small highland villages, not an invasion. In this view the conquest narratives are later literary memory, written centuries afterwards.

Where this leaves it

The excavations do not support a rapid destruction of Jericho and Ai in the manner described, and the debate over dates is not closed. The text itself, in the next book, tells a slower story. Most readers end up choosing between "the archaeology is misread", "the text exaggerates" and "the text is mostly later tradition". Each position has serious defenders.