The Sean McDowell Show - New Jericho Evidence Reopens a Closed Case

Episode Date: January 27, 2026

Did Joshua really conquer Jericho and does archaeology support it? Archaeologist Brian Windle joins me today to share why he believes the debate over Jericho may need a major update. We talk about why Jericho has been so confusing for scholars, what Kathleen Kenyon actually believed and how pottery, tomb finds, fortification walls, and destruction evidence factor into the bigger question: Is Joshua’s Jericho historically plausible? *Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf) *USE Discount Code [smdcertdisc] for 25% off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM) *See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK) FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://x.com/Sean_McDowell TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sean_mcdowell?lang=en Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/ Website: https://seanmcdowell.org Discover more Christian podcasts at lifeaudio.com and inquire about advertising opportunities at lifeaudio.com/contact-us.

Want to keep God's word with you wherever you go? The King James Bible Study KJV app by Salem Media makes it easier to read, study, share, and pray daily with the timeless KJV translation. Enjoy features like offline access, audio Bible listening, smart search, and tools to highlight bookmark and take notes, all designed to keep your Bible studies simple and organize. Best of all, it's free to download in the Google Play Store. Grow in your faith every day. Search for King James Bible Study, KJV, and download the app today. The conquest of Jericho and Joshua has been one of the most contested events in the Old Testament. Does the archaeology now support Joshua's conquest?

Archaeologist Brian Windle from the Associates for Biblical Research is here to make his case. Brian, thanks for coming on and for send me a copy of your new book. Hey, thanks, Sean. It's great to be here and chat with you about Jericho. Yeah, it's hard to think of a more exciting and interesting topic from the Old Testament than this. So I call on a know your backstory. When and why did you first start to study the archaeological evidence for Jericho? And what did you find kind of when you first started looking into this? Yes. So when I started volunteering with the Associates for Biblical Research about 10 years ago, I was very familiar with the work that our organization had done. Bryant Wood, as an archaeologist who had looked at Jericho City 4. So just for your listeners, for our viewers here, Jericho is what we call a tell. It's a mound with a bunch of cities, one on top of each other, occupation layers through history.

And those are given just different names, stratum one, stradum two, or city one, city two, city, three, city four. And the whole debate about Jericho and which city was associated with Joshua's conquest all seem to center on city four. And so British archaeologist John Garstang excavated there in the 1930s, and he thought that Jericho City 4 had the data that aligned with the account in the Bible of Joshua. In the 1950s, Kathleen Kenyon dug there, and she said, no, that's city 4, that's actually middle bronze age. That's about 150 years before Joshua. And then Dr. Bryant Wood, from Associates for Biblical Research, came along in the 1990s, And he said, no, Kathleen Kenyon was wrong.

She misdated the city. John Garstang was right. So that's where the debate had been and gone back and forth for the last 35 years or so. And so what I wanted to do about four years ago, I decided to go, well, what's the latest? What's the new data suggesting? Because I knew there was a new dig there that was going on. It'd been going on there for, well, when I started researching it about, well, about 15 years by that point. They're up to 20 years now of excavations at Jericho. And so I thought,

well, what's the latest research say? I wanted to kind of bring things up to speed. And what I noticed when I started looking into it was that few, if any, evangelical scholars were actually interacting in any meaningful way with the excavation results from the team that's led by a man named Dr. Lorenzo Negro from Sapienza University in Rome. And so I thought, well, this is a interesting. And as I started reading about his research, I realized that the latest research from his data was suggesting that Kathleen Kenyon was actually right about City 4. And according to their stratigraphy, City 5 was the late Bronze Age city around the time of Joshua. And so I thought, hmm, I wonder if City 5 is a viable candidate for the city that Joshua conquered. Is it?

Joshua's Jericho. And so I had just started a master's degree at that point in archaeology and biblical history from Trinity Southwest University. And so I thought that would make a good master's thesis project. And so I started out there. Some people say that there's a fine line between passion and obsession. And I like to say I'm passionate about Jericho. Some have suggested I might be a little obsessed with this whole topic, but I fell down the rabbit hole about four years ago. And I've been studying it ever since. All right. So to clarify for viewers and frankly for myself, because I've been to Jericho, I think it was 2016. I brought it a team that was there, got a tour from Joel Kramer, archaeologist, friend of this channel.

And from what I understand, there's no debate about the site of Jericho. It's agreed upon where it's at. The debate is you're saying there are cities built on top of cities. And this is common in archaeological digs because you have a firm foundation, maybe you have a water supply, maybe it's a safe area. There's a lot of different reasons. And Joel said it's like a cake. Like you have a layer of a cake on top of a cake on top of a cake. So the debate is not location, which is the case for like Sodom and Gomorrah.

People debate what the location is. We know where Jericho is at. The question is what layer within Jericho matches up with the biblical account? And of course, skeptical writers would say if any of them match up to the biblical account. Is that a fair assessment? Yeah, that's absolutely right, Sean. right? We're just debating which stratum is to be associated with different eras. And so City 4 is a beautiful, beautiful layer in terms of what's there and has a very nice destruction layer.

And so a lot of people said, oh, it's got this beautiful destruction layer. It just seems to match. And they've pointed out other things. They've said, well, you know, they found jars of burnt grain. and that seems to align with what is in the Bible, which is true. It does seem to align with what's in the Bible. On the other hand, Garstang found jars of burnt grain at Jericho in the early Bronze Age, City 3, at a lower level. And they've found jars of burnt grain at Talalhamam in three different destruction layers

just across the Jordan River and at Hatzor in a 13th century destruction layer. So I'm not sure that it's maybe the smoking gun that people think it is, as the slam dunk, hey, this is the city that Joshua conquered. And so, yeah, we're just discussing it. Most of the debate has been about city four. Where my research comes into it is I'm looking at city five. And there is some overlap. And I want to be clear about that.

Some of the things that previously were associated with city four would, like the tombs, for example, now under the current stratigraphy by the current team digging there is associated with City 5. And so I'm looking at City 5 going, hey, what evidence is there from City 5 that matches it? But in terms of where it's located, everybody agrees. Telas Sultan is the name of the site today. You're right, there's a spring, a perennial spring

that's been flowing there from millennia, right on the eastern foot of the tell, the mound that's there. And so, yeah, that's Jericho. There's no doubt about that. It's just which stratum, which layer of that cake is the layer Joshua conquered. That's super helpful.

Now, you mentioned a name Kathleen Kenyon, and I'm not an archaeologist. I'm not going to pretend to, but in my interviews and my study of this, her name is one of the most recognizable and influential. So maybe explain who she is and what the traditional within scholarly views has been about Jericho, maybe the last like half century plus. Yes, so Kathleen Kenyon is a British archaeologist, and she was an excellent field archaeologist. In fact, those of us who dig over in Israel, we dig in squares, and we use a version of what's called the Wheeler Kenyan method in archaeology. We're actually using her methodology and archaeology. Her work was that transformative.

The reason that she is famous is because she excavated at very, very famous site. she excavated at Jericho, she excavated to Jerusalem. And so she really is a towering figure in archaeology of biblical sites. And she's famous at Jericho, of course, because when Garstang said, I found Joshua's Jericho, Kathleen Kenyon said, yeah, that's actually a middle Bronze Age stratum. That's about 150 years before Joshua. And it's unfortunate, Sean, because some people took that to mean that Kathleen Kenyon was denying the conquest or that she's the one who destroyed the Bible's credibility on the fall of Jericho. And people who suggest that haven't read her works because she absolutely believed in the historicity of the fall of Jericho.

Sometimes I'll quote things that she said. In fact, she said this. She said, all the canons of historical criticism demand that we accept the main facts of the story of the conquest of Jericho as authentic. For it was obviously an event of great importance in the ultimate dominance of the Israelites in Palestine and the wealth of detail makes it clear that it was a faithful record. That's not the Kathleen Kenyon I had heard about when I started down this road. Me too. And I started reading her work. And I realized that all she was saying was that City 4 was not the city that Jericho

that Joshua conquered at Jericho. She absolutely said that there was late, she published late Bronze Age pottery. Sometimes I recently watched a video on YouTube by an archaeologist saying, Kathleen Kenyon said she never found any pottery at Jericho. I'm sorry, but that's just not true. She published pottery from the late Bronze Age at Jericho. She excavated a late Bronze Age house that was destroyed in the 14th century that she associated with Joshua and the Israelites coming in. And so her work, I think, has been misrepresented, and I think it's been misrepresented by people on the right and the left.

I think people have kind of said, oh, see, she showed that Jericho wasn't, you know, the story of Jericho wasn't historically accurate. when that's not really what she was saying. She was saying city four is not the city that Joshua conquered. It fell in the middle of Bronze Age about 150 years before when I would date Joshua anyways. And so people have kind of taken that and either railed against her and tried to, you know, not just show that she's wrong. Because I don't have a problem with people coming along saying, you know what, that's incorrect for these reasons. I think that's good scholarship, right?

We fact-check people. But when it starts to get into some had hominem attacks, I don't like that kind of thing. And then on the other side, people have kind of said, oh, see, she showed that the Bible wasn't true. Well, that's not the view she held, and that's not what she said. So that's kind of the way that people have handled her

over the last 50 years or so. That's really helpful. I appreciate the clarity and the charity. That's something I try to do here in this channel. I'm not going to say I do it perfectly, but let's get into what she wrote and let's assess it fairly. So she wasn't challenging the existence of the conquest. That's a very separate issue.

Now, why then does Jericho pose a problem, or you might argue seem to pose a problem for those who take the historical reliability of the Bible seriously? Well, the reason it poses a problem is because Jericho has been excavated numerous times and quite extensively. And I should just maybe just make a little note there. When we talk about extensive excavations, I want to make sure that our viewers understand that most sites, we're talking 5% of the site maybe excavated, 10%.

Ephesus is a site that's one of the most excavated sites. I think only 20% of ancient Ephesus has been excavated. So when I say it's been extensively excavated, I want to put that in context for everybody. But there have been many excavations. There are four main ones, an Austro-German team in the early 1900s, John Garstang in the 1930s, Kathleen Kenyon in the 1950s, and then Lorenzo Negro's Italian-Palestinian team that's been excavating there since 1997. And the reason it poses a problem is that the results from these excavations have been confusing and contradictory. And there is no clear destruction layer that everybody agrees on and can point to and say, see, that's Joshua. And I would argue in part, it's because in the late Bronze Age, there's not a lot of stuff there.

So when I was researching in Jerusalem, I happened to be at the Albright Institute in Jerusalem, doing some research in their library. And I happened to meet a girl who was on Lorenzo Negro's excavation team. And I thought, oh, this is great. I can ask her my questions. So I said, hey, I'm doing some research on this. I'm researching Jericho in the late Bronze Age. And she goes, why?

There's not much. Why would you late Bronze Age stuff? There's not much there. I said, well, that's in part why I'm why. I said, there's lots of stuff written about middle bronze age and the early bronze age and the, and the, the, the, the, the, theolithic and even the later, the Iron Age, but not a lot of stuff about the late bronze. I want to know about that.

And so, so the problem of Jericho is that there's just not a lot of stuff and there's not a lot of, there's not a lot of material and there's not a clear destruction layer that everyone agrees and says, that's the stratum. That's the destruction layer. It's pretty clear. not like at a place like Lakeesh, for example, where we can clearly see, everybody agrees, that's the destruction layer of Sinacroab and the Assyrian invasion in 701 BC. We don't have that at Jericho. Okay, that's really helpful. And some of the questions we're going to get to are,

is would we expect to have that clear destruction layer? And so the lack of it is a surprise, or is it really not unexpected, just like when it comes to the Exodus, would we expect a Pharaoh to describe in detail a humiliating defeat and the loss of slaves. You might say we wouldn't expect such a, you know, details to be included. So that has a lot to do with how we assess this, what we expect and what's preserved in the remains. So we'll get to that. But maybe layout. We'll come back to the evidence. I want to walk through the case that you make. But first, what is your unique proposal for the conquest of Jericho? And how did you go about investigating it. Yeah, so I think there are two parts to my my unique approach to it. And we can talk

about my chronological approach, which is somewhat unique in terms of when I date or how I date the conquest period. But the big thing with my research is that I'm shifting the focus from city four to city five. And I haven't come across, well, anyone really before I started doing my research, who had made that shift, that paradigm shift to go, wait. Want to keep God's word with you wherever you go? The King James Bible Study, KJV app by Salem Media makes it easy to read, study, share, and pray daily with a timeless KJV translation.

Enjoy features like offline access, audio Bible listening, smart search, and tools to highlight bookmark and take notes, all designed to keep your Bible studies simple and organized. Best of all, it's free to download in the Google Play Store. Growing your faith every day. Search for King James Bible Study, KJV, and download the app today.

Two excavations are saying that City 5 is the city that was in the late Bronze Age, which is one we would place Joshua. And so when I set out to do my research, the first thing I did was I went to Scripture, went to the Bible, and I made a simple criteria screen based on the data that's in Joshua Chapter 2, which is the story of the spies going to Jericho, and then Joshua Chapter 6, which is the account of the fall of Jericho. And in a simple criteria screen to show that the site has to be occupied at the time frame, the Bible places it.

It has to be fortified. And it was destroyed. So we might expect to find some evidence of destruction. And so from there, I realize that if I'm going to date occupation, the primary way that we as archaeologists date an occupation level is through the material remains that people leave behind. And the primary dating method that we can use at this period of time, because this is before coinage, so we don't have coins that we can find that say, hey, this was Joshua or something like that. The primary way is dating things through pottery. We call that ceramic typology.

The way I described is this. My dad grew up. His house was behind a used car sales lot. And so when I was a kid, my dad could, if we saw an old 50s car driving down the road, I'd say, he'd add, what kind of car is that? And he'd look at it for a second. He goes, that's a 1955 Chevy something. And he could tell just because of the design of it. And so, because that changed through the years, every few years, they would change the design. The same is true of pottery, only not every few years. Pottery forms, pottery decoration, changes through history. And so that's the primary way that we date things. And so I knew I would need to learn about pottery. So I started contacting museums all around the world.

that had pottery from Jericho in their collections. And the curators were very gracious, sent me their lists. And then usually it was a big database with 10,000 pieces of something there. So I would go through and find everything I was interested in, try to find pictures of it. I went to the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem, one of the coolest experiences I've ever had. I bet. They took me down into the basement, which is, which doubled as a, the as the storehouse for the Israel Antiquities Authority.

So we're just talking rows and rows of wooden shelves with pottery on them. And so she brought me the little box of the pottery that I wanted to see. So I got to photograph a whole bunch of John Garstang's pottery from Jericho at the Rockefeller. I've been to the Royal Interior Museum in Toronto to photograph a bunch of Kathleen Kenyon's pottery from Jericho. And so I created a database of all of the... the known pottery from Jericho. So for the record, I have in my database right now, 174 vessels, 392 shards, four scarabs or seals, a picture of one canoform tablet, and one figurine for 572 artifacts from Jericho that date to the late Bronze Age.

So if anyone ever says, yeah, there's no evidence Jericho was really occupied at the time Joshua was around. I would beg to differ based on my research. And then I looked at the pottery assemblage from Jericho, and I compared that to the repertoire of pottery from six different sites, all within 50 miles of Jericho to say, okay, let's compare the pottery to see if that, because that will help us with the dating. And then I consulted some of the world's leading experts in ceramic typology. Dr. Robert Mullins from Assoac Pacific is probably the world's leading expert on late Bronze Age pottery. He literally wrote the chapter in the book on late Bronze Age pottery that we all use in the field called the ancient pottery of Israel and its neighbors. He wrote the chapter on it. He was very gracious to correspond with me and analyze some of my photos with me.

I reviewed past excavation reports. And of course, I read everything I could that Lorenzo Negro had put out. And thankfully, I think in God's timing, right in the midst of my PhD, he started publishing. he started publishing stuff on Jericho in my master's degree. He started publishing things. And so I was able to get a hold of some very hard to get articles and put that all together into my master's thesis. So that's kind of how I've arrived at the conclusions that I've arrived at. I will let our audience decide if this passes the barrier into obsession or not. But you are approaching this with a thoroughness. I appreciate. So humor me with this. I've been to Jericho.

and I've been on kind of the rim you walk around you can see inside. How deep is it? I don't recall roughly. What's the depth from the bottom to like the top platform if you had to just estimate? I'm just trying to think here probably, oh, that's a good question. 50 to 100 feet, I would think, from where you are. That's totally fair. That's about what I would have estimated.

And as you look down, you see layers of different cities one on top of another. Is city five, just the city. immediately on top of City 4 that was built on top of what is often considered the traditional time by scholars when the conquest happened? Is that really as simple as it is? Yeah, it really is that simple, right? You have the, and usually they're broken and then into sub-phases, so there might be, so for example, City 5 has City 5A and City 5B, and so corresponding to, you know, LeBron's 1 or lay bronze two period. And it really is that simple, right? Because you think about it, you have the early bronze people and then the city got destroyed. And there might be a couple of

different early bronze cities. And then the middle bronze people came. And because you've got a defensible position, you've got a water source right there. And then the late bronze on top of that. And then the Iron Age on top of that. And then you've got your Roman on top of that. And so now I will say this and it's important to understand that at Jericho throughout most of the tell erosion has eroded it down past the Roman past the Iron Age past the late Bronze Age to the middle Bronze Age period. So we can talk about that as one of the reasons we don't find a lot of stuff and that's part of it. So it's important to note that. Sorry, that makes it harder because these aren't just like in boxes that are just siphoned, you know, with dates on. And that's the challenge.

for an archaeologist. Okay, so it sounds like early on, part of your approach was I'm going to go to the text. I'm going to read the story in Joshua and see what it describes we should expect to find if the story is true and historical when we go to the archaeological record. Now, in your book, you kind of lay out three different things. maybe just tell us what we would expect to find first. And then I want to take them one by one and let you lay out your case. So what would we expect to find if we really did find the remains from the conquest of Joshua and Jericho?

Well, first of all, I mean, the text is clear, right? You've got Rehab, you've got her place of business there. You've got a king mentioned. You've got soldiers mentioned. So clearly it's occupied. So you would expect to find some evidence of occupation, and the primary evidence you find from that is pottery. So you've got occupation, first of all,

and it has to be around the right time of when that conquest happens. We can talk about that in a minute too, because that's important. The second thing is, was it fortified, right? You've got this description of a city. It's actually called a city. And the Hebrew word that's used for city is used. they use it differently in the Bible than we use it today. When we talk about a city today, we talk about a certain population size. That makes it a city. In the ancient world, when they

use that Hebrew word, it just meant that it had a city wall around it. So if it's, it's so the fact that it has that word means that it was fortified, it had a city wall. Plus, obviously the text in Joshua 6, a big part of it, which is what makes Jericho such a powerful image in the account, is that the walls came tumbling down, as the old song says, right? So you've got walls. You would expect to find walls. A gate is even mentioned in it. And so in the story, because Joshua chapter 6 says that they closed the gate each night.

And so you would expect to maybe find some evidence of that. And then finally, you've got the city being destroyed. And archaeologists love destruction layers because you can, you tend to be able to, it buries things. It seals a loci. It seals the area so you can really date it then based on the things you find underneath it. And within the story of Joshua, obviously the two most important parts from an archaeological perspective are collapsed walls.

That would be consistent with what the text says. And it says that they burn the city with fire. And so you might expect to find some evidence of a burn layer in different areas of the city. All right. that's really helpful. So let's walk through these and get your evidence. And the first one, it feels like there's two parts of the first one when you date it and that it was actually occupied. So tell us when you date the conquest to and why you think City 5 matches up with that time. Yeah. And that's one of the key questions people have to settle because if you look in the

wrong time period, you're not going to find the right stuff, the right materials. So the way I look at it, almost everybody who comes at the account of the Exodus and the conquest, and they're tied together because the Exodus happened and then they wandered in the desert for 40 years, wandering in the wilderness, and then we have the conquest. So, and the key text that we all pretty much go to is First King, 6.1. First King 6.1 says that Solomon began building his temple in the 480th year after the children of Israel left Egypt in the fourth year of his reign. So that seems like a pretty simple mathematical equation. If you accept the data literally, and I do, and one of the reasons I do, Sean, is because it says it was in the 480th year, which means that you count back

479 years. And 479 seems to me like a shockingly specific number that's not easily divided into some symbolic 12 generations of ideally idealized 40 years generations or however other people do because there are different people and just really simply there are two schools of thought one is that there's an early date to the exodus around the 15th century around 1446 or so they would say so a conquest around 1400 and then there's the late date which is in which is sometime in the 13th century, 1270, 1250. And I would be an early date guy. I tend to take scripture at face value,

particularly when you got specific numbers like 479. The main reason people choose the late date, and to be honest and charitable, the text says that the children of Israel, when they were slaves in Egypt, built the cities of Pitham and Ramsey's, right? And so Ramsey's was a pharaoh in the, the 13th century. So that's when they typically would place the Exodus based on that.

I would look at that and say that's just a later editorial updating of that because if you look back in the story of Joseph, where did they settle people? In the land of Ramsey's it says. So it's already been updated back then too. And so I don't think that's a problem. We know that they did that. The city of Dan is another example, right? It says it used to be called Lash and then it was called Dan, but it's used, the name Dan is used in the book of Genesis before it was actually Dan. And so I look at this and I go, okay, First King, 6-1 seems to be pretty simple. If you know the anchor date of the fourth year of Solomon's reign, you just count back 479 years. The problem for me is that I see imprecision in the biblical text surrounding

this issue in two regards. First of all, 480th year is how it reads in our English Bibles, which are based on the Masoretic text. There's a textual variant in the Greek translation, the Septuagint, it says 440th year. And the Greek Septuagint itself is based on a Hebrew text. And we know from the Dead Sea Scrolls that there were several different Hebrew translations before Christ. And so it seems that there was a Hebrew translation that the Greek translation is based on that read 440th. So I've done a deep dive into this, and I honestly can't pinpoint which I think is correct.

So essentially, I have to hold the fact that there might be, there are two viable biblical dates for the Exodus and conquest. So I look at it like that. And then the other thing is, it's only 1446 or 1406, if you choose the Masoretic text, it's it's the conquest will be 1366 if you choose the subtergent and that's only if you've got the anchor date of the fourth year of Solomon's reign right was it 967 like um like um like um like some say was it 966 like the great edwin tila said

kenyon said it was 960 Albright said it was 959 and so i just i just see too much ambiguity around this and then you add to that archaeological dating um it's not like all the potters woke up on January 1st, 1400 and said, all right, everybody, we're changing styles today. From now on, we're going with this style and this pattern. So pottery was used over a period of time. So even pottery dating has a date range. When we look at Egyptian chronology,

which is what the late Bronze Age chronology is based on, Egyptologists will tell you that there's a known plus or minus 20 years. year margin of error. Kitchen mentioned that. B-Tech, Hoffelmeyer, they all note this in the New Kingdom period, which is when we're talking, Joshua's conquest occurred. Carbon 14 dating has, you know, a date range. So I put this all together and I say, look, I'm going to take those two dates, 1406, 1366, around that. And I'm going to take a plus or minus two-decade window. which closes my window, it gives me an 80-year period. And I would say that sometime between 1426 BC and 1346 BC, the conquest occurred. And my approach is a little more new.

Looking for a simple way to stay rooted in God's Word every day. The Daily Bible Devotion app by Salem Media gives you morning and evening devotionals designed to encourage, inspire, and keep you connected with scripture. Plus, you'll enjoy daily Bible trivia and humor. A fun way to learn and share a smile while growing in your faith. Get the Daily Bible Devotion app for free on both iOS and Android. Start and end your day with God's Word. Search for the Daily Bible Devotion app in the App Store or Google Play Store and download it today. Once maybe than some people like, because in our modern world, we want to know exact, what's the exact date of this? And I go back, you know what? I think we're going back some 3,400 years. I think getting it to within 80 years is not bad.

in my own approach. Plus, I think that I'm just trying to be intellectually honest with the data in the text and with the archaeological dating methods. And so that's how I approach it. I call that the conquest window. Sometime at the end of the 15th century BC, first half of the 14th century BC, right in there, that's when I think the exodus, the conquest occurred, rather. Okay, so that's really, really helpful.

We don't have to go into some of the particular details because I know you're beginning your doctoral work and you're going to be analyzing this pottery in depth. So it'll be really interesting to see what the analysis shows when you're done with this. But what would be just kind of the quick points why you think City 5 falls within that window? Yeah. So the first thing would be the pottery. There's been pottery found on the site itself. And I've plotted all of the areas it's found. It's been found around the site and then primarily on the top of the tell, place called Spring Hill, which was the hill right above the spring. And that's where all, that was the prime real estate. That's where the palaces were. The early Bronze Age palace was there.

Middle Bronze Age palace was there. The late Bronze Age, they call it the middle building or Negro calls it the residency. Then the Iron Age building was, the Iron Age Halani Palace was there. And so they've found all sorts of painted pottery there. And that, it's called bichrome pottery. it seems to be, as I've looked at it, it seems to be standard Canaanite, black and red pottery that's been painted and it's fairly, now there is debate on whether it's actually true Cypriot pottery or just this copy stuff. And I think the latest research shows it's the copy stuff. And that was popular in that late 15th century throughout the 14th century BC, gone by the 13th century BC predominantly. So that should,

shows us it was occupied. Three tombs had whole vessels, reams of whole vessels from the late Bronze Age, Tomb 4, Tomb 5, Tomb 13. Again, that would date it, a Negro would date it from about 14. One of the tombs used from about 1450 down through the, the 1300s, and then the other two would be in that 14th century range. So those seemed to suggest that it was occupied. In the tombs, they found a number of seals and scarabs of Egyptian pharaohs. And so that's helpful. Well, it can be helpful. I should be careful how I say. I want to be fair. Because those were, I don't know if you ever, do you ever collect baseball cards when you were a kid? Basketball cards. Yeah. So I collected hockey cards as a kid here in Canada. And I sometimes compare scarabs to that. They were kind of handed down,

collected and handed down. And so very popular pharaohs like Thubmosis. the third of which we have a seal. That could be kept and traded and remade, you know, commemorative ones for years and years and years after. So maybe not very helpful. But there is a scarab of Hapshepsuit who was a female pharaoh, and she was not very popular. In fact, after she was the, the next pharaoh likely defaced all of her images.

And so probably not one that was highly sought after and collected. that might be helpful in dating. And then they're very helpful in dating if you find a scarab that's actually in a strata, a stratum that it dates to the time of that pharaoh. And that's what we have with Om and Hotep the third. And so when you look at this sequence of scarabs, it takes you from about the middle of the 15th century, 1450 or so, down into the first part of the 14th century into the 1390s, 1380s. And so again, you've got occupation there.

And then you've got a tablet. They actually found, Garstang found, a cuneiform tablet. And that was, it was badly damaged. They could make out the son of somebody. That's pretty much all they can make out on it. But Garstang himself said it is most like the Amarna tablets. And the Amarna tablets are a group of letters that were sent back and forth between the kings of the city states and Canaan and the Egyptian pharaohs because Egypt controlled Canaan. at this time. And so if that is true, then that would be another piece of evidence in the 14th century.

In fact, Negro summarized it this way. Just on the base of this one little cuneiform tablet, he said this. On the eastern flank of the tell, Garstang retrieved a late bronze clay tablet preserving an administrative text, which suggests the city had a political role, a palace, a ruler, and an archive. And so that sounds like kind of the city of Jericho I read about. out in Joshua chapter 6. And so all of that fits within my chronological window. Okay, so to catch everybody out, this is really helpful, by the way, Brian, is you would argue from the biblical text, there's a little ambiguity and imprecision in the language in the

years that the conquest should fall between 1426 and 1346. So 15th, 14th century within that window. So we go to the record and you lined up multiple things from the pottery that's found. there in City 5 that dates to that time. The tombs, the seals and scarabs, and a cuneiform tablet. Some of these are stronger than others, but there's a number of different factors that point towards occupation and dating to the time that you project the conquest would have happened. Step number one. Okay. Step number two is that there would be fortification that's there, not just occupation, not just people. What's the evidence it was fortified at that time?

time. Yeah, and this is where Negroes excavations have been very helpful because they've actually excavated. You've been there, Sean. So you know that one of the primary things you see when you first walk in at the southern side of the tell is this is this curving part of a big stone wall. They call it a cyclopean wall because I guess the ancient people thought only cyclopses could pick up rocks that big and put them in a wall. So we call it the cyclopean wall. And everybody, agrees that that was made before Joshua. That was middle bronze at the end of the middle bronze age period that that was part of the fortification system. And then what happened in the late bronze age is the city got resettled. Again, you've got a defensible position. You've got a spring of water right there.

By the way, the spring was encircled by the city walls in this particular site, which was very handy, particularly if people came to lay siege to the city. And what Negro's team did is they've, they've excavated another part of that city wall. And they have suggested that what happened was the late Bronze Age people built a mud brick wall on top of the stone wall. So the stone wall would be about about 15 feet tall and it encircles the site. That was left over from the middle Bronze Age. And the late Bronze Age people came along and they said, hey, this perfectly good wall standing here. let's build a, let's build a mud brick wall on top of it.

And so he, his team says he's published that the wall was six and a half feet wide. The mud brick part of the wall was six and a half feet wide. And it was just set back about about a foot from the front of the cyclopeum, that stone wall. And we have a kind of a rule of thumb in archaeology, one to three ratio for walls. So that's width to height. And so if that's the case, then the height of the mud bricks themselves was like 19 feet on top of a 15-foot stonewall. And so, I mean, you're talking over 30 feet there. So when the people came into Israel, you remember what they said?

They said, the spies came back. They said, oh, we saw cities that were walled up to the heavens. That would have seemed that way. And so Negro's research, and I should, in fairness, to. Dr. Negro. He is not a Christian. He does not believe that the Bible is true. He would probably say that the Bible is that this account is legendary or was used by someone much later writing the Bible to justify their existence in the land. But his research is kind of lining up with the fact that there was a walled city because there were people who previous generation said,

Yeah, most of the cities in late Bronze Age were not fortified. But now we're finding out that many of them were and Jericho was one of them. So that's what we would find. Now, this is where this is really helpful. If we know the tracing of that wall, we can now tell what, how big Jericho was. So Jericho was approximately 11 acres in size. So for comparison, Hatzor at this time was 207 acres in size. Lakeish was 20 acres in size

Megito was 49 acres in size Jericho's 11 acres You know in our minds we've heard these songs We've seen these these in my day The flannel graph right Of course Remember that in Sundays school And so it's taken on this mythical proportion

When in actual fact the archaeology suggests It was a small to modest size city Probably a couple thousand people And so all of that can be told From the fortifications Okay so Italian archaeologist Negro has been there since the 90s. Is that correct? Did you mention he started? That's correct. Okay. So this is the moment. 97. His last his last excavation that I can see he published a report from the 2024 season.

Okay. All right. So almost two decades plus definitely over two decades. The latest scholarship archaeological digs not Christianly motivated. would not take the Bible as the way that you and I would and other Christians would. Seems to confirm our first two points that there was, in terms of the dating within the 14th, 15th century, it was occupied as the Bible discusses, City 5. But second, there also was a fortified city significantly that lines up with the way the Joshua story is told. So far, it seems to line up with your case. The third piece, though, is evidence of destruction. It seems to me this would be the most contested point.

Was it destroyed in that era in a way that matches up with a famous story of them marching around the city seven days? And the walls came tumbling down. Well, the short answer is yes. We do have some evidence of destruction. And the first thing is, so I reached out to Dr. Negro and he graciously emailed me back. I asked him some questions. Oh, cool. And he said, well, I've answered those questions in a, in a,

in a chapter I wrote for this book. And so I went online and was able to procure a copy of this kind of rare, very obscenely priced German volume that he had written a chapter in. And I just wanted the one chapter, but that's okay. ABR was gracious. They said, no, no, we got you covered. We'll get that for you. And so I'm very thankful the Associates for Biblical Research for that.

And in it, he makes this statement. And he says, the late Bronze Age mud brick walls were recognized by Kenyon in the trenches she excavated. And I went, wait a minute. No, I've read Kathleen Kenyon stuff. She said she didn't find any walls. She actually said that the walls had disappeared from erosion. So I was curious. So I'm looking at his references.

And then I tracked down the parts in Kenyon's excavation volume. And here's what he's saying. The walls that she associated with City 4 that she thought were Middle Bronze Age, he is now saying those are late Bronze Age. Those are City 5 walls. And so I'm reading the description of these walls. She describes it as a heavy fill of fallen red mud bricks piling up to the top of the revetment. This is the, this is, and there's a very famous side drawing, cross-section drawing,

of Trench 1 that ABR has used for years that shows this pile of red mud bricks that would have created like a, almost like a siege ramp going up into the city when it fell. And, and so that's been part of the debate around city four. Negro is now saying those are the walls from city five. Those are the late Bronze Age walls from city five. And we have collapsed mud bricks at the bottom of the walls. Now that seems to align with what scripture says. And then we have Kathleen Kenyon who excavated a domestic dwelling. And she found several walls from this house. She found an oven, like a beehive-shaped oven. We call them taboons in archaeology. She found a dipper jugglet, a little jugglet that was there. She was the only late Bronze Age vessel that they found that they

were able that was whole on the tell in C2. And she said this. She said, beside the oven, a single dipper jugglet was lying on the floor. This jugglet is the only late Bronze Age vessel we have found in C2 on the tell, the evidence seems to me to be that the small fragment of a building which we have found is part of the kitchen of a Canaanite woman who may have dropped the jugglet beside the oven and fled at the sound of the trumpets of Joshua's men. And then she goes on to say, to date that destruction to the 14th century BC. So now we've got destruction within the time frame of the chronological window. The big thing is, is there evidence? of fire. And this is where, when you look at Jericho and you look at the burn layer from the early

bronze level, there's a beautiful right on the southern part of the tell where the inner gate is. I took a picture of it. It's a gorgeous burn layer. It's early bronze age, but beautiful. Marriage was never meant to be effortless, but it was meant to endure. Tried and true is a scripture-centered marriage guide for couples who want a marriage shaped by faith, not perfection. I'm Dana Shea, the author. In this book, I explore 12 imperfect biblical marriages, stories marked by struggle, waiting, failure, and restoration. Rather than offering quick fixes, tried and true helps couples to understand how spiritual intimacy and emotional connection grow through hardship, not the absence of it. With biblical insight, reflection, and guided conversation,

this book meets couples in the long middle of marriage and points them toward lasting hope. Available now at tried and true marriagebook.com or find tried and true everywhere books are sold. Burn layer. The middle Bronze Age city has a great burn layer. But then we come to the late Bronze Age city and there's just not much left there from it. But Lorenzo Negro has noted that the late Bronze Age ended in some kind of conflict. So he mentions that there is fire, but he says it's hard to tell. It's not documented in a clearly documented way because of the excavations of the first two teams that excavated it in a non-reconstructible way. So he's admitted that there's some evidence of fire, but he hasn't been really clear on the dating of it. But he does note that there is a drought of archaeological evidence in the 13th century,

during the period of Ramsey's at Jericho, which has been interpreted as an abandonment of the site. So it seems to be that he would be kind of saying that it's in the 14th century then, this destruction by fire. We don't exactly know. We do know that Garstang found some evidence of an outer layer of burnt debris outside of a city wall. Now, he had misstated one of the city walls that he thought was from Joshua's time. but was a thousand years earlier. But another part of the wall, even Negro admits, he got that one right, and he's mentioned some burn layer there in the late Bronze Age.

Unfortunately, we can't be more specific with the dating. But I would suggest that we've got collapsed mud bricks, and we've got destruction in the city with Kathleen Kenyon's domestic house, and we've got some limited destruction by fire. It seems to align within that chronological window, but that's the best we have at this time. And so I would look at this and I would summarize and I say when you put this all together and you look at the pottery and the scarabs and the walls and the destructions and you just

kind of line them up, they all seem to align even though they kind of have different timeframes, they all seem to align right within that chronological window we set for the conquest. Okay, this is so fascinating and interesting. as far as I understand, a shift in where the conversation could go amongst the larger scholarly assessment of Jericho and also potentially where evangelical scholars would date it and potentially an alignment that maybe we haven't seen in the past, if you're right. So the strength is you date this between 14th and 15th century, 1426 to 1346 based on the Bible. We find it's occupied during that time for a number of reasons. reasons that you gave. We find that it was fortified during that time, and there's evidence of

destruction. The weak link, if there were one, is that it clearly describes in Joshua burning the city, and there's some evidence for that that lines up, but maybe not as clear as we would expect based on the text alone going to the archaeological record. Is that a fair way to put it? Yeah, I think that's absolutely fair. And so one of the things I've looked at at the text is this. When it says it burned the city, they burn the city with fire. To our modern minds, maybe images of Dresden in World War II come to mind. But I don't know that the text is actually saying the entire city was burned with fire. First of all, they didn't build a lot of things with wood back then. It was mostly stone. But the other thing is that, and Kenneth,

Kitchin pointed this out in his great book on the reliability of the Old Testament. He points out that there is a lot of rhetorical language in the book of Joshua. For example, in Joshua chapter 10, I think it is. They talk about how they wiped out the Amorites. But then the text goes on to talk about the Amorites who they didn't wipe out. Well, wait a minute. I thought you just said you wiped out the Amorites. It's a little bit like when I played hockey as a kid. I went to, we have one high school and all the communities sent their kids to that. So we went to school during the day with the same guys. going to be playing against at night. And so sometimes there was a little trash talk going on and we'd say things like, you know, you're dead meat tonight. Now, we didn't literally mean we were going to

kill them. That was just rhetorical language we were using. When we look at Hatsor, which is another city that they burned, it seems that there is some limited evidence for burning at Hatsor in a city gate in one of the temples and maybe in part of the palace. And so that date, that date, to this period, 15th, 14th century period. The bigger destruction layer is in the 13th century at Hatzor. And so I think that you could have limited burning in symbolic areas of the city that would satisfy burning the city with fire if that phrase is being used in a way that involves some rhetoric. We tend to impose really literal translations on how we read the Bible, particularly in Western North America.

And I think that if you look at it from a rhetorical point of view, and there are examples of that in Joshua, this might be an example of that. And so I might not find a beautiful burn layer that's the whole site-wide, but I might find examples of it here and there, and that would satisfy the text. It's a similar move that Paul Copan makes when he's talking about more the moral challenges of genocide,

when it says completely wipe out the Amalcites and the Canaan and sometimes it says they were, but then they show up later in the text. It's like, wait a minute. Now, of course, the challenge to that, which we don't need to really go into detail here, is then it raised the question, what part is exaggeration, what part is not? So it could turn around and challenge us on the other side, and we have to be careful that what lines up, we say, oh, that's historical, and what doesn't we go, that's exaggeration. And that's some of the challenge that I'm sure you have to wrestle with and other scholars.

So let me ask you this. Do you, are you planning, you sent me your book, which was fascinating. It's, I think, about 120 pages. It's like a more than a carpenter-length book that's very readable. But you have some of the scholarship backing this up just called Joshua's Jericho. But have you and are you planning on publishing some of this in journals to get scholarly interaction outside of, say, the evangelical world or even amongst other evangelical archaeologists? Yeah. So two things. First of all, I have two articles right now that are up for peer review,

one in, well, I won't name the magazines, but one has to do with the archaeology in an archaeological journal, peer-reviewed archaeological journal, and the other has to do with my chronological approach in an evangelical theological journal. And so I'm trying to get that out there. In fact, I'm holding off on publishing our stuff in our own magazine, Bible and Spade, until I get it through peer review there. The other thing I would note is that I, that as this was part of my thesis, I had a great thesis committee.

Dr. Scott Stripling, who you've had on your show here before, was on my thesis committee. Dr. Steve Collins is my primary, primary professor. You've had him on to. Dr. Gary Byers was my faculty advisor. And they were very good at questioning me,

of challenging me, of getting my thinking, particularly since, while both Scott and Gary are part of Associates for Biblical Research, and Bryant Wood was our main guy for years and years. And so I've tried to be really respectful because I have a huge respect for Bryant and what he did. I think he presented a plausible case for City 4 as Joshua's Jericho over 30 years ago with the data that he had available. And I would like to build on that. I like to think I'm building on his work and trying to present a plausible case for City 5 using the latest archaeological data. And so they were very good at helping me refine my work. I have some other friends in ABR who were very good. And, you know, even people, I have friends who haven't fully subscribed to my theory,

but, you know, one of them said to me, you know, Brian, I really appreciate that you appreciate that you're doing original thinking on this and not just recycling and reciting what everybody is, everybody else has been doing for 30 years. And so that's been part of what I'm doing. And hopefully these two articles will get through peer review and I'll be able to get some of that scholarly interaction because I think that's very helpful. I also have some other people who are interacting with me, who are also students who have different views than I do. And so I'm doing some interaction with them and back and forth and what they see and what I see. And that's very helpful too to help me refine my thinking on this.

It's important for people to see that this is a part of the process. If you go through this process, you make a case for City 5, and at the end of the day, it's not plausible. And you say, you know what, I made a case. It made sense. City 5 is not the best candidate. That's really helpful in the world of archaeology. I actually consider that a win from somebody looking on the outside.

I mean, when I researched the apostles for my own doctor, oral work. At first, I was like, I got to make this argument as strong as I could. And then I paused. I'm like, wait a minute, this is not how you do archaeological. I'm sorry, this is not how you do historical research. I got to figure out what is the evidence that they died as martyrs, where they died, and then assess, does this contribute for an argument for the resurrection? And if so, how? And so some people have critiqued me for not being more aggressive in my argumentation of their martyrs, their martyrdoms. And I'm like, friends, the evidence is not there. We have to follow where it leads.

And I still think we can make a good case, but we have to nuance it. So how confident at this stage, I realize you haven't done a deep dive on the pottery yet. You're proposing certain things. It's new in the process. but how confident and optimistic are you in your case for City 5 for the conquest? I would say at this point with the data that we have available, I think I've presented a strong case, a plausible case given the data. Now, at the end of my book, I note that Lorenzo Negro has not published his final dig report with all the data and all the pottery plates from Jericho yet. And so when he does, I mean, I reserve the right to change my mind.

But at this point, the stuff that they have done has been good work harmonizing the data from the previous excavations along with their own. And if they're correct and if City Five is the late Bronze Age stratum there, and I think based on the work I've seen of theirs, that they present a good, strong case, I think that given the fact that a lot of the site has been eroded over, over time that in the Iron Age they basically scraped the tell clean and and rebuilt on top, which might also explain why a lot of the late Bronze Age stuff is found around the outside of the tell. I think in light of those things, I think that City Five is a viable candidate for City Five. I tend to be within ABR, the cautious guy who is trying not to overstate my case. Yeah. And so I do want to dive deeper into the, into the pottery in particular to see if we can,

can clarify and tighten the dating a little bit more. I'm looking at things like, for example, my current project right now, I've got an isometric drawing of the, of the middle building, and I'm plotting all of the pottery into the different rooms based on Garstang's excavation report. and looking, seeing, okay, and one of the rooms he describes stratigraphy, so I'm looking at that. I'd like to look into these type of pottery called Cypriot milk bowls because authentic shards and imitation shirts have been found by all of the excavation teams at Jericho. I think there might be some more there.

But right now, I think in a general term, because I take a window, chronological window approach, I'm confident that City 5 is the city that Joshua conquered. I would like to, with my research, just try and narrow down that date as much as I can with the pottery. Well, I love it. Cautiously optimistic. And I have to say to you, when I was first hired at Talbot, the committee at that time, one of the directors said, you know, she's like, Sean, you know, sometimes apologists get ahead of themselves and don't state things cautiously.

in the world of academia, if you get hired, make sure you don't do that. I distinctly remember that. And that's such good advice. And I would say, I've been a professor of 13 years, you do that really well. You make a case. You tell a traumatic, interesting story. I will be following this for sure. But I think you're not overstating your case from what I can tell.

So I think really, really good work. Keep us posted, if you will. So if your journal articles come out. If there's some new other breaking, you know, incident where it lines up or doesn't, you know, maybe we'll have you back. And maybe somebody with a different perspective to kind of debate this back and forth. But keep us posted. And I will let people here know what's going on in this world. And in archaeology, when we say, you know, this happened fast, that might be six months or five years.

These things work slowly. But this- Need a daily spark of hope and direction? Let the Daily Bible app from Salem Media. be that spark. This free Android app delivers an uplifting verse each morning, plus reading plans, devotions, and trusted podcasts from leaders like Joyce Meyer and Rick Warren. Prefer to listen instead? The Daily Bible app reads verses, reading plans and chapters allowed, handy for the headphones moment of your day. Choose from versions like ESV, NIV, KJV, and more, and bookmark favorites

to revisit later. Share inspiring messages with loved ones right from the app. Feel God's presence in every notification. Search for Daily Bible app. on Google Play and begin your day with hope, purpose, and peace. This is about as fun and exciting of a story I've heard in a while. Thanks for your original research. Appreciate you coming on. Your book, Joshua Jericho. It's very easy to read and understand you make a case,

but also taught me a few things about the story itself. I hadn't really noticed before. So thoroughly enjoyed that. We'll have you back. Folks, before you click away and make sure you hit subscribe, we will keep covering archaeological news and stories and events here. especially really in particular is it intersects with the Bible. We also, in our master's program in Apologetics,

we will have weekend classes, top night people like Titus Kennedy, on the latest on biblical archaeology. If you're thinking, I want to do a deep dive and apologetics to study some of this stuff. Think about joining me at Talbot. We also have a new certificate program where we walk people through some of the top lectures. We just updated it. And then just some simple assignments to learn apologetics. you can get a certificate saying you know some things about apologetics. Big discount below.

Brian really enjoyed it. Again, I hope people pick up your book. And please keep us posted on how this unfolds because, my goodness, it is this big and important story from the Old Testament with a lot of implications that I think somebody can find. So thanks again for coming on. Thanks so much for having me. This has been fun. Hey, friends, if you enjoyed this show, please hit that follow button on your podcast. app. Most of you tuning in haven't done this yet, and it makes a huge difference in helping us reach and equip more people and build community. And please consider leaving a podcast review. Every review helps. Thanks for listening to the Sean McDowell Show, brought to you by Talbot School

of Theology at Biola University, where we have on campus and online programs in apologetic, spiritual information, marriage and family, Bible, and so much more. We would love to train you to more effectively live, teach, and defend the Christian faith today. And we will see you when the next episode drops. This is Chris Christensen, and back in 2006, I started a simple project, a project to try and introduce more people to the Bible through Bible study called the Bible Study Podcast. It's a simple name and a simple idea. Each week, every week, we study one chapter of the Bible, talk about what it says and what that might mean for us today. To listen to the and now go to life audio.com or search for the Bible study podcast on your favorite podcast app.