Setting the Stage

For the past several years, I have conducted a deep dive into the latest archaeological research on Jericho as part of my master’s thesis. This involved hundreds of hours of investigation, two trips to Tell es-Sultan (ancient Jericho), studying Late Bronze (LB) pottery from Jericho in person at the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. Along the way, I consulted the world’s leading expert in LB ceramic typology.¹

To organize my research, I built a database of all known published LB artifacts from Jericho, as well as those held in museums around the world.  In total, my database currently contains 572 LB artifacts, including 174 vessels, 392 sherds, four scarabs, one cuneiform tablet, and one figurine.

All of this came together in my thesis entitled “Tell es-Sultan/Jericho City V: The City the Israelites Conquered?” which will soon be published as a book through Trowel Press.

Over the next few months, I will be releasing some of my research about the fall of Jericho, as described in Joshua 6. In this first post, I will set the stage by describing the history of excavations at Jericho, the debate surrounding the dating of City IV, as well as present my view that City V is the city that Joshua conquered.

The Importance of Jericho

Jericho poses a problem to those, like me, who uphold the historical reliability of the Bible. The results of multiple excavations at the site have been both contradictory and confusing. Many scholars believe the archaeological data are at odds with the description of the fall of Jericho in Joshua 6. For example, Finkelstein and Silberman noted that “the famous scene of the Israelite forces marching around the walled town with the Ark of the Covenant, causing Jericho’s mighty walls to collapse by the blowing of their war trumpets was, to put it simply, a romantic mirage.”²

Yet, if the account of the fall of Jericho in the book of Joshua is a historical record of an actual event, one would expect to find some evidence of occupation, fortification, and destruction around the time of Joshua. I believe that the most recent excavations at Jericho by Lorenzo Nigro and his team from Sapienza University, combined with past excavations, provide such evidence.

Which City is Joshua’s Jericho?

Tell es-Sultan consists of a series of cities, built on top of one another throughout the millennia, creating strata, much like a layered chocolate cake. The controversy surrounding the stratum at Jericho associated with Joshua’s conquest has largely centered on the dating of the well-known destruction of City IV.  While everyone agrees that this Canaanite city of Jericho was destroyed in a violent, fiery manner, not everyone agrees on the date for this event. 

The first excavators, Sellin and Watzinger, who dug seasonally from 1907 to 1909 and again in 1911, originally misidentified the stone Cyclopean Wall as Israelite and the double mudbrick city wall as the Canaanite walls that came tumbling down before Joshua’s army.³ Later, in 1926, Watzinger adjusted his conclusions in light of other excavations, attributing the Cyclopean Wall to the last phase of the Middle Bronze Age and the double mudbrick wall to the end of the Early Bronze Age.⁴ This essentially placed the destruction of City IV in the Middle Bronze Age, much too early to have been destroyed by Joshua, who conquered the city in the Late Bronze Age.⁵

In the 1930s, archaeologist John Garstang excavated a residential area of Jericho and concluded that the fiery destruction of the city occurred in the Late Bronze Age, ca. 1400–1385 BC, linking it with Joshua and the Israelites.⁶

From 1952–58, Kathleen Kenyon excavated at Jericho and corrected Garstang’s view, dating the destruction of City IV to the end of the Middle Bronze Age, ca. 1550 BC.⁷

In the early 1990s, Bryant Wood, who did not excavate at Jericho, suggested that Kenyon’s analysis of the date of this destruction was incorrect, as he believed she had based her conclusions largely on the absence of Cypriot bichrome pottery.⁸

Most recently, Lorenzo Nigro, who excavated from 1997 to 2000 and 2009 to 2023, upheld Kenyon’s dating of the destruction of City IV to the end of the Middle Bronze Age.⁹ Moreover, one of the major achievements of Nigro’s team from Sapienza University was a harmonization of the data from previous excavations with their own into an overall periodization of the site.¹⁰ According to their stratigraphy, City V occupied the site during the LB I and II periods.¹¹ Indeed, they found LB remains on the southern, eastern, and north-western edges of the tell.¹²

The Stratigraphy of Jericho According to Lorenzo Nigro’s Team from Sapienza University (Adapted from Nigro, Lorenzo. 2016. “TELL ES-SULTAN 2015: A Pilot Project for Archaeology in Palestine.” Near Eastern Archaeology 79.1: 4–17 and Nigro, Lorenzo and Jehad Yasine. 2024. “Interim Report on the Excavations at Tell es-Sultan, Ancient Jericho (2019-2023): The Bronze and Iron Age Cities.” Vicino Oriente XXIX, 47-96.)
ARCHAEOLOGICAL PERIOD	DATES	STRATUM/CITY
Epipaleolithic (Late Natufian)	10500–8800 BC	Sultan Ia
Pre-Pottery  Neolithic A	8800–7500 BC	Sultan Ib
Pre-Pottery  Neolithic B	7500–6000 BC	Sultan Ic
Pottery  Neolithic A	6000–5300 BC	Sultan IIa
Pottery  Neolithic B	5300–4300 BC	Sultan IIb
Chalcolithic	4300–3500 BC	Sultan IIc
Early Bronze Age IA	3500–3300 BC	Sultan IIIa1
Early Bronze Age IB	3300–3050 BC	Sultan IIIa2
Early Bronze Age IIA	3050–2850 BC	Sultan IIIb1
Early Bronze Age IIB	2850–2700 BC	Sultan IIIb2
Early Bronze Age IIIA	2700–2500 BC	Sultan IIIc1
Early Bronze Age IIIB	2500–2300 BC	Sultan IIIc2
Early Bronze Age IVA	2300–2200 BC	Sultan IIId1
Early Bronze Age IVB	2200–2000 BC	Sultan IIId2
Middle Bronze Age IA	2000–1900 BC	Sultan IVa1
Middle Bronze Age IB	1900–1800 BC	Sultan IVa2
Middle Bronze Age IIA	1800–1700 BC	Sultan IVb1
Middle Bronze Age IIB	1700–1650 BC	Sultan IVb2
Middle Bronze Age III	1650–1550 BC	Sultan IVc
Late Bronze Age IA	1550–1470 BC	Sultan Va
Late Bronze Age IB	1470–1400 B.C.E
Late Bronze Age IIA	1400–1300 BC	Sultan Vb
Late Bronze Age IIB	1300–1200 BC
Iron Age IA	1200–1136 BC	Sultan VIa
Iron Age IB	1136–960 BC
Iron Age IIA	960–840 BC	Sultan VIb
Iron Age IIB	840–732 BC
Iron Age IIC	732–585 BC	Sultan VIc
Persian Period	535–333 BC	Sultan VIIa
Hellenistic Period	332–64 BC	Sultan VIIb
Roman Period	64 BC–AD 324	Sultan VIII
Byzantine Period	324–636	Sultan IX
Early Islamic Period	636–1000	Sultan X
Crusader Period & Middle Islamic	1000–1250
Late Islamic (Mamluk) Period	1250–1516
Ottoman Period	1516–1918	Sultan XI
After World War I	1919–Today	Sultan XII

My View

If Watzinger, Kenyon, and Nigro are correct, City IV could not have been the city that Joshua and the Israelites conquered, as it was destroyed much too early. However, according to the latest stratigraphy, City V was occupied in the Late Bronze Age, suggesting it may be the city that fell during the conquest.

When I began my research, I realized that few evangelical Christian scholars had interacted in a meaningful way with Nigro’s research. In fairness, it has only been in the last few years that he has published anything of substance about Jericho in the Late Bronze Age.¹³ Thus, in addition to rereading the writings of Sellin & Watzinger, Garstang, Riklan,¹⁴ and Kenyon, I have read everything I could find that Nigro has written about Jericho City V.

While he has not yet¹⁵ published a final excavation report, I believe there is enough detail in his current publications to establish that Jericho was occupied, fortified, and destroyed around the time the bible indicates the conquest occurred. In the coming months, I will be sharing some of my research to support the claim that City V is a viable candidate for the city that Joshua conquered.

Acknowledgements

Some of my readers who know my role as a Staff Researcher and Writer with the Associates for Biblical Research (ABR) may be surprised to find that I hold a different view on the city Joshua conquered than Dr. Bryant Wood, ABR’s Director of Research. He believes that City IV was the city that Joshua conquered, siding with Garstang over Kenyon¹⁶ (and presumably Nigro). I am grateful for Dr. Wood’s research and have tried to build upon his work. Much of the latest archaeological data, including refinements in comparative ceramic typology, was not available to him when he developed his position over three decades ago. While we have reached different conclusions about which city (stratum) at Jericho was conquered by the Israelites, I have a great respect for Dr. Wood and his legacy.

I am also grateful for the support of those at ABR who encouraged me to pursue my research, even though it went in a different direction than we, as an organization, had been presenting for many years. One of the things I appreciate about ABR is that they allow scholars to hold different views, as long as they hold to the supremacy of the Bible. Scott Lanser, the former president, as well as Henry Smith, Scott Stripling, and Gary Byers, were willing sounding boards, helping me clarify and condense my research. Both Scott and Gary were advisors on my thesis committee.

As I seek to change the paradigm by demonstrating that the archaeological evidence from City V aligns with the biblical criteria for the occupation, fortification, and destruction of the city, I am thankful for those who have helped guide me in my research.  

Next Month: In part two of this series, I will be presenting my approach to the date of the fall of Jericho. If one looks in the wrong time period, then the evidence for the conquest will be missed.

Cover Photo: Bill Schlegel / BiblePlaces.com / Used with Permission

Endnotes

1 Dr. Robert Mullins was gracious enough to interact with me regarding the bichrome pottery discovered at Jericho. He co-wrote the chapter on Late Bronze Age pottery in the key book on ceramic typology that we use on our dig in Israel. Mullins, Robert A. and Eli Yannai. 2019. “Late Bronze Age I–II,” in The Ancient Pottery of Israel and its Neighbors, Volume 3: From the Middle Bronze Age through the Late Bronze Age, ed. Seymour Gitin. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society.

2 Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman. The Bible Unearthed. New York: The Free Press, 2001), 82.

3 Lorenzo Nigro, “In the Shadow of the Bible. Archaeological Investigations by the Deutsches Palästina Vereins before the First World War: Taannek, Megiddo, Jericho, Shechem.” In Archéologie dans l’Empire Ottoman Autour de 1900: Entre Politique, Économie et Science, edited by V. Krings and I. Tassignon, (Bruxelles-Rome: Institut Historique Belge de Rome, 2004), 224–225.

4 Maura Sala, “The Archaeological Expeditions to Tell es-Sultan (1868-2012).” In Archaeology in the ‘Land of Tells and Ruins’: A History of Excavations in the Holy Land Inspired by the Photographs and Accounts of Leo Boer. Ed. Bart Wagemakers. (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2014), 124.

5 I will address the date of the conquest in my next blog. According to a literal reading of the data in 1 Kings 6:1, the fall of Jericho occurred around 1406 BC. However, the biblical text has some uncertainty about the exact year of Solomon’s fourth regnal year, so there’s a degree of imprecision built in. To complicate matters further, the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament) reads “440th year” instead of “480th year,” which shifts the conquest date to about 1366 BC. In my own work, I prefer to use what I call a “chronological window” approach, which looks for archaeological evidence that is ± 20 years on either side of both possible “biblical dates.”

6 John Garstang and J.E.B. Garstang. The Story of Jericho. (London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, Ltd., 1948), 179.

7 Kathleen M. Kenyon, “Some Notes on the History of Jericho in the Second Millennium B.C.” Palestine Exploration Quarterly, 83:2, (1951), 117.

8 Bryant G. Wood, “Did the Israelites Conquer Jericho? A New Look at the Archaeological Evidence.” Biblical Archaeology Review 16.2 (March/April 1990), 50.

9 Lorenzo Nigro, “TELL ES-SULTAN 2015: A Pilot Project for Archaeology in Palestine.” Near Eastern Archaeology, 79.1 (2016),11–15.

10 Lorenzo Nigro, “The Italian-Palestinian Expedition to Tell es-Sultan, Ancient Jericho (1997–2015): Archaeology and Valorisation of Material and Immaterial Heritage,” In Digging Up Jericho: Past, Present and Future, eds. Rachael Thyrza Sparks, Bill Finlayson, Bart Wagemakers and Josef Mario Briffa, (Oxford: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd., 2020), 178.

11 Lorenzo Nigro, “TELL ES-SULTAN 2015: A Pilot Project for Archaeology in Palestine.” Near Eastern Archaeology, 79.1 (2016),11.

12 Lorenzo Nigro, “The Italian-Palestinian Expedition to Tell es-Sultan, Ancient Jericho (1997–2015): Archaeology and Valorisation of Material and Immaterial Heritage,” In Digging Up Jericho: Past, Present and Future, eds. Rachael Thyrza Sparks, Bill Finlayson, Bart Wagemakers and Josef Mario Briffa, (Oxford: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd., 2020), 204.

13 Lorenzo Nigro, “Tell es-Sultan/Jericho in the Late Bronze Age,” in Durch di Zeiten: Through the Ages, eds. Katja Soennecken, Patrick Leiverkus, Jennifer Zimni and Katharina Schmidt. (Munich: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2023), 599–614.

14 In December 1992, Shimon Riklin, on behalf of the Staff Officer for Judea and Samaria, conducted a sounding on the west side of the tell, to the south of Kenyon’s Trench I and unearthed a section of the EB mudbrick city wall. His work has no bearing on the date of City IV, but, for completeness, I read his excavation report, which is often overlooked.

15 As of September 2025

16 Bryant G. Wood, “Did the Israelites Conquer Jericho? A New Look at the Archaeological Evidence.” Biblical Archaeology Review 16.2 (March/April 1990), 44–57.