The Butcher of Canaan

What must be going through their minds? Dazed with defeat, dragged from their refuge and brought before the leader who had conquered them, these five men must have known that their future was as dark as the cave in which they had hidden, and which had become their prison when their enemy had blocked its only exit. If there is any hope in their thoughts at all, it must be in the wish that this man before whom they now stand would prove himself to be a man of honor, a principled leader who, guided by his [1]beliefs, would be magnanimous in victory, would display some measure of mercy as a gesture of true greatness.

Dragged from the cave which had become their prison.

It is not to be. Instead, they find themselves forced to the ground, are publicly humiliated as, at the prompting of their leader, each captain in his turn sets his foot upon their necks, grinding their faces into the dust of their own homeland. This grim ritualized humiliation over with, the leader himself then steps forward and personally beats them before finally killing them. He then hangs the five corpses on trees and leaves them hanging there until sundown. The corpses are then cut down and thrown unceremoniously into the cave which had been their refuge, and the entrance is sealed forever.

Each captain in his turn sets his foot upon their necks.

It is an incident shocking in its ruthlessness. If these five men were hostages of Al Qaida we would be howling our disgust. Instead, we know these details because all that I have described above can be read in the Old Testament’s Book of Joshua (Joshua 10:22-27), and it is Joshua himself who is the leader in question. My previous [2]post about Joshua dealt with the scriptural account of the defeat of Jericho and its apparent conflict with the archaeology on the ground. That post questioned the veracity of the scriptural account, but with this post I’m assuming these events to be true – not because I personally believe them to be, but because millions around the world accept that they are. This post is about the consequences of accepting that truth.

Historians might disagree about the exactness of the frontiers, but there is no disagreement that Canaan was a part of the Egyptian empire. This map shows the empires as they were during the reign of the heretic king Akhenaten in Egypt, which paralleled the historical situation during the scriptural account of the Israelite conquest of Canaan.

Joshua again presented himself as a subject for a post when I read in my King James Version that the editors describe Joshua’s life as being filled with [3]‘excitement, variety, success and honor’. It’s hard to argue with the first three. But honor? As I have come to realize, an Apologist will find a way to justify [4]anything – as long as that ‘anything’ is found in scripture. So justify this: the Book of Joshua provides us with a list of Canaanite cities conquered by Joshua, but only gives a figure for those slain for one of them – the city of Ai to the west of Jericho. Since, without exception, the entire populations of these cities are slaughtered by the Israelites, and we are given an initial list of ten cities and one battle, as the numbers slain in Ai are given as 12,000, then a low-end estimate for the total inhabitants of these cities slain could feasibly have been some 80-100,000 civilians.

Had Joshua’s Israelite forces existed they would have found the Canaanite battleground already occupied. Events above the timeline are confirmed and corroborated by history, and yet none of these events and the occupying forces which were involved in them are mentioned in the scriptural account of Joshua’s supposed conquest. The events in Joshua could have taken place sometime between 14-1300BCE. While these dates coincide with a period of relative weakness of Egyptian power in Canaan, it was the Hittites, not the Israelites, who took advantage of this.

But further along, we are told that the total number of Canaanite kings defeated by Joshua was thirty one (Joshua 12:24), so the number of field engagements, battles, sieges, kingdoms and other conquests would raise this total considerably. Let’s go with a reasonable estimate of a grand total of 180,000-200,000 Canaanites killed by the Israelites, both armed forces and civilians. Not a [5]soul was left alive in any of the Canaanite cities which fell to Joshua’s forces.  Men and women, children and the elderly: all were put to the sword without mercy. Again, it is scripture itself which tells us this.

Achan is brought before Joshua to face judgement. The sentence: death by stoning. 

So what about Israelite losses and defeats? Forget defeats, because none are mentioned. And losses? In the entire campaign, we are told only of 36 Israelite casualties (Joshua 7:5), slain by the men of Ai in an Israelite ruse that partly misfired. The following verses describe Joshua’s despair at these Israelite deaths, even to questioning the direction of his whole campaign. It turns out that a certain Achan, in violation of God’s stipulation, could not resist doing a little looting in defeated Jericho. This had angered God, which in turn had caused things to go against those 36 Israelites. Joshua gets back on God’s good side by having Achan stoned to death for his misdemeanour, and the campaign is back on track. Evidently a spot of looting by a single individual angered God considerably more than the Israelites’ unbridled slaughter of thousands of Jericho’s civilians. The total annihilation of the population of Ai is what follows, so we can conclude that God is again on Joshua’s side.

“And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.” Joshua 6:21. This single verse from scripture graphically relates the fate of the civilian population of Jericho at the hands of the Israelites: a fate repeated for every Canaanite city which they were supposed to have conquered. It presents those who accept the Bible as the revealed word of God with a stark choice: either reject scripture and take responsibility for your own moral worth, or accept it as fact, and attempt to morally justify the slaughter of women, children and the elderly in the name of God.

But the Canaanites were not monsters who needed to be cleared out of the way as if Joshua were some dragon-slayer ridding the land of a curse. They were, it is worth remembering, ordinary folk concerned with gathering in their harvests, trading what they had to trade, keeping their families, living out their lives and paying due homage and respect to their [4][13]beliefs. And they were living on their own land. From the Canaanite side of things, Joshua and the Israelites must have seemed like agents of chaos: a devastating invasion force which wreaked havoc and destruction, slaughtering the families which they had struggled to raise, stealing their lands and turning their world into dust and ruin.

Akhenaten (left) and Ramesses II, both with very different attitudes to Egyptian interests in Canaan, and during whose reigns the region would become alternately more chaotic and more subservient. 

But there were other regional forces in Canaan at this time. Why is there no mention whatever in scripture of the Israelites encountering Egyptian military resistance? Tablet correspondences found in [6]Amarna and from the later reigns of the pharaohs Seti I, Thutmose III and Ramesses II actually mention Canaan, which was still a part of the Egyptian Empire. Egyptian forces were garrisoned there - and the Egyptians would later go to war to defend their Canaan territory against the fearsome Hittites. So what happened? Did they just sit back and watch as Joshua stole this part of their empire from under their noses? Why do scrupulous Egyptian records frequently mention Canaan but not the [7]Israelites? Is it because there were in reality no Israelite forces for Egypt to be concerned about?

A Canaanite khopesh (top) from the Late Bronze Age, with (below) a bronze Egyptian khopesh from the tomb of Tutankhamen. The fluting on the metal would have given the weapon extra strength. Canaanite weapons were often copies of weapons used by the Egyptian occupying forces. Very little is known about Israelite weapons from this period, although it is assumed that they also followed Egyptian precedents. The distinctive blade probably evolved from the shape of an axe, and in Dynastic Egypt the khopesh also had a ceremonial function. The Assyrian sword - the sapara - also followed this design.

Were we to read this exact same account of the conquest of Canaan in an [8]other-than-scriptural source, and were we to view Joshua simply as a figure from history in the light of these events, we surely would conclude (if we have any moral values) that here was a conqueror who truly gloried in slaughter, as ruthless in his nature and in his deeds as any Attila the Hun or Genghis Khan – or even any Babylonian despot from his own world. Instead, as we know, the Book of Joshua became canonical scripture, and its commander is looked upon as the worthy successor to Moses who led his people into the Promised Land. Normal human decency has been stood on its head, and a man who otherwise might have – with every deserved justification – become known to history as the Butcher of Canaan ends up instead being described as a man of honor.

Hawkwood


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Part Two: The Square Peg of Scriptural Genocide, the Round Hole of Moral Acceptability

Justifying the genocides: I am aware of the various Apologist (Wolterstorff, Copan, Flannagan, et al) justifications for the genocides in the Book of Joshua, which claim that they are intended to be taken symbolically in some way. But such Apologist explanations for this scriptural trail of death fail to address the moral premise that, real or not, these massacres are stated in scripture as being executed with the blessing of God. Whether the massacres were symbolic, allegorical, etc. becomes immaterial to the stark fact that in scripture God was okay with all this, and actually approved of it (hence the Israelites' sweeping victories with improbably negligible losses to themselves). Indeed, at the battle of Gibeon (Joshua 10:10 and 14) we are told that God personally joined in the slaughter. My point stands: what does this say about the Israelites as a people, and about the deity who guided them?

An ivory Canaanite game board with gold inlay, complete with counters or pegs of gold, Late Bronze Age. This is one of the few such boards to survive relatively intact. Such sophisticated craftsmanship and luxurious styling present a different picture from the one of an [3]‘idolatrous and dissolute’ people put forward by those who seek to demonize the Canaanites in order to justify scriptural genocide.

The historicity of the genocides: Because of the anthropological (linguistic) and archaeological discrepancies with the purported Israelite conquest of Canaan and lack of corroboration from other contemporary sources, I personally am not convinced that the Israelites conquered Canaan at all. The most likely historical scenario is that at the time of Joshua in the Late Bronze Age many of the Canaanite cities that were reported as being conquered by the Israelites were already in a state of semi-ruin (which is what the archaeology on the ground indicates) from the Egyptian conquest and occupation. Almost a full millennium later, the Israelites, who in all probability emerged from the Canaanite diaspora that was displaced by the Egyptians, saw the ruins and exploited them by contriving a conquest by their own forebears that never actually took place. The cities already were in a state of disrepair, and the writers of Joshua, penning their tale some eight to ten centuries after the time of the presumed Israelite conquest, drew their own colourful conclusions as to who did the conquering, thus providing themselves with a fallacious conquerors’ pedigree.

The Hittites: masters of war, and men of [9]iron. The notoriously bellicose Hittites were in northern Canaan during the time frame of Joshua's own purported incursion. And yet, as with the Egyptian military forces, no mention is made in scripture of any Hittite-Israelite encounter.

In the shadow of Beit She’an: If there is one thing which confronts us with the improbability of the scriptural account of the conquest of Canaan it is the existence of the fortress of Beit She’an (a.k.a. Beth-Shean). From the Book of Joshua we learn that, having conquered the southern Canaanite cities, Joshua regrouped his forces at Gilgal and then marched north: a route that would have taken him directly up the west bank of the Jordan River Valley. He defeats the near-impossible odds of a powerful Canaanite alliance at the waters of Merom, then swings east to sack and burn the city of Hazor. In scripture these events all move along swimmingly, but a map of that time frame suggests a very different scenario.

The Location of Beit She'an Fortress 

The command centre of the Egyptian occupying forces in Canaan, Beit She’an’s highly strategic location assured its control both of the east-west routes through the highlands to the coast, and the approach to the northern Jordan River Valley. The palace of the Egyptian governor of Canaan was also situated on its heights. The route of Joshua’s forces supplied by scripture would have left Joshua no option but to pass north in the very shadow of this stronghold – and yet in scripture it is as if it does not exist.

Beit She'an as it is today

Beit She’an was considered to be near-impregnable. Only after 1100BCE was it overrun – not by the Israelites, but by the Philistines. So what did Joshua and the Israelites do – sneak past the fortress while the Egyptian military was having lunch? One hardly can imagine the Egyptian governor leaning over the parapet and shouting, “Good luck in the north, lads!” as the Israelites tramped by. For the whole time frame of the supposed Israelite conquest, Canaan was controlled by the Egyptians. And yet the Book of Joshua never once mentions the presence of the then-resident Egyptian forces stationed in Canaan, or any Israelite-Egyptian military encounter.

The idea that the Egyptians just sat back and watched as those upstart Israelites snatched a swathe of their empire from under their noses is stretching all historical credulity – and strongly suggests the way in which the writers of the Book of Joshua had drifted out of touch with the historical situation on the ground of almost a thousand years before. Egypt, remember, was still powerfully in control of Canaan after the Israelites were supposed to have conquered it.

The approved portrayal of Joshua: a suitably heroic Bronze Age figure clad in glinting armour. But his armour is from the Iron Age of centuries later, and his helmet (which also is from the Iron Age) is that of the Assyrian cavalry - the future conquerors of Israel. Evidently this artist was somewhat hazy about historical time frames.

The Christian perception of Joshua: For me to read on a North Carolina minister’s [10]blog the continuing justifications which a Christian must produce to hammer the square peg of scriptural genocide into the round hole of moral acceptability (even after admitting, as this minister does, that the conquest of Canaan was ‘brutal’) is not merely sad: it is morally repugnant. And this particular Christian blog is by no means unique. Among others I have come across is the [11]Grace Communion International website, which actually states at the outset that “Joshua is one of the Bible’s great books of courage and faith.” – but then glosses perfunctorily over the Israelites’ multiple acts of mass slaughter. Yet another Christian [12]blog indulges in the usual [13]demonizing of the Canaanites, and explains that the genocides are not actually genocides but (quoting Calvinist pastor Mark Dever) “the expiration of God’s mercy” – which for me reading it provided another WTF moment. This blogger (who apparently is a Christian missionary) then goes on to explain that the mass slaughter in the Book of Joshua does not actually count as genocide because “God owns the land, and the people in it. They are his to do with as he pleases.”

What if Joshua was a Canaanite? I am left to reflect that had Joshua been a Canaanite, and had he committed all the various atrocities attributed to him in the book which bears his name, Christians would have painted him blacker-than-black. Instead, he indulges in acts of truly bestial carnage and, apparently merely because he is ‘on their side’ (whatever that means) Christians have him repeatedly emerging smelling like a rose garden, and as an individual who enjoys the respect of three world religions (Christianity, Judaism and Islam). Is such selective blindness to serial acts of callous inhumanity what faith and moral awareness are about?
Hawkwood

A special thank you to any reader who has stayed the distance over this, my longest post to date. Scripture cannot be divorced from the historical context in which it was written, any more than its moral values should be viewed as a special case, divorced from moral values which we otherwise would uphold. To endorse genocide merely because it happens in scripture is to uphold the ethics of despotism.

Notes:
[1] A god of genocide: The point here is that Joshua’s god – the God of the Bible and of Christianity – is supposed to be a morally superior and more humanly responsive deity than the beliefs of the lands which Joshua conquered. But we are in a bizarre situation in which events in the Book of Joshua make it manifestly clear that this is not so. The God in Joshua (and not just in this particular book of scripture) is palpably a deity, not of principles and values worthy of emulation, but of such gross moral standards that he actually approves of and appears to encourage acts of slaughter and even genocide which are committed in his name. This is not my personal opinion; it literally is the scenario which scripture presents to us.

[2] Joshua, Jericho, the Trumpets and the Wall.


[3] Demonizing the enemy: This is quoted from the Zondervan King James Study Bible, page 274. Incredibly, this Apologists’ Bible justifies even Joshua’s acts of mass slaughter by taking pains to describe the Canaanites as “idolatrous and dissolute” (demonizing one’s perceived enemies is a standard ploy for justifying the unjustifiable) and the bloody campaign against them as being part of “a history of redemption unfolding… with its interplay of divine grace and judgement” (page 272), which is, I believe, the most astonishingly callous way of justifying genocide that I have come across anywhere. If the Canaanites were so depraved, how is it possible that one of them became the architect of the very house of God? Yes, it was a northern Canaanite (Phoenicia to the Greeks) who designed Solomon’s temple (my painting of its reconstruction above) in Jerusalem.

[4] Gods of Canaan and Israel: The justification given in Joshua is a justification of belief and of territory: the territory of claiming Canaan for the Israelites in the name of their god, and the struggle between an emerging monotheistic faith and a resident polytheistic faith. The principal Canaanite god is named in scripture as Baal. Baal is however not a name, but a titular term of address meaning ‘Lord’. Since various deities were called by this term – including originally the Israelites’ own deity – isolating which ‘Baal’ is being referred to in scripture is down to region. The Baal of northern Canaan was a rain and weather deity – likely attributes for a people for whom rainfall and a good harvest were critical. The gods both of Canaan and Israel had animal sacrifices made to them; the life blood of those animals flowed in their name. So which god could reasonably claim the moral high ground: the god of the Canaanites who was petitioned for good harvests, or the god of the Israelites who encouraged mass slaughter?

[5] The solitary exception is the woman Rahab (right) and her family in Jericho, whose life was spared after she had provided refuge for two Israelite spies.

[6] Please see my post The Amarna Heresies. Ironically, it was the pharaoh Akhenaten’s self-absorbed preoccupation with art rather than with foreign policy which gave the Hittites their foot in the door of northern Canaan. 

[7] Please see note [2] in my post Joshua, Jericho, the Trumpets and the Wall. Ethnically, the Israelites were Canaanites, belonging to the same principal language group of Hebrew, which is often a determining factor in establishing a people’s origins. The Egyptians referred frequently to the Habiru, a stateless brigandage in Canaan. It is thought that ‘Hebrew’ stems from this term.

[8] Ah, but that is the problem: there seem to be no independent historical sources for the Israelites’ conquest, which surely would not have gone unnoticed by the other regional powers involved.

[9]  In Joshua 17:18 we are famously told that the Canaanites had 'iron chariots'. Since the only people in this time frame known to use iron were the Hittites, it can be taken as a further indication of the degree to which the writers of Joshua in the Iron Age had little historical perspective of the situation in Bronze Age Canaan of many centuries before.    

[10] The Mattrix - The Canon of Glory: Joshua

[11] Grace Communion International - Joshua: Conflict and Conquest

[12] Brance Gillihan's Blog - Devoted to Destruction

[13] 'Sinful': Quoted from Brance Gillihan’s blog: “The Canaanites were wicked people. They worship demon gods to whom they sacrificed their own children by burning them alive. They engaged in perverted sexual practices as part of their worship. God is judging them for their sins.”  This picture (right) is doing the rounds of the Internet as 'Baal worship'. But the massive bronze idol is an archaeological nonsense, and the child sacrifice is a dubious anthropological one. There is no substantive evidence for such Canaanite sacrifices (the classical source for these lurid stories is actually in Carthage, not Canaan), but let’s assume them to be true. In what way is this more ‘sinful’ than all the atrocities - including the scripturally recorded killing of children - committed by Joshua which God smiled upon?


Sources:
Beth Alpert Nakhai: Archaeology and the Religions of Canaan and Israel. The American Schools of Oriental Research, Boston, MA, 2001.
Michael Sugarman: Trade and Power in Late Bronze Age Canaan. Academia.edu PDF.
Ian Shaw (editor): The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt. Oxford University Press. 2000.
Jonathan M. Golden: Ancient Canaan and Israel: An Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2009.
Rivka Gonen: Burial Patterns and Cultural Diversity in Late Bronze Age Canaan. The American Schools of Oriental Research, Boston, MA, 1992.
Gregorio Del Olmo Lete: Canaanite Religion According to the Liturgical Texts of Ugarit. Eisenbrauns, Winona Lake, IN, 2004.

The three scenes from the Book of Joshua are painted by James Tissot, late 19th-early 20th-centuries. The artist of Joshua crossing the Jordan (incorrectly attributed on the Web to the author and minister J. W. McGarvey) and the artist of the imagined portrait of Rahab are both unidentified. The Canaanite khopesh is from Baidun Antiquities. The Egyptian khopesh is in the Cairo Museum, as is the statue of Akhenaten. The statue of Ramesses II is in the Turin Museum. The Canaanite board game is in the collection of the University of Chicargo. Reconstruction of Solomon's temple and the maps and timeline by Hawkwood, © David Bergen Studio, All Rights Reserved.

Joshua, Jericho, the Trumpets and the Wall

When Julius Caesar wrote his account of the conquest of Gaul, he was not writing it as a personal diary, to keep those events fresh in his mind. He was not even writing it to preserve a record for history as such. He was writing it specifically to impress the Roman senate with his abilities of conquest, and he took pains to describe himself as a capable general of war who could – and did – win new territories for the Roman Empire. The account of the conquest of Gaul was, as it were, Julius Caesar’s doctorate.

Accompanied by the Ark of the Covenant, Joshua leads the Israelites across the Jordan towards Jericho (Joshua 3:17) and the conquest of Canaan. Scripture tells us that the waters miraculously parted to ensure that the Ark remained dry; wonders which Caesar had to make do without during his own conquest of Gaul.

Caesar made a suitable token gesture of modesty by always referring to himself in the narrative in the third person: ‘Caesar did this, he did that..’, as a way of distancing himself from the fact that he, the writer, was also the star of the story. But knowing the circumstances of why these events came to be written, we also can assume that Caesar beefed things up here and there in the narrative to cast himself in the most favourable light, and any messy [1]setbacks in the campaign were sometimes glossed over.

The Egyptians’ expansion of their empire by conquest followed a different pattern from the Romans’ of later centuries. The Egyptians would have maintained military garrisons in Sinai and Canaan, but did not export their culture and social laws to these new territories, as did the Romans in later centuries. The hieroglyphs, believed to indicate the word ‘Israel’, are from the [2]Merneptah stele.

In Gaul Caesar triumphed, and it became his prerogative to write history in his favour. But taking things one step further: supposing that Caesar had written his account… but that the conquest of Gaul had never actually taken place? Supposing that instead he had taken truly sweeping liberties with events, and had sat in his tent in some secluded corner of Gaul concocting the whole story of the conquest merely to impress? Were we to happen across his account in another millennium or two, and intervening history had become clouded, would we actually realise the subterfuge?

Scripture relates (Joshua 2:1-24) how the woman Rahab gave aid to two Israelite spies: a deed which prompted Joshua to spare her life and those of her family, so making them the sole survivors of the ensuing massacre. Subsequent translations describe her as a prostitute, although the original texts do not specify this.

Archaeology can both confirm and refute what we read in scripture. The principal Canaanite city of Jericho can be excavated. But excavations in Jericho have shown that in the era of Joshua it was a city without a [3]wall, so Joshua’s [4]trumpets bringing down the wall (with the help of the Almighty) might make a stirring story, but we have to doubt that the defeat of Jericho happened in the way in which scripture describes. With Jericho, we are confronted with a situation in which the texts tell us one thing, and actual excavations on the ground tell us another. But what about Joshua’s conquest of other cities in the land of Canaan? To go one step beyond: were Jericho and other Canaanite cities even conquered by the Israelites at all?

The walls of Jericho as they are today. 

It is not so much what archaeological excavations of these cities have turned up. It is more what is not found there. The more excavations have continued, the less signs have been unearthed of any Israelite warfare having taken place. There were no obvious signs of destruction in that time frame, and few weapons. What had happened? And how to explain the fact that the Israelites were so familiar with Canaanite beliefs and customs?

Jericho pottery from the period 3000BP up to the Middle Bronze Age of 1500BP: the time of the maximum expansion of the Egyptian Empire and its conquest of Canaan.

No less than other scientific disciplines, archaeology must go wherever the evidence takes it. As a practicing science, it does not exist to confirm what we prefer to believe. The Israelites were a new people without a history of their own. In this Bronze Age time frame, and in this place, a people’s credentials consisted of conquest. You were, so to speak, what you conquered. And if you had not actually conquered anyone, well then, you apparently shuffled the deck to make that happen. And so it seems that the Israelites wrote their own fictitious history of glorious [5]conquest, perhaps as much to give themselves a sense of their own identity as to impress others.

Some of the principal cities in the Canaan region which have been the subject of archaeological investigations. Cities such as Ai and Hazor, specified in scripture as being conquered by the Israelites, were already ancient ruins by the time Joshua and his forces were supposed to have arrived there. According to scripture, Gezer and Megiddo (from which comes our word Armageddon) were so strongly fortified that Joshua made no attempt to storm them. 

But Canaanite cities already had been conquered by Egypt long before Joshua arrived on the scene. The people whom scripture calls the Israelites probably were displaced refugees from this conquest – and many if not most would have been from Canaan itself. In other words: the Israelites were the Canaanites. This readily explains their familiarity with Canaanite traditions and beliefs – including their original pantheon of their god having a consort: the ‘Elohim’ (‘gods’) of Genesis, which refers to God’s consort, the Canaanite goddess Asherah. The scriptural account of the presumed ‘conquest’ of Canaan under Joshua was first written down some eight hundred to a thousand years after the events described – time enough to embellish things, and to create a catalogue of conquest which never actually took place.

And what a catalogue it is. From Jericho to Ai, from Ai to Makkeda to Libnah to Lachish to Eglon to Hebron to Debir, on and on (Joshua 8:1-onwards). The result is always the same: no Israelite losses are recorded, and all inhabitants of these cities – men, women and children – are slaughtered without mercy. Were this tragic list true, it would mean that the Israelites practiced ethnic cleansing in the land of Canaan on a genocidal scale. And what would that say about the Israelites – and about the God under whose sanction they operated? Do you really want it to be true?

Accompanied by the Ark of the Covenant, the trumpets sounded, the Israelites shouted, and the walls of Jericho came tumbling down. Or did the Egyptians beat the Israelites to the punch?

Excavations on site appear to suggest that the whole story in scripture of Joshua opening his conquest of Canaan with the defeat of Jericho (with God as his ally) is a fabrication. Not only did Jericho have no effective defensive wall at the time for the sound of the trumpets to cause to ‘fall down flat’: the city was not even a real going concern when Joshua and his army were supposed to have been there. So it seems that the unknown writers of these texts sat in their metaphorical tent in a corner of the land and fabricated the whole account of the conquest of Canaan.

Even Julius Caesar with his occasional possible embellishments in his account of the conquest of Gaul never presumed to stretch the truth as far as the unknown writers of scripture. Canaan was conquered, as was Gaul – but by the Egyptians many years before the Israelites even existed as a regional force. And when Joshua arrived at Jericho, he would have found many of its buildings in ruins, and its wall already buried in the dust. 

Hawkwood 

Notes:

[1] The massacre at Ai: I’m being a little uncharitable to Caesar here, as his account generally seems to be an honest one, recounting both victories and setbacks. One crushing defeat in northern Gaul resulted in fifteen Roman cohorts (about 1720 men) being annihilated. Such narrative even-handedness is hard to find in the scriptural account of the presumed conquest of Canaan, which sweeps from victory to victory with truly ruthless savagery on the part of the Israelites, naturally enough with God's sanction, and with the unrealistically negligible loss of thirty six Israelites (Joshua 7:5). In the central city of Ai (the aerial view of the excavations, right) the Israelites indulged in yet another bloodbath, killing all twelve thousand of its inhabitants in a single day (Joshua 8:25). As I point out in this post, the whole conquest of Canaan by the Israelites could well have been fabricated. The pages of the Book of Joshua are so drenched in blood and slaughter that I for one sincerely hope that it is. 

[2] Israel: The Dynastic Egyptians, meticulous bureaucrats as always, mention the Israelites by name only once in three thousand years of their scrupulously-recorded history. A granite stele of Merneptah (left, with the hieroglyphs alleged to represent 'ISRAEL' highlighted), son of the famed Ramses II, proclaims tersely that ‘ISRAEL IS LAID WASTE, IT'S SEED IS NO MORE.’ The hieroglyphs on the stele indicate that the Israel referred to was considered to be, not a recognized city state, but a stateless semi-nomadic people. In the interests of accuracy, however, the stele hieroglyphs specifically say, not ‘Israel’, but ‘I.si.ri.ar’. It was its discoverer, the 19th-century archaeologist Flinders Petrie, who concluded that it meant ‘Israel’. But since the land referred to is Canaan, Petrie’s conclusion seems reasonable. Please see also Note [5] below for an explanation of the 'seed' context.

[3] Dating the walls: Archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon established that walls existed, but that these date from the Early, not the Middle Bronze Age. Therefore by the time of Joshua, these walls would have largely disappeared, buried beneath a city that was razed by the Egyptians. These conclusions were however made in the 1950’s. Subsequent further excavations point to Jericho being occupied by a nomadic squatter population in the Middle Bronze Age, when it would have been unfortified. By the time of Joshua in the Late Bronze Age there would have been little left of the largely deserted city to conquer. The city walls revealed in excavations are therefore unrelated to the time frame of the scriptural account. Few examples of the impartial ethics of science are as defined as in the excavation of the city of Jericho. Those who look for ‘proof’ of the Biblical account of a walled city that was destroyed will find what they seek in the ruins of Jericho. But such conclusions must necessarily ignore the discrepancy of centuries in the time frame provided by impartial archaeology.

[4] Two possible options: The entire account of Joshua’s conquest of Jericho can be found in Joshua 6:1-27 (left: Hebrew animal horn shofars). When the Israelite forces entered the city it was another gore fest massacre, with all within the city – men, women, children and the elderly – even oxen, sheep and donkeys – being put to the sword by the Israelites (Joshua 6:21). So either you accept scripture, in which case you must go along with the scenario that the Israelites were brutalized thugs who slaughtered women, children and the elderly – or you accept likely archaeological conclusions, which would let the Israelites off the hook, but would by default mean that the story in scripture is fabricated false witness. Which are you going to choose? 

[5] The question of the burnt grain: Dynastic Egypt added Sinai and Canaan to its conquered territories just as Rome added Gaul and other regions. The phrase on the Merneptah stele: "..its seed is no more" was a standard phrase referring to the Egyptian practice of destroying the grain store of a vanquished enemy, knowing that a missed harvest and starvation would be the result. This is exactly what we find at Jericho, where all the cached grain (right) has been burned and left behind. This burnt grain, characteristic of Egyptian conquest, has in part provided the C14 dating of the Dynastic Egyptian conquest of the city, centuries before Joshua's time. This is crucial, as it is clearly not logical that either the Canaanites or the victorious Israelites after them would have been resident in a city which contained existing burnt grain stores. Apparently this burnt grain also had the editors of the Christian fundamentalist Creation Wiki website scratching their heads when they came to write their entry on Jericho. They wonder why the Israelites burned the valuable grain, instead of taking it with them. The conclusion which they arrived at: "the Israelites were told to dedicate everything in the city to the Lord" – which goes to show just how much the shoe can be stretched to fit the foot.

The Empire that got overlooked
The Creation Wiki entry on Jericho nowhere mentions either the dating significance of recent archaeological finds or the fact that Jericho was actually sacked by the Egyptians – or even that Canaan was once part of the Egyptian Empire. Since this information is generally available, I can only conclude that the site editors knew of the information (presented here in my own post) but chose deliberately to omit it because it conflicts with the scriptural account. I have more respect for my readers than that, and if something is known then I’ll include it on this blog, yes, even if it conflicts with my own conclusions. Deliberately excluding material out of a fear that it will weaken one’s case is the surest way of admitting how weak that case is to begin with.

Sources:

The archaeological aspects of this post have been drawn from the field excavations, researches and writings of:  Israel Finkelstein, chairman of the Archaeology Department, Tel Aviv University. Archaeology historian Neil Asher Silberman. Ze’ev Herzog, professor of Archaeology, Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures, Tel Aviv University. Kay Prag, DPhil FSA, director of excavations in Jordan, et al. If you have objections to what is written here, please take them up with these academics. I’m just the messenger.

Joshua and the Israelites crossing the Jordan, Rahab with the two Israelite spies, and the priests blowing the trumpets have been repainted for this post from the 19th-century engravings by Julius Schnorr von Caroslveld, and are three of a complete cycle of engravings which von Carolsfeld produced for an illustrated edition (left) of the Bible. His engraving of the birth of Eve features in my other post The Ecstasy of Eve. The versions for this post have been painted by Hawkwood for the David Bergen Studio © All Rights Reserved.

Schnorr von Carolsveld might not always have portrayed things faithfully to scripture (in the third painting here, the trumpets should be shofars, the Levites bearing the Ark should be barefoot, etc.), but his art nevertheless expresses a lively dynamism which sweeps the viewer along with the action.