Originally posted by Mountain Man
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Originally posted by Mountain Man
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Re Kenyon's discoveries at Jericho,in her first season Kenyon discovered that overlying the Middle Bronze Age defences was Iron Age material dating back to around the seventh century BCE. There was no evidence of any defences from the late Bronze Age, purportedly the period of Joshua. Those findings showed that Garstang's original datings had been wrong. The pottery that he had discovered was clearly Early Bronze Age and was dated to the third millenium BCE not to the period associated with the Conquest of Joshua.
Originally posted by Mountain Man
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As a further point of interest another discrepancy between archaeology and the Bible was found at the site of ancient Ai, where so we are told Joshua carried out his clever ambush. This site was identified as Khirbet-et-Tell, a large mound in the eastern area of hill country to the north-east of Jerusalem. Its geographic location closely matched the biblical description and nor were there any alternative Late Bronze Age sites within the vicinity. Excavations there in the 1930s discovered the remains of a huge Early Bronze Age city that was dated to over a millennium before the collapse of the Late Bronze Age. However, there was no indication [either by pottery sherds or any artefact] that there was a settlement there in the Late Bronze Age.
[See, Miriam C. Davis Dame Kathleen Kenyon: Digging Up the Holy Land, Routledge, 2016; and Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts, Simon and Schuster, 2001]
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