Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Archaeological evidence records the sacking of the city of Jericho, but radiocarbon dating of this event puts it much earlier than the generally accepted dates for the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt.Since the Bible claims that Jericho was destroyed forty years after the exodus, this discrepancy has led most scholars to question the historicity of the biblical account.Many have concluded that the exodus from Egypt and the Israelite conquest of Canaan were not real events.Surprisingly, radiocarbon dating of the Late Bronze Age is also in question, because at several critical sites such as Akrotiri, Avaris, and Jericho, radiocarbon ages are consistently older than dates from pottery stratigraphy.These discrepancies are a huge problem for both biblical and secular archaeology.On the one hand, there is a lack of evidence to support the historicity of the biblical account; on the other hand, secular archaeologists have failed to explain the Middle Bronze Age "collapse" in Canaan, of which the fall of Jericho was a part.This paper reviews radiocarbon constraints for several important sites, and concludes that the coherence of biblical and archaeological accounts would be greatly improved by adopting an early sixteenth-century date for the biblical exodus.
DOI: 10.58913/nzya6759
Author: Alan Dickin
Institution: McMaster University
Language: English
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4401343076