Jericho’s Bronze and Iron Age Destruction Sequence
Tell es-Sultan preserves millennia of walls, rebuilding, and catastrophe, but its best-documented burned fortified city ended in the late seventeenth or sixteenth century BC, leaving no destruction horizon that scholars can securely identify as Joshua’s conquest.
- Artifact date
- Middle and Late Bronze Age through Iron Age; principal fortified-city destruction around the mid-sixteenth century BC in conventional chronology
- Discovered
- 1930
- Findspot
- Tell es-Sultan, ancient Jericho, in excavations by John Garstang and later Kathleen Kenyon
- Current location
- In situ at Tell es-Sultan; finds in Palestinian, British, and other institutional collections
What archaeologists can actually examine
Jericho is not one wall and one fall but a mound containing twenty-nine major occupation phases. Bronze Age builders repeatedly fortified the spring settlement with ramparts, stone foundations, mudbrick walls, towers, and gates. The best-known City IV destruction ended the Middle Bronze fortified town in widespread fire and collapse, leaving burned stores and architecture. Kathleen Kenyon’s stratigraphic excavation placed this catastrophe around the mid-sixteenth century BC, and high-precision radiocarbon on short-lived cereals and charcoal confirmed a late seventeenth- or sixteenth-century horizon. Late Bronze occupation is represented more sparsely and was affected by erosion, leveling, and later activity; recent Italian-Palestinian excavations continue to refine those remains. Archaeology establishes formidable defenses and violent destructions, but it does not yield a consensus walled-city destruction matching either common fifteenth- or thirteenth-century models for Joshua.
Jericho preserves many walls and destructions
Neolithic, Early Bronze, Middle Bronze, Late Bronze, and Iron Age remains must be separated rather than combined into one event.
City IV ended in fire and collapse
Burned rooms, mudbrick debris, vessels, and stored grain document a sudden terminal Middle Bronze catastrophe.
Radiocarbon supports an early destruction date
Short-lived cereal and charcoal samples place the principal fortified-city destruction in the late seventeenth or sixteenth century BC.
Late Bronze occupation was limited and altered
Some activity is present, but erosion and leveling complicate reconstruction and no consensus Joshua destruction has emerged.
Location is secure; historical attribution is not
Tell es-Sultan is ancient Jericho, yet neither walls nor fire identify the attacker described in Joshua 6.
Follow the evidence from discovery to debate
Move through the find in a deliberate order: establish its provenance, examine the surviving object, place it in time, and then weigh the scholarly interpretation.
How the find came to light
Charles Warren sounded Tell es-Sultan in 1868. Ernst Sellin and Carl Watzinger excavated in 1907–1909 and 1911, followed by John Garstang’s campaign from 1930 to 1936. Garstang connected a burned city and collapsed defenses with Joshua. Kathleen Kenyon returned from 1952 to 1958 using Wheeler-Kenyon stratigraphic trenches and separated the Early and Middle Bronze walls that earlier excavators had combined; she dated the principal burned fortified city centuries earlier than Garstang’s biblical attribution. Since 1997, joint Sapienza University of Rome and Palestinian Department of Antiquities teams have excavated, conserved, and republished Bronze and Iron Age areas. This long history explains conflicting popular claims: different expeditions encountered different walls and used changing ceramic chronologies and methods. The surviving archive must be read by locus and phase, not as a single photograph of Joshua 6.
What you are looking at
Tell es-Sultan is an oval mound beside the perennial ‘Ain es-Sultan spring. Its most famous defenses include the much earlier Neolithic stone wall and tower, Early Bronze fortifications, and massive Middle Bronze ramparts faced with stone and crowned by mudbrick walls. In City IV, collapsed mudbrick, burned rooms, vessels, and charred grain record a sudden destructive event. Those remains should not be confused with the Neolithic tower or with walls of other Bronze Age phases. Late Bronze evidence includes limited occupation and imported pottery but lacks a securely identified contemporary fortification circuit comparable to Joshua’s narrative. Later Iron Age settlement returned to the mound and surrounding oasis. The archaeology is compelling precisely as a sequence: structures were built, eroded, cut, rebuilt, burned, and reused over thousands of years.
Where it belongs in history
Radiocarbon study of eighteen Kenyon samples, including six short-lived charred cereal specimens, placed the terminal Middle Bronze destruction in the late seventeenth or sixteenth century BC. Calibration has improved since the original 1995 publication, but the horizon remains far earlier than the thirteenth century and earlier than many conventional fifteenth-century conquest calculations. The Late Bronze and early Iron record is comparatively modest and debated, with erosion and later leveling limiting exposure. Jericho’s spring sustained occupation in many periods, while political importance shifted with regional systems. A mound can retain an ancient name and monumental ruins even during a period of reduced settlement, so later literary memory need not map neatly onto a flourishing walled city. Each chronological claim must specify which wall, city phase, and destruction it means.
Consensus, questions, and debate
Kenyon’s mid-sixteenth-century date for the principal burned city became the dominant archaeological position and received independent radiocarbon support from Bruins and van der Plicht. Bryant Wood and other advocates of an early conquest have challenged ceramic interpretation and proposed a later fifteenth-century date; recent reviews reconsider scarabs, pottery, grain, and radiocarbon but have not produced consensus for Joshua. Italian-Palestinian work emphasizes a more nuanced Late Bronze and Iron sequence, including limited occupation that older summaries sometimes called complete abandonment. The important distinction is between some activity at Jericho and a fortified city destroyed in the manner and period required by a given biblical chronology. Scholars broadly agree on Tell es-Sultan’s identity and the reality of City IV’s fire; debate persists over fine chronology and literary relationship.
The biblical record beside the artifact
Joshua 2 depicts a fortified city with a gate and wall, and Joshua 6 describes encirclement, collapsed defenses, burning, and the preservation of Rahab’s household. Tell es-Sultan is securely identified with ancient Jericho and proves that the place had an exceptionally long history of fortification and repeated destruction. The City IV fire and collapse resemble general elements of the narrative, but their scientific date is a central obstacle to direct identification. First Kings 16:34 remembers Hiel rebuilding Jericho, while 2 Kings 2:4–22 presents an inhabited prophetic community and problematic spring in a later Iron Age setting; archaeology likewise shows later occupation distinct from the Bronze Age city. The site illuminates Jericho’s landscape and deep memory but does not independently verify Joshua’s attackers, miracle, or curse.
Joshua 6:1–27
1Now Jericho was straitly shut up because of the children of Israel: none went out, and none came in.
2And the LORD said unto Joshua, See, I have given into thine hand Jericho, and the king thereof, [and] the mighty men of valour.
3And ye shall compass the city, all [ye] men of war, [and] go round about the city once. Thus shalt thou do six days.
4And seven priests shall bear before the ark seven trumpets of rams’ horns: and the seventh day ye shall compass the city seven times, and the priests shall blow with the trumpets.
5And it shall come to pass, that when they make a long [blast] with the ram’s horn, [and] when ye hear the sound of the trumpet, all the people shall shout with a great shout; and the wall of the city shall fall down flat, and the people shall ascend up every man straight before him.
6¶ And Joshua the son of Nun called the priests, and said unto them, Take up the ark of the covenant, and let seven priests bear seven trumpets of rams’ horns before the ark of the LORD.
7And he said unto the people, Pass on, and compass the city, and let him that is armed pass on before the ark of the LORD.
8¶ And it came to pass, when Joshua had spoken unto the people, that the seven priests bearing the seven trumpets of rams’ horns passed on before the LORD, and blew with the trumpets: and the ark of the covenant of the LORD followed them.
9¶ And the armed men went before the priests that blew with the trumpets, and the rereward came after the ark, [the priests] going on, and blowing with the trumpets.
10And Joshua had commanded the people, saying, Ye shall not shout, nor make any noise with your voice, neither shall [any] word proceed out of your mouth, until the day I bid you shout; then shall ye shout.
11So the ark of the LORD compassed the city, going about [it] once: and they came into the camp, and lodged in the camp.
12¶ And Joshua rose early in the morning, and the priests took up the ark of the LORD.
13And seven priests bearing seven trumpets of rams’ horns before the ark of the LORD went on continually, and blew with the trumpets: and the armed men went before them; but the rereward came after the ark of the LORD, [the priests] going on, and blowing with the trumpets.
14And the second day they compassed the city once, and returned into the camp: so they did six days.
15And it came to pass on the seventh day, that they rose early about the dawning of the day, and compassed the city after the same manner seven times: only on that day they compassed the city seven times.
16And it came to pass at the seventh time, when the priests blew with the trumpets, Joshua said unto the people, Shout; for the LORD hath given you the city.
17¶ And the city shall be accursed, [even] it, and all that [are] therein, to the LORD: only Rahab the harlot shall live, she and all that [are] with her in the house, because she hid the messengers that we sent.
18And ye, in any wise keep [yourselves] from the accursed thing, lest ye make [yourselves] accursed, when ye take of the accursed thing, and make the camp of Israel a curse, and trouble it.
19But all the silver, and gold, and vessels of brass and iron, [are] consecrated unto the LORD: they shall come into the treasury of the LORD.
20So the people shouted when [the priests] blew with the trumpets: and it came to pass, when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, and the people shouted with a great shout, that the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they took the city.
21And 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.
22But Joshua had said unto the two men that had spied out the country, Go into the harlot’s house, and bring out thence the woman, and all that she hath, as ye sware unto her.
23And the young men that were spies went in, and brought out Rahab, and her father, and her mother, and her brethren, and all that she had; and they brought out all her kindred, and left them without the camp of Israel.
24And they burnt the city with fire, and all that [was] therein: only the silver, and the gold, and the vessels of brass and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the LORD.
25And Joshua saved Rahab the harlot alive, and her father’s household, and all that she had; and she dwelleth in Israel [even] unto this day; because she hid the messengers, which Joshua sent to spy out Jericho.
26¶ And Joshua adjured [them] at that time, saying, Cursed [be] the man before the LORD, that riseth up and buildeth this city Jericho: he shall lay the foundation thereof in his firstborn, and in his youngest [son] shall he set up the gates of it.
27So the LORD was with Joshua; and his fame was [noised] throughout all the country.
A responsible historical conclusion
Jericho is an ideal case for learning how archaeological claims change when stratigraphy replaces a dramatic object-centered story. The mound truly preserves fallen walls, fire, grain, and a famous biblical location, yet those features belong to specific phases that must be dated before they are correlated. The site therefore protects readers from two errors: dismissing the narrative merely because later evidence is sparse, and claiming proof by combining remains from different centuries. Jericho’s extraordinary longevity also broadens the question beyond conquest. Its spring, early urban experiments, successive defensive systems, destruction, abandonment, and resettlement reveal why the place carried such cultural memory. The archaeology’s greatest contribution is a disciplined historical sequence, not a single sensational ‘Joshua wall.’
Authoritative sources
Institutional catalogs, excavation reports, and academic publications let you examine the evidence beyond this summary.
Interim Report on the Excavations at Tell es-Sultan, Ancient Jericho (2019–2023): The Bronze and Iron Age Cities
Sapienza University of Rome Research RepositoryCurrent Italian-Palestinian expedition report refining the Bronze and Iron Age sequence and revisiting areas affected by earlier campaigns.
The Bronze Age Destruction of Jericho, Archaeology, and the Book of Joshua
ReligionsPeer-reviewed open review of excavation history, pottery, scarabs, radiocarbon, and competing correlations with Joshua.
Tell es-Sultan (Jericho): Radiocarbon Results of Short-Lived Cereal and Multiyear Charcoal Samples
Radiocarbon / University of Groningen Research PortalPeer-reviewed laboratory study of eighteen Kenyon samples dating the terminal Middle Bronze destruction to the late seventeenth or sixteenth century BC.
Ancient Jericho/Tell es-Sultan
UNESCO World Heritage CentreAuthoritative site synthesis describing the mound, spring, monumental remains, and twenty-nine-phase occupation history.